VoiceStudio — a desktop app that clones voices, designs new ones, dubs video, reads audiobooks and transcribes speech, all on your own computer.

Alternative to: ElevenLabs. Starter is $6/month and is the first tier with a commercial licence, Instant Voice Cloning and Dubbing Studio. Creator is $22/month and adds Professional Voice Cloning. Annual billing is the monthly price times 10.

Cost to run: the app is $0. You supply the hardware: about 8 GB of RAM to start and roughly 10 GB of disk on a Mac. A GPU is optional but faster. VoiceStudio Pro, a separate closed-source build, is $99 per user per year or $299 one-time.

Licence: AGPL-3.0 for the app. The default voice model's weights are CC-BY-NC, which is non-commercial. None of the 62 models in the project's own licence list is cleared for commercial use: 4 are marked non-commercial and 58 are not yet reviewed.

Runs on: macOS 13.3+ on Apple Silicon, Windows and Linux. Intel Macs get the app UI only and must connect to a remote backend. Windows on ARM is experimental.

Requires: the installer plus an internet connection for first-run setup and model downloads. CPU works, slower. NVIDIA (CUDA) and Apple Silicon (Metal) are accelerated. No account, no API key.

Traction: 84,475 stars · 9,337 forks · 4,867 commits · highest issue/PR number referenced in commits: #3299.

Liveness: very live — 1,611 commits in the last 30 days. Last commit October 24, 2026. Latest stable release v0.5.6, September 23, 2026 (a v0.5.7 beta installer is also out).

Maturity: version 0.5.6. The macOS builds are not Developer ID-signed or notarized, and an open issue reports macOS 27 calling the Apple Silicon app "damaged."

Links: repo · site · Hacker News submission, 6 points, 0 comments

Figures as of October 24, 2026.

What it does

VoiceStudio is a desktop app for working with voices. You give it a short clip of a voice and it can read any text back in that voice. You can also describe a voice in words and it builds one.

It does more than speak. It dubs a video into another language with timed speech. It turns a long text into an audiobook. It transcribes audio, and it has a floating dictation widget. The project claims 646 languages.

All of it runs on your machine. There is a local API and an MCP server, so a coding agent can drive it too.

The default engine is k2-fsa's OmniVoice model. You can swap in others from a list that includes CosyVoice 3, VoxCPM2, KittenTTS and IndexTTS 2.5. Transcription defaults to WhisperX.

The project used to be called OmniVoice-Studio. It was renamed VoiceStudio on August 7, 2026. Same repo, same history. The name OmniVoice still belongs to the model underneath it.

What it replaces, and what that costs

ElevenLabs is the incumbent. The repo says so in its own description: "the open-source, fully-local ElevenLabs alternative."

ElevenLabs prices, from its own pricing page, monthly list:

Free — $0, 10,000 credits, no commercial licence

Starter — $6/month, 30,000 credits. First tier with a commercial licence, Instant Voice Cloning and Dubbing Studio

Creator — $22/month, 121,000 credits. First tier with Professional Voice Cloning

Pro — $99/month, 600,000 credits

Scale — $299/month, 1.8 million credits, 3 seats

Business — $990/month, 6 million credits, 10 seats

Annual billing — the monthly price times 10, so Creator is $220/year

Two intro offers were live on the page: Starter's first month at $1 until November 1, and Creator's first month at $11. Those are promotions. The list prices above are what renews.

Credits run out fast on video. Dubbing Studio without a watermark costs 10,000 credits per minute. Plain text to speech is 1 credit per character.

VoiceStudio has no credits and no meter. The app is free. The cost moves to your hardware and your time.

These two bills do not line up neatly, and here is why. ElevenLabs Starter includes a commercial licence for the audio it makes. VoiceStudio's default model does not give you one. See The catch.

Is it still alive?

Very. 1,611 commits landed in the last 30 days. The last one was today.

Releases are slower than commits. The latest stable build is v0.5.6, from September 23. 1,627 commits have landed since. A v0.5.7 beta with installers went up on October 24, so stable users are a month behind.

The downloads download. I checked the Windows .exe, the Apple Silicon .dmg and the Linux AppImage. All three returned the full advertised byte count. GitHub reports 276,516 downloads across the five v0.5.6 installers, a figure that includes Windows auto-updates.

Two people write most of the code. The maintainer, Palash Debnath, has about 72% to 76% of commits. The high end counts two email addresses tied to him only by the author name, and they commit from a different time zone. A second contributor, velixio, has about 13.4%. About a quarter of commits (1,163 of 4,867) carry a Co-authored-by: Claude trailer. The repo ships CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, and issues get a ready-for-agent label. AI coding agents do a visible share of the work here, in the open.

The stars came late. Trendshift logged about 12,700 stars by the end of August. Then 37,686 arrived in September and 34,020 more in October so far. It hit #1 across all languages on Trendshift on September 3, 13 and 28. Forks grew along with stars, at a steady 10 to 20 percent of them, and commits more than doubled in September. Merged PRs did not rise, though. I found no sign the stars were bought, and no single launch that explains the jump.

What people say

Hacker News barely noticed. The only VoiceStudio submission, on September 15, got 6 points and zero comments. That is unusual for a repo at 84,000 stars. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The loudest voices are on GitHub. Contributor psiberfunk, who has 42 commits, pushed back on the new contributor agreement in issue #2586 on October 2:

"I’m not opposed to VoiceStudio having a commercial or Pro edition, and I understood when contributing that the project had a commercial licensing model."

"That said, CLA 1.0 is a materially broader agreement than the contribution terms that were in place when many of us contributed."

He asked for reciprocity before signing: a free personal licence to any Pro edition that includes contributors' work.

The maintainer's account, on the open request to sign the builds, in issue #1779 on October 1:

"Shipping signed binaries now depends on the maintainer obtaining the certificates; this stays open until then."

On the model underneath, from a Hacker News thread about a different voice model on October 20, c0rruptbytes wrote, in full: "Omnivoice is pretty good". That comment is about the model, not this app.

The catch

The default voice model is non-commercial. OmniVoice's own model card says: "The pre-trained model is licensed under the CC-BY-NC due to constraints from its training data (e.g., Emilia)." Its audio tokenizer carries a separate Boson Higgs Audio 2 licence built on Meta's Llama 3 terms. Above 100,000 annual active users you need Boson's permission.

The project is upfront about this. Its README says a paid app licence "does not grant those rights." But the Pro page is titled "Commercial License for Client Work." The Pro licence covers VoiceStudio's code. It does not cover the weights. If you want to sell the audio, check the licence of the engine you pick. The project's own list marks 4 of its 62 models as non-commercial and the other 58 as not yet reviewed. None is cleared for commercial use.

Pro is closed source. VoiceStudio is open-core. The free app is AGPL-3.0. Pro is "a separate, closed-source build," $99 per user per year or $299 one-time. What Pro adds today is more devices per seat, remote devices and early access. Premium voices, cloud sync and more engines are listed as upcoming.

The licence has moved twice. The project switched to FSL-1.1, a source-available licence, on April 29. It moved to AGPL-3.0 on June 6. On October 2 it added a Contributor License Agreement that lets Yupcha Softwares Private Limited, the company that maintains VoiceStudio, use contributions in proprietary products. It asks past contributors to sign too. That is what psiberfunk objected to.

Consent is on you. The README says: "Clone voices only with permission." No code checks for it. An invisible AudioSeal watermark is on by default. You can turn it off in Settings.

The Mac build is rough. The builds lack Apple's Developer ID signature, so recent macOS calls the app "damaged." The workaround in the issue thread is a Terminal command. Intel Macs can't run the engines locally at all.

Analytics are opt-in. It uses PostHog, off until you say yes. The code's own comment: "silence is not consent." Only listed fields are sent, under a random per-install ID.

Credits

• Maintainer: Palash Debnath (@debpalash), with Yupcha Softwares Private Limited, the company that maintains the project.

• Contributors who shipped in the last 30 days: velixio, Rudy Celekli, Bicheng Wang, swadhinbiswas.

• Quoted: psiberfunk (issue #2586), the maintainer's account (issue #1779), c0rruptbytes (Hacker News).

• Data sources: ungh.cc, a git clone of the repo, the repo's README, LICENSE, LICENSE-NOTICE.md and model_licenses.json, the k2-fsa/OmniVoice model card on Hugging Face, Trendshift, the Hacker News Algolia API, voicestudio.sh, and elevenlabs.io/pricing.

OpenCode — a free, MIT-licensed coding agent that runs in your terminal, reads your repo, edits files and runs commands, with any of 75+ model providers behind it.

Alternative to: Claude Code, included in Claude Pro at $20/month billed monthly, or $200 a year billed up front (the page rounds that to $17/month). Also Cursor, whose page now starts paid plans at Plus $8/month (Grok models only) and Premium $30/month, and GitHub Copilot Pro at $10/user/month.

Cost to run: the client is $0, and it ships with free models you can use without an account. Anything better means paying a model provider. OpenCode's own options are Zen (pay as you go, $20 top-ups plus a $1.23 card fee) and Go ($10/month or Go Plus $40/month). The project publishes no monthly cost estimate.

Licence: MIT. Free for commercial use.

Runs on: macOS, Linux and Windows, in the terminal, with a desktop app and web UI.

Requires: a model. That means an API key, a supported subscription login (ChatGPT Plus/Pro or GitHub Copilot; the v1 docs also list GitLab Duo) or a local model through Ollama. Claude Pro/Max logins are not supported.

Traction: 220,983 stars · 29,544 forks · 20,846 commits · highest issue/PR number referenced in commits: #58731. GitHub shows about 2.5k open issues and 1.3k open PRs.

Liveness: very live — 1,246 commits in the last 30 days, npm @opencode/cli 2.1.4 on October 23. Last commit October 24, 2026.

Maturity: version 2.1.4 on npm, while GitHub Releases still carries the v1 line (v1.19.4, October 22). SECURITY.md says: "OpenCode does not sandbox the agent."

Links: repo · site · Hacker News thread, 1,274 points

Figures as of October 24, 2026.

What it does

OpenCode is a coding agent. You open it in a project folder and tell it what you want in plain English. It reads the code, edits files, runs commands and shows you what it did.

It is the same kind of tool as Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex CLI and Cursor's agent. The difference is the model. OpenCode is not tied to one company's AI. It connects to more than 75 providers, plus local models on your own machine.

Version 2.0 went out on npm on September 11 and was formally announced on October 12. It added a background service, background subagents, a rewritten API and a "Code Mode" that every MCP server uses by default.

The project lives at anomalyco/opencode. It used to be sst/opencode, and its code switched to the new address on January 2, 2026. The old address still points here. The lead maintainer is Dax Raad.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The closest incumbent is Claude Code, which you get with a paid Claude plan. Prices from each vendor's own page:

Claude Pro — $20/month billed monthly, or $200 a year billed up front (the page rounds that to $17/month). Claude Code is included

Claude Max — "From $100" per month. The page would not show the higher tier's plan price, so it is UNVERIFIED here

Cursor — Plus $8/month (Grok models only), Premium $30/month, Super $100/month, Ultra $200/month, Teams from $30/user/month

GitHub Copilot — Pro $10/user/month, Pro+ $39, Max $100. Copilot Business price did not render: UNVERIFIED

Cursor's page has changed. It no longer lists the Pro and Pro+ tiers. Premium and above include "generous usage of Grok models" but no allowance for other companies' models. Those are billed at API list price.

OpenCode itself costs nothing. But a coding agent is only as good as the model behind it, and the model is where the bill lives. OpenCode does not make that bill go away. It lets you choose who sends it.

Your options, roughly from cheapest:

Free models — bundled, no account needed. The lineup changes with promotions, and OpenCode says your data is stored only when you use these free models

Local models — free per token, through Ollama, on your own hardware

A subscription you already pay for — ChatGPT Plus/Pro, GitHub Copilot or GitLab Duo. Usage counts against that plan

OpenCode Go — $10/month, or Go Plus at $40/month, with limits that reset every 5 hours, weekly and monthly

OpenCode Zen — pay as you go. You start by adding $20, plus a $1.23 card fee per $20 top-up (about 6%). It claims "zero markups" on the models themselves

Your own API key — any of 75+ providers, billed by them

The one thing missing from that list: a Claude subscription. More on that below.

Is it still alive?

Very. 1,246 commits landed in the last 30 days, and the last one was today.

It ships constantly, on two tracks at once. Version 2 goes out on npm as @opencode/cli. That is what the README and the installer now push. Version 1 keeps getting patched on GitHub Releases and on npm as opencode-ai. There is no v2 release on GitHub, only tags.

The downloads download. The v1.19.4 Linux build from GitHub returned 79,667,571 bytes. The v2.1.4 Linux package from npm returned 113,868,298 bytes.

This is a big team, not a solo project. 891 different email addresses committed in the past year. The top human committers are Dax Raad (2,910 commits), Aiden Cline (2,382), Kit Langton (2,172) and Adam Elmore (2,077), after merging each person's duplicate identities. A bot, opencode-agent, has 2,590.

On Trendshift it peaked at #1 TypeScript repository of the day, first on June 15, 2025, and #1 repository of the week across all languages in week 2 of 2026.

What people say

OpenCode gets real attention on Hacker News. Its launch-style thread in March drew 1,274 points and 618 comments. The 2.0 announcement drew 888 points. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

A fan, vadepaysa, on the March thread (comment):

"OpenCode Zen almost always has a FREE coding model that you can use for all kinds of work. I recently used the free tier to organize and rename all my documents."

A lukewarm one, nater5000, on the 2.0 thread, October 14 (comment):

"I've only used OpenCode a bit, but I found it was sufficient for the workloads I was throwing at it. It wasn't quite enough to beat out Codex or Claude Code as my go-to choice, though."

And on the breach thread, October 17, jchw asked who was affected (comment):

"I don't use OpenCode but I would like to know who this impacts. Surely people who are just using OpenCode locally with their own credentials wouldn't be impacted, right? [...] Not saying this isn't bad, but it isn't clear and they're not sharing any information."

The catch

The hosted Console was breached. On October 17, the project's own account, @opencode, posted: "We had a security breach last night related to a large scale distillation attack that impacted 1.4% of OpenCode Console users." The Console is OpenCode's hosted service, where some users save provider keys. The email users received, as posted on Hacker News, said keys "saved in your workspace may have been exposed." The free local client is a separate thing. If you ever stored keys in the Console, rotate them. About 12 minutes later the account posted an edited version that adds: "If you did not get an email you were not impacted, it was a subset of users who had external providers linked."

It can't use your Claude subscription. A March 19 commit titled "anthropic legal requests" removed the bundled Claude Pro/Max login. The v1 docs now say: "Anthropic explicitly prohibits this." You can still use Claude models with an API key, which is billed per token, not by subscription.

There is no sandbox. SECURITY.md is blunt: the permission prompts are "a UX feature," and "not designed to provide security isolation." The project has three published security advisories, and all three let an outside party run commands on the user's machine. One, a web UI cross-site scripting flaw from January, is rated Critical (9.4) and was fixed in 1.1.10. The other two are rated High, fixed in 1.0.216 and 1.18.22.

Upgrades and long sessions can bite. Open issues include #53971, titled "V1→V2 migration silently drops legacy messages missing required fields (agent/model/parentID) — old sessions show empty history," and #33356, about the local database growing past 13 GB because old events are never pruned. These are cited by title.

Free and some paid models keep or train on your data. On OpenCode Go, the Muse Spark "Contributor" models are marked as used to train future Meta models. Several others keep data for 30 days. The privacy table on the Go page lists each model.

Usage claims are the project's own. The site says OpenCode is used by "over 16M developers every month." There is no published method. The repo's own download-stats file stopped updating on January 29.

My read

The agent is free. The model never is.

That's the part people skip. You can download OpenCode in a minute and pay nothing for it. But the work happens in the model, and somebody bills you for that. Claude Code bundles the two into one subscription. OpenCode splits them apart.

So the real feature isn't the price. It's the choice. You pick who sends the bill, and you can switch when someone else gets cheaper or better. That's worth something. Just don't install it thinking your AI spend goes to zero.

If it holds up on real work, there's a field report in it.

Credits

• Maintainer: Dax Raad (@thdxr), with Anomaly. Project account @opencode.

• Contributors who shipped in the last 30 days: Aiden Cline, Kit Langton, Luke Parker, Shoubhit Dash, James Long, Adam Elmore, Frank, Brendan Allan, David Hill, and about 65 others.

• Quoted: vadepaysa, nater5000 and jchw (Hacker News), and the @opencode account.

• Data sources: ungh.cc, a git clone of the repo, the repo's README, LICENSE and SECURITY.md, the GitHub security advisories page, the npm registry, Trendshift, the Hacker News Algolia API, opencode.ai (home, Zen, Go), claude.com/pricing, cursor.com/pricing and GitHub's Copilot plans page.

MailCheap — a newsletter app you can host yourself: write an issue, send it to your list, publish it on the web, from a dashboard or from an AI agent. Built by Marc Lou.

Alternative to: beehiiv Lite at 10,000 subscribers, $139/month billed monthly or $119/month billed yearly, unlimited sends. MailCheap's own paid hosting, MailCheap Cloud, starts at $19/month.

Cost to run: sending is about $6.40 per 40,000 emails on Amazon SES's default plan for new accounts, or about $4.20 after switching to a la carte (tenant fees included), plus whatever you pay for MongoDB, Upstash QStash and a Node.js host. Those three were not priced for this entry.

Licence: AGPL-3.0, unmodified. MIT for the first 4 days, until October 14, 2026. Commercial use is allowed; if you run a modified version over a network, you must offer its users your version's source under the same licence.

Runs on: any Node.js 22+ host reachable over HTTPS from the internet, Vercel included.

Requires: MongoDB, Amazon SES or PostShiba, Upstash QStash, your own domain with DKIM, return path and DMARC records. New SES accounts start in a sandbox until Amazon approves production sending.

Traction: 1,384 stars · 361 forks · 146 commits · issues turned off · 17 pull requests, 0 merged

Liveness: very live — 146 commits since October 10, last commit October 24, 2026. One author, and the public repo is synced from a private one.

Maturity: no releases, no tags. The README: "Self-hosting comes without support: issues are off and setup questions go unanswered."

Links: repo · site · Hacker News, 2 points, 0 comments

Figures as of October 24, 2026.

What it does

MailCheap is the whole newsletter stack in one repo. An editor with slash commands. A send button with a pre-flight review that checks your subject line, unsubscribe link and Gmail's 100 KB clip limit. A public website for every issue, with a signup form and a sitemap. Imports from beehiiv, Substack, Mailchimp, Kit and four others.

The pitch is in the name. Hosted newsletter tools mostly charge by how many people are on your list. MailCheap is built to charge mainly for emails sent; its Cloud plans also cap active subscribers, but dormant ones don't count. Self-hosted, that means you pay Amazon SES per email and nothing per subscriber.

It also ships deliverability guardrails most people never think about until they get burned. New contacts get mailed in steps: 2% first, then 5% more, then the rest, 30 minutes apart, as long as bounces and complaints stay low. Readers who ignore several issues get one "do you still want this?" email, then stop getting issues. Past 2% hard bounces or 0.08% complaints, sending pauses on its own.

Everything the dashboard does also works from an AI agent through an MCP server. Sending is marked as an action that can't be undone, so agents ask before they hit it.

What it replaces, and what that costs

beehiiv prices by subscriber count and includes unlimited sends. MailCheap prices by emails sent. That makes the two hard to line up, so here is one fixed list, held constant: 10,000 subscribers, four issues a month, 40,000 emails.

beehiiv Lite, 10,000 subscribers — $139/month billed monthly, $119/month billed yearly

beehiiv Pro, 10,000 subscribers — $239/month billed monthly, $199/month billed yearly

beehiiv Free — capped at 2,500 subscribers, so not available at this size

MailCheap Cloud Growth (75,000 emails, 40,000 active subscribers) — $39/month, or $390/year

MailCheap self-hosted, Amazon SES default plan — 40 × $0.16 = $6.40/month in sending

MailCheap self-hosted, Amazon SES a la carte — 40 × $0.10 = $4.00/month, plus tenant fees of 40 × $0.005 = $0.20 and $0.005 per tenant

beehiiv's prices come from its own pricing page code; the rendered page only shows the 1,000-subscriber defaults. The SES default matters: Amazon's pricing page says new accounts start on its Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, and $0.10 is what you get after switching to a la carte. Whether tenant fees also apply on Essentials is unclear from the page, so the $6.40 line may be slightly low.

The self-hosted lines are sending only. They leave out the database, the job queue, the host and the hour of DNS setup the README tells you to plan for. Those costs are real and were not priced here.

These are costs, not savings. If you already pay beehiiv $139 a month, moving to MailCheap Cloud would stop that bill and start a $39 one. If you have never paid for a newsletter tool, there is nothing to save. Self-hosting is a different trade again: a far smaller sending bill in exchange for running your own email infrastructure with no support.

MailCheap Cloud's own pricing page makes a narrower claim: 4,000 subscribers sending weekly costs $19 on its Starter plan against $109 on beehiiv Lite. That $109 is beehiiv's month-to-month price at its 5,000-subscriber tier. Billed yearly, the same beehiiv tier is $95.

Is it still alive?

Very live, with three caveats that matter more than the commit count.

One author. All 146 commits are Marc Lou's. The first landed October 10 and the latest landed today.

The public repo is a mirror. 144 of the 146 commits are titled "Sync from mailcheap-cloud" followed by a hash. The code is written in a private repository for the paid product and copied out. The README says every change ships to both.

Outside contributions are not landing. Issues are switched off. Seventeen pull requests have been opened, including two that add a Docker setup, one of which also swaps SES for plain SMTP and QStash for a MongoDB job queue. None has been merged. The README says pull requests "may not be reviewed."

There are no releases and no tags. Trendshift shows a peak of #5 among JavaScript repos on October 11, and no ranking after that.

What people say

Almost nothing yet, in public, in a form this column can quote. The one Hacker News submission drew 2 points and no comments. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The loudest conversation is on X, and it is Marc Lou's own. His launch posts tell the story: he left beehiiv after a third price rise in two years, rebuilt the parts he used with AI help, and open-sourced it when people asked. A later post pitched the hosted version as 83% cheaper than beehiiv. Those posts were read through search snippets, not fetched directly, so they are summarized here rather than quoted.

beehiiv's CEO posted a list of features you would need to rebuild to replace his product, according to a write-up on X, which notes he never named Marc Lou. That post was not retrieved, so it is not quoted or counted here.

The pull request tracker is the most useful signal. The open Docker and SMTP requests show what self-hosters want: a way to run MailCheap without signing up for SES and QStash first.

The catch

The licence changed as the paid version arrived. MailCheap shipped under MIT on October 10. On October 14 it moved to AGPL-3.0. The same commit pitched MailCheap Cloud, from $19 a month; Marc Lou's post announcing the cloud version is dated October 15 (read via a search snippet, not fetched). The first commit stays MIT, as the README notes. The AGPL text itself is standard and unmodified. What it means in practice: you can run MailCheap for your own newsletter, commercially, but if you run a modified version for other people over the network, you have to offer them the source of your version.

Self-hosting gets less than Cloud. Cloud gets a shared sending address and a free <slug>.mailcheap.ai website, so you need no domain. It also gets a Gmail warm-up that spreads a new domain's first sends over two days, and chat support. Self-hosters bring their own domain and get no support. The DNS helper behind Cloud's shared addresses "isn't part of this repository."

SES is not plug-and-play. New Amazon SES accounts start in a sandbox: 200 emails a day, to verified addresses only, until Amazon approves production access. The README budgets about an hour for setup, most of it waiting.

Every account on one server shares a sending reputation. The project's SECURITY.md lists known gaps in its own words, including that SES account quota and reputation are shared, and that API keys can't yet be limited to read-only or to one newsletter.

It is two weeks old. No releases, one author, no outside code merged. That can change fast in either direction.

My read

Two things are true here.

The idea is right. Paying for subscribers who never open your email is a bad deal. Paying for the emails you actually send is the fix, whoever builds it.

The repo is a storefront. 144 of 146 commits are syncs from a private repo. Issues are off. Not one outside pull request has been merged. The licence went from MIT to AGPL in the same commit that started selling the paid version.

Plenty of companies run that way. Know that you're looking at a storefront as well as an idea.

Credits

Built by Marc Lou (@marclou). No other contributors in the git history. Data: the repo's git history, README, AGENTS.md, SECURITY.md and LICENSE; ungh.cc; Trendshift; the pricing pages of mailcheap.ai, beehiiv and Amazon SES; the GitHub pull request tracker; Hacker News; Marc Lou's posts on X, via search.

Hypit — a toolkit that lets a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex take a sample video and rebuild its whole edit (footage, captions, B-roll, effects) as a reusable workflow, then render variants of it.

Alternative to: HeyGen Creator, $29/month billed monthly or $24/month billed yearly, 600 credits. Hypit's own site compares itself to Arcads, whose plans start at 8,000 credits a month; Arcads shows dollar prices only inside its app, so none is claimed here.

Cost to run: no fee for the software when you run it yourself. Generation is billed by the model service you pick: Hypit's own HypiHub from $9.90/month (1,800 credits), a partner gateway, or your own API keys. The project's three example videos cost $1.07 to $1.15 each, by its own figures.

Licence: source-available, not open source. A modified Apache 2.0; repository indexes such as repos.ecosyste.ms classify it as "other". Free for your own organization's work, client work included. A commercial licence, with no published price, is required to host it for other people (even for free), sell it, bundle it into a product you sell, or remove its branding.

Runs on: any machine with Node.js 22.15 or newer. Renders in headless Chromium.

Requires: a coding agent that can use skills, plus ffmpeg and ffprobe (and uv for the local speech-alignment tools). No GPU; local speech alignment defaults to the CPU.

Traction: 25,323 stars · 2,888 forks · 1,495 commits · 15 open issues and 40 open pull requests on the tracker page, closed counts unknown

Liveness: slow — 867 commits in August, 79 so far in October, and no code commit since October 14, 2026. Last commit October 23, a docs update.

Maturity: v0.3.1, October 9, 2026, the latest of 27 releases.

Links: repo · site · no Hacker News thread found

Figures as of October 24, 2026.

What it does

Hypit is built for short-form video that copies a format that already worked.

You hand your coding agent a video. Hypit breaks it down into a written plan: the shots, the captions, the B-roll, the effects, all pinned to the words being spoken instead of to timestamps. Swap the words, the voice, the product or the presenter, and the agent rebuilds the video around them. The tagline is "1 command, 100 variants, 100M views."

The README's own examples show the range. A street interview remade with cartoon hosts. The same video translated into Spanish with the same punchlines. A ranking video with new contestants.

Hypit itself doesn't generate footage. It orchestrates whatever models you connect: Seedance, GPT Image, Wan and others for pictures and video, ElevenLabs, Fish Audio or Xiaomi MiMo for voice. Two of the bundled voice packages include voice cloning from a single audio sample. Captions, motion graphics and code-drawn visuals can be built with no generation model at all.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The paid tools in this space sell AI presenters and ad variants by the credit.

HeyGen Creator — $29/month billed monthly, or $24/month billed yearly · 600 credits a month · custom avatar with your own voice and likeness

Arcads Starter — 8,000 credits a month · one talking-actor video up to two minutes costs 800 credits · dollar price UNVERIFIED (shown in-app only)

Hypit, self-hosted — $0 for the software

Hypit's HypiHub, to pay for generation — Starter $9.90/month (1,800 credits), Pro $49.90, Ultra $129.90, billed monthly

Hypit is free, but the video models it calls are not, so $0 against $29 is the wrong comparison. You pay HypiHub, a partner service, or the model providers directly, and the bill depends on how much footage you generate. HypiHub's own pricing page says a five-second 720p clip costs about 47 credits on its cheapest Seedance model and about 204 on the standard one, and that those figures cover generation only.

The project publishes three example runs at $1.07, $1.09 and $1.15. Those are its own claims for specific videos, not a rate you can plan on.

Is it still alive?

Slowing hard.

July (from the 30th) — 12 commits

August — 867 (all months by Beijing time)

September — 537

October, to the 23rd — 79

The last commit that changed code landed October 14. The two since then swap a WeChat group QR code in the docs. Forty pull requests are open.

The work is concentrated, too. Two people wrote 95.8% of it. One maintainer, who commits under three names that share one email, has 864 commits. The other has 568.

Stars tell a different story from commits. Trendshift logged no new stars from August 24 to September 10, then about 2,800, 3,100 and 2,300 on September 15, 16 and 17. Hypit was #1 across all languages on September 15 and 16. That is a launch spike with a long tail, not a steady climb. Whether every star is real could not be checked from here; the pattern alone proves nothing either way.

What people say

No Hacker News story or comment about Hypit was found, under that name or its earlier name, Narratage. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed. The launch chatter found was mostly on Chinese-language X; the project also runs WeChat, Telegram and Discord groups, which were not read.

The issue tracker carries the most useful signal, and most of it is about the paid service, not the code:

• #435, opened October 22: a user says refund emails to the support address have gone unanswered since October 19, and the support phone number didn't pick up. One user's report.

• #367 and #368: HypiHub video jobs failing with "credits insufficient" despite a funded balance. Both closed: in #367 the team said a content-review rejection had been mislabeled and the jobs refunded; #368 was fixed on the server side.

• #281, opened September 17: a request for a commercial licence to build a mobile app on Hypit. Still open.

The catch

It is not open source. The licence is Apache 2.0 with conditions bolted on, and they have been there since the first licence commit in August. You can use Hypit for your own company and for client work. You cannot host it for other people (even for free), sell it, or bundle it into a product you sell without a commercial licence. The licence names no price and no contact; the website offers a "Contact us" business tier. Its contributor section also has contributors agree that the producer, Hypit.AI, can adjust the agreement "to be more strict or relaxed as deemed necessary."

The repo says nothing about consent. The repo's description promises you can "swap the face," and voice cloning ships in two packages. The repo, its docs and its licence contain no language about consent, likeness or deepfakes. That language exists only in hypit.ai's Terms of Use, which cover its website and the paid HypiHub service and forbid cloning "another person's face, voice, or identity without valid permission." For self-hosted code the licence governs, and nothing in the repo points to those terms.

What you make is yours, and so is the risk. The licence says outputs belong to you with no conditions. It also says content made through third-party models may fall under those providers' terms. Platform rules on synthetic media and ad disclosure are on you.

The software is free; the service is the business. The README calls HypiHub "our recommended hosted model service." The open issues about credits and refunds are about that service.

Momentum is fading. The September spike brought the stars. Every October code commit landed by the 14th. After that, a QR code.

My read

If you run a brand, or shoot for one, treat this as a liability before you treat it as a tool.

The pitch is "swap the face." Voice cloning ships in the box. And the repo doesn't say one word about consent. That rule lives only in the website's terms of use, which the repo never links to.

Remixing a viral format with your own people, your own product and your own voice is fine. Cloning somebody else's face for an ad is on you, and the tool won't stop you.

Credits

Built by Hypit.AI (@hypitai). Maintainers: rponeawa (Sharky Wang) and overlordkim (kashorin), neither with a verifiable X handle. Other contributors: fetw882, Mikee Ai, Flandern. Data: the repo's git history, README, docs, package READMEs and LICENSE; ungh.cc; repos.ecosyste.ms for licence classification; Trendshift; hypit.ai's pricing page and terms; HeyGen's pricing page; the Arcads help center; the GitHub issue tracker; Hacker News search.

CleanYourTV — a free toolkit that has an AI coding agent switch off the ads, tracking and preloaded apps on an Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi, then sets a small Apple TV-style home screen.

Alternative to: a default, not a product. The stock Android TV and Google TV home screens. Google's Android TV help page says the Home tab's suggestions, some "sponsored by media partners," "can't be turned off"; its Google TV page says even Apps only mode still shows "sponsored content and teasers." For context only, the hardware way out: Apple TV 4K from $299, Google TV Streamer $149.99.

Cost to run: free. You supply a computer on the same Wi-Fi, plus your own coding agent (Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI) if you use that path. A by-hand path needs only Python 3 on the computer.

Licence: MIT (the bundled Outfit font is SIL OFL 1.1). Free for commercial use.

Runs on: Android TV and Google TV, Android 8.0 or newer for the launcher; the cleanup lists include some older sets too. Fire TV gets the cleanup only. Samsung Tizen and LG webOS are not supported.

Requires: Developer options and debugging switched on at the TV. Network ADB, which the project's FAQ warns is plaintext on port 5555, so close it when you are done. No prebuilt app: the launcher is built from source (JDK 17, Android SDK 34). The install script grants the launcher location permission, which it uses to read the Wi-Fi network name.

Traction: 30,717 stars · 3,540 forks · 2,227 commits · 37 open issues on the tracker page, closed count unknown · issue numbers past #1441

Liveness: very live — 2,227 commits and seven releases since October 17; last commit October 24, 2026. Too young to say anything about long-term upkeep.

Maturity: v2.7.0, October 23, 2026. The project's own warning: "at your own risk, and changing a TV's software may affect its warranty or support."

Links: repo · site · Hacker News, TechCrunch link, 38 points

Figures as of October 24, 2026.

What it does

Most Android TV and Google TV sets ship with a home screen full of suggested shows, sponsored rows and apps you never asked for. CleanYourTV turns that off without rooting the TV.

You switch on debugging at the TV. A computer on the same Wi-Fi connects to it. Then a coding agent, or you by hand, works through a list of packages for your exact model and disables them one at a time. Before it changes anything it saves a record of what was on. Last, it installs a home screen of its own: about 497 KB, plain Java, with no internet permission. The README adds "no background services"; the remote-key helpers are opt-in.

Nothing is deleted. The project uses pm disable-user --user 0, which it describes as the same switch as Settings > Apps > Disable. One script, tools/restore.sh, replays the saved record and puts the TV back the way it was, leaving anything you had disabled yourself still off. A few firmware-specific lists that hide packages instead need their own undo steps. The new home screen stays until you remove it yourself.

The repo is seven days old. It started on October 17 as a before-and-after post of the maintainer's parents' TV. Readers sent in their own TV models, and the list grew from there. The examples/ folder holds 260 model files today.

What it replaces, and what that costs

There is no product here to cancel. CleanYourTV stands opposite a default.

Google says so in writing. Its Android TV help page says the Home tab's suggestions are based on trending content or sponsored by media partners and can't be turned off. Google TV's "Apps only mode" strips personal recommendations, but its own help page says you will still see sponsored content and teasers.

So what does a reader do today? Live with the ads, or buy a box and stop using the TV's own software. The two obvious boxes, at their makers' own prices:

Apple TV 4K — from $299.00

Google TV Streamer (4K) — $149.99

Neither is a like-for-like comparison. A streaming box is a whole new device, and the Google one runs Google TV, sponsored rows included. They are here to show what "fixing the TV" usually costs, not as a bill CleanYourTV stops. That is why the Quick Facts row says alternative to a default rather than replaces anything.

Paid launcher apps exist on the Play Store. Projectivy Launcher is free with in-app items listed at $0.99 to $7.49 each. Its exact premium price did not render, so no number is claimed here.

Is it still alive?

Very, for now. 2,227 commits since October 17, peaking at 544 on October 22 (India time, the maintainer's) and 324 the day after. Seven tagged releases, v2.1.0 through v2.7.0, all between October 19 and October 23. The last commit landed today.

The commit graph needs one footnote. The maintainer, Gathin, authored 1,049 of the 2,227 commits, but 852 of those are merges. Count only non-merge commits and his share is 14.6%. Most of the people committing touched the TV model lists, and he is merging their work. 442 different email addresses have committed.

The releases carry no files. That is deliberate: the README says there are no prebuilt binaries. GitHub's automatic source archive could not be fetched from the research sandbox, so no download was verified.

Trendshift has it at #1 on the all-languages daily list, first reached October 21, and #1 among Java repos four days running. The README badge says "#1 trending repo of the week." Trendshift's weekly Java list shows #3, and no all-languages weekly #1 was found. The badge claim is unverified.

What people say

There was no big Hacker News thread about the repo. The largest story was a TechCrunch link, 38 points and 2 comments. Posts of the repo itself drew 6 points or fewer.

The comments that exist split three ways.

One reader quoted the viral post and shrugged that a streaming box already does this: "It looks rather like the version of Android TV on my 2018 vintage Xiaomi Mi Box S." (kazinator)

One wanted it out of the terminal: "Could this repo be modularized per manufacturer/model and turned into a mobile app perhaps? Download, detect TV(s) on network, debloat." (toomuchtodo) A community-built phone app now exists, linked from the project site. It is not part of this repo.

One recommended it in a bigger thread about a different ad-free TV write-up: "Better to use the one debloater that is popular, than the one made by only one person." (machomaster)

The sharpest dissent is on the issue tracker, not HN. Issue #884, filed October 22: a Xiaomi Mi TV Stick stuck on its boot screen after the owner's agent, working without a ready-made list, disabled core Android packages. It was closed "not planned" the next day. The maintainer pointed the owner to Xiaomi service, and the tools now block core system packages, citing that issue.

Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed. The repo's docs/PRESS.md lists 196 articles. That count matches the file's own rows; the articles were not opened.

The catch

It can break a TV. The FAQ names the risk itself: disabling something the TV leans on. #884 is one real case. A discussion thread reports a JVC set stuck on its boot animation. The project's rules for agents now forbid disabling Android's core packages, and forbid even opening factory or test apps, because on some boards that flips a factory-mode flag "the shell cannot undo."

Network ADB is an open door while it is on. The FAQ says it is plaintext on port 5555, and on some firmware any device on your network gets a shell. Turn it off when you finish. One open issue reports a projector where it cannot be switched off at all.

Updates undo it. A firmware update puts the disabled packages back and returns Home to the stock launcher. tools/check.py --fix re-applies the list, but you have to run it.

It barely touches ads inside apps. The FAQ says you can partly block them with an ad-blocking Private DNS resolver, which then sees every DNS query the TV makes, and that it does not remove YouTube ads at all.

You need a computer and, on the easy path, a coding agent. Whatever that agent costs you is not in this entry. The by-hand path needs only Python 3 and more of your time.

The README nudges toward the maintainer's employer. His GitHub bio lists him as Sr. DevRel Lead at 0G Foundation, and the README's agent list names Claude Code "on 0G Private Computer" ahead of an Anthropic plan, with a link to 0G's product. Any Anthropic plan, Codex or Gemini CLI works too.

Seven days is not a track record. The commit rate is a viral spike. Whether anyone is merging TV models in March is the real liveness test.

My read

This is the AI use case I'd point people to.

A guy fixed his parents' TV with a coding agent and posted the before and after. Within a week, 442 different email addresses had committed to the repo, most of them adding TV models.

The agent turned one person's fix into a list everybody else can use.

Read the catch before you point it at your own TV. A TV stuck on its boot screen is a real cost. But the idea is right.

Credits

Built by Gathin (@gathint, GitHub Gathin23). Most active contributors in the first week: xbsheng (82 commits), maxhayim (35), hanzg-han (31), Cristian Rojas (24). Quoted: Hacker News users kazinator, toomuchtodo and machomaster. Data: the repo's git history, README, AGENTS.md and LICENSE; ungh.cc; Trendshift; Google's Android TV and Google TV help pages; apple.com and store.google.com for prices; the Google Play listing for Projectivy Launcher; the GitHub issue tracker.

REA — an MIT-licensed add-on that lets a coding agent take apart apps, binaries and websites and explain how a feature works, with the evidence attached.

Alternative to: Binary Ninja Sidekick, the AI reverse-engineering assistant from the makers of Binary Ninja. Sidekick Basic is $30/month billed monthly or $24/month billed annually. It runs inside Binary Ninja, and commercial use follows the Binary Ninja licence (Commercial: $1,799 one-time, with one year of updates).

Cost to run: REA itself is $0. Deep native analysis needs a decompiler underneath it: Ghidra (free), Hopper (price UNVERIFIED) or IDA Pro (from €1,099/year). You also pay for your own coding agent. The project publishes no inference estimate.

Licence: MIT. Free for commercial use. Commercial engines it drives (IDA, Hopper, JEB) keep their own licences.

Runs on: Windows, macOS and Linux, with limits by target (Windows Ghidra support is experimental). Works through Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other agents that support local MCP servers.

Requires: Node.js 22.19+, 24.11+ or 26+, plus npm. Hopper, Ghidra or IDA for native binaries. A Chrome-family browser for websites. Analysis runs locally, but results go to your agent, and your model provider's data policy applies to them.

Traction: 274,839 stars · 69,220 forks · 3,397 commits · highest issue/PR number referenced in commits: #4274. Open and closed issue counts unknown.

Liveness: very live — 2,677 commits in the last 30 days, latest npm release 6.5.0 on October 14. Last commit October 15, 2026, 11:48 p.m. ET.

Maturity: version 6.5.0. The README warns: "REA changes quickly, and new releases include frequent bug fixes."

Links: repo · site · Hacker News thread, 806 points
Figures as of October 16, 2026.

What it does

REA stands for Reverse Engineer Anything. You install it into a coding agent with one command, npx rea-agents@latest setup. After that you can ask the agent how a feature in some app works, and the agent uses REA's tools to look inside the app and find out.

It works on compiled programs, JavaScript and Electron apps, .NET assemblies, Android APKs, firmware and websites. For a compiled program it hands the agent assembly, pseudocode, strings and call references. For a website it hands over page structure, scripts and network traffic. The agent then explains what it found, and can rebuild the feature in your own project.

The site's demo asks why Windows Calculator gives 220 for 200 + 10%. REA pulls the instructions behind the % button. The agent reads them and finds the rule: after a plus sign, % means a percentage of the first number.

The project started small. The first commit, in April 2026, is titled "Initial commit: betterBinaryMCP - Enhanced MCP server for Hopper Disassembler." A Show HN for it in July drew 3 points and no comments.

What it replaces, and what that costs

REA is not a decompiler. It drives one. That puts it opposite the AI layers the decompiler vendors now sell on top of their own tools.

The closest match is Binary Ninja Sidekick, which does agentic reverse engineering inside Binary Ninja. Its published plans:

Sidekick Free: $0 "with active support"
Sidekick Basic: $30/month monthly, or $24/month billed annually
Sidekick Preferred Pro: $100/month monthly, or $80/month billed annually
Sidekick Max: $300/month monthly, or $240/month billed annually
Sidekick Self-Hosted: $5,000 per floating user per year, minimum three licences

Sidekick's commercial use "is governed by the terms of the Binary Ninja license in use, rather than by the Sidekick plan itself." Binary Ninja Personal is $199 and does not allow commercial use. Binary Ninja Commercial is $1,799, a perpetual licence with one year of updates. So the first year of commercial use at Sidekick's lowest paid plan adds up like this:

Binary Ninja Commercial: $1,799 (one-time, one year of updates)
Sidekick Basic, billed annually: $24 × 12 = $288
First-year total: $2,087, before tax

Two engines REA does drive, IDA and Hopper, have moved the same way. Hex-Rays lists an IDA MCP add-on: "Drive IDA from an AI assistant over the Model Context Protocol." IDA Pro itself starts at €1,099/year (Essential), billed annually only. Hopper's home page says it is "now enhanced with AI capabilities through an integrated MCP server." Hopper's price did not render to a scrape, so no number is given here.

What REA costs instead: $0 for REA, $0 for Ghidra, and whatever your coding agent costs you. That last line never goes away, and the project does not estimate it. These two costs do not subtract. Each hosted Sidekick plan comes with a monthly usage allowance. REA leaves you to bring, and pay for, your own agent.

Is it still alive?

Very. 2,677 of its 3,397 commits landed in the last 30 days. The last one landed at 11:48 p.m. ET on October 15. npm lists 32 published versions of rea-agents, the newest being 6.5.0 on October 14. The repo carries 36 git tags.

Three of those versions were major releases in four days: 4.0.0 on October 5, 5.0.0 on October 7, 6.0.0 on October 8.

It is not a one-person project, though one person still leads it. Merging author identities on shared email, GitHub account ID or matching display name, morluto wrote 1,709 commits (50.3%). Next is N0zoM1z0, who also commits as Ysopwnable, with 563 (16.6%). The two reconstruction repos the README showcases, DX-Ball and TH04, sit under N0zoM1z0's account. Kaoru0822 follows with 494 (14.5%). 234 distinct author emails committed in the last year.

The star curve is the part people stop and stare at. Trendshift's daily log shows 88 stars in total before October 1, then 274,278 after it. The busiest day was October 12, at 52,186 stars. REA ranked #1 across all languages on Trendshift on six days between October 5 and October 13, and #1 among TypeScript repos on nine of its ten listed days. Between two reads about twelve and a half hours apart, on October 15 and 16, the star count went from 262,989 to 274,839.

npm counted 231,579 downloads of rea-agents in the week of October 6–12.

No security advisories are published on the repo.

What people say

The main Hacker News thread, posted the evening of October 9 (ET), has 806 points and 338 comments. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The top skeptical question, and the most useful answer to it. ethin asked: "How exactly is this better than telling Claude for example to 'install and set up a full RE environment including Ghidra' on my local system and get to work?" tptacek replied: "Everybody has their own set of skills and specific scripts and tools to do this stuff. You might use Ghidra as the the kernel of those workflows, but you still want something more than just Claude freestyling, at least for now." He added: "(Who knows if this'll be true 6 months from now.)"

On output quality, InvisibleUp looked at the TH04 reconstruction: "it's a lot better quality than a lot of AI decomps I've seen. It's matching, the variables are named sensibly, comments are sparse and comprehensible, and there's not much in the way of unaddressed Ghidra jank." The same comment worries about the hobby: "It kinda just... totally eliminates that as a hobby entirely."

On the stars, 5ak3t laid out the jump from "~4,226 to 54,614 stars in ~5 days" and called the fork growth "even stranger." cedws replied: "Reeks of botting, some comments here also look artificial." That is one commenter's read. This entry found no evidence either way and makes no claim about it.

The catch

It is a layer, not an engine. Deep native analysis needs Hopper, Ghidra or IDA installed. Setup can install Hopper with your approval; Ghidra and IDA must already be on the machine. The README is blunt about commercial engines: "REA grants no tool license, key, or activation entitlement."

Your findings can leave your machine. REA's own FAQ: "REA analyzes targets on your machine. Your agent receives the results, and its model provider's data policy applies to those results." Unless you run a local model, code pulled from a binary goes to whichever model provider your agent uses.

Your model may say no. One HN commenter, Meleagris, wrote: "In my experience, even just hinting at reverse engineering to models from Anthropic or OpenAI leaves them extremely sensitive to refusals."

Setup edits your agent's config. It shows a plan first and keeps backups, per the install docs. But the site's first install option is a prompt you paste into your agent, and at least one HN commenter compared that to curl | bash.

The legal line is yours to walk. The project's DISCLAIMER says it "will not help with" circumventing DRM or licence checks, building game cheats, bypassing authentication on systems you are not authorized to test, or "copying proprietary software or reproducing its protected code and assets." It also says reverse engineering "may be restricted in your jurisdiction or by the license of the software you analyze." The tool's own demos rebuild features of other people's software. Whether your use is allowed depends on what you point it at.

It moves fast. Three major versions in four days. The README tells users who hit a bug to update first, and warns that "a similar repository name or copied README does not establish that a download is official." Get it from the repo, rea.tools or the rea-agents npm package only.

My read

Point it at your own stack first. I run businesses on a pile of software I didn't write and can't see inside. When a vendor tool does something weird, I file a ticket and wait. REA turns "why does it do that?" into a question I can actually ask. The tools I own or am allowed to inspect are the obvious first targets.

It's a wrapper, and that's fine. The best HN pushback was, basically, that Claude can already install Ghidra and go. True. REA's pitch isn't a better decompiler. It's a repeatable workflow with the evidence attached. tptacek put it well: you want "something more than just Claude freestyling." Whether that gap survives the next six months is the real question.

Watch the star counter. It's growing so fast you can watch the numbers climb while you hit refresh. Trendshift logged 88 stars before October. Then it logged 274,278. One HN commenter thinks that smells like bots. I don't know. I'm reporting the curve, not calling it.

The legal line is the product. The demos rebuild features from apps you don't own. The disclaimer says the project won't help with copying "protected code and assets." Both are true at once. If REA survives that tension, there's a field report in it.

Credits

Maintainer: morluto (GitHub). Project account @reatools on X.

Top contributors (all-time commits): N0zoM1z0 / Ysopwnable (563, plus the DX-Ball and TH04 reconstructions), Kaoru0822 (494), Rudy Mizrahi Celekli (91). All three committed in the last 30 days.

Voices quoted: ethin, tptacek, InvisibleUp, 5ak3t, cedws and Meleagris on Hacker News.

Data sources: the REA repository (git history, README, LICENSE, DISCLAIMER, install docs), rea.tools and its FAQ, ungh.cc, the npm registry and npm download API, Trendshift, the Hacker News Firebase and Algolia APIs, the repo's GitHub security advisories page, the Binary Ninja and Sidekick pricing pages, the Hex-Rays pricing page, and the Hopper home page.

cmux — a native macOS terminal, built on Ghostty, with a vertical sidebar of workspaces for running many AI coding agents at once
Alternative to: Warp, the commercial agent terminal. Like for like it is $0 against $0: Warp Free also lets you bring your own AI. Warp's paid tiers are prepaid AI usage, pay as you go from $20/mo. Also a default: one terminal window per agent.
Cost to run: free for the terminal. The agent you run inside it (Claude Code, Codex and the like) is billed separately by its own vendor. Paid cloud tiers run from $50/mo; a $30/mo Founder's Edition sells early access.
Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later for the macOS app, iOS app and CLI, free for commercial use. The server code is BUSL-1.1 since 2026-09-28 and needs a commercial licence for production use, including self-hosting.
Runs on: the terminal app is macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon or Intel: "macOS only, for now." A separate cmux TUI has Linux and Windows builds.
Requires: a Mac and a coding agent of your own. No Docker, no GPU, no cmux account for the free tier.
Traction: 27,548 stars · 2,424 forks · 19,185 commits · issue and PR numbers reach #16397 · open/closed issues unknown
Liveness: very live — 6,633 commits in the last 30 days; last commit 2026-10-01
Maturity: v0.64.25, the latest stable release, 2026-09-17. Still pre-1.0. The iOS app and remote tmux are labelled beta.
Links: repo · site · pricing · Show HN, 198 points
Figures as of 2026-10-01.

What it does

cmux is a terminal app for the Mac. It runs your shell, and whatever you start in it, in tabs and split panes, the way any terminal does.

The difference is the left edge of the window. Every workspace sits in a vertical sidebar, and each row shows the git branch, the pull request status, the working directory, open ports and the latest notification from whatever is running there. When an agent finishes or needs an answer, its row lights up. Cmd+Shift+U jumps to the newest one.

That is the whole pitch. You run five agents on five projects in one window instead of five windows, and the sidebar tells you which one wants you.

It is not a fork of Ghostty. It uses libghostty as a library for drawing the terminal, and it reads your existing ~/.config/ghostty/config. Around that sits a native Swift app with a scriptable in-app browser, a CLI, a socket API, cmux ssh and a cmux claude-teams command.

The free terminal contains no AI. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or anything else you run in it brings its own model and its own bill. An early-access "cmux AI" is offered to paying Founder's Edition backers.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The closest product you can buy is Warp, a terminal that sells AI usage on top. Per Warp's own pricing page, where every paid tier is "pay as you go, starting at" the figure shown:

Free — $0, the terminal, limited AI and cloud agents, and "Bring your own AI inference"
Build — from $20/mo monthly, or $18/mo billed annually: 1,500 credits, "$20 of included agent usage at API rates"
Max — from $200/mo monthly, or $180/mo billed annually: 18,000 credits
Business — from $50/user/mo monthly, or $45/user/mo billed annually: up to 25 seats

There is no terminal bill here to stop. The like-for-like comparison is Warp Free at $0 against cmux at $0, and both let you bring your own agent. Warp's Build tier is $20 of prepaid agent usage at API rates, not a fee for the terminal. Anyone who spends it would spend it with their agent's vendor instead. That is why the Quick Facts row says alternative to, not replaces.

Cursor sits further away. It is a full code editor, not a terminal. It comes up here because leaving Cursor for a terminal is the switch this entry was prompted by. Cursor Pro is $20/mo, Pro+ $60/mo, Ultra $200/mo, and Teams Standard $40/user/mo, all monthly. Cursor's annual prices load in the browser and would not render to a scrape, so they are not given here.

What cmux costs instead is nothing, for the terminal. The paid side is a cloud product layered on top:

Free — $0, the open-source macOS terminal, local agents with your own keys
Pro — $50/mo, cloud agents on up to 50 cloud VMs sharing 24 GB RAM and 6 vCPUs, plus the iOS app
Max — $200/mo, up to 50 VMs sharing 64 GB RAM and 16 vCPUs
Team — $60/user/mo, Pro plus central billing
Enterprise — custom, self-hosted or air-gapped

All of it is billed monthly; the pricing page says "Paid plans are billed monthly." The README also links a $30/mo "Founder's Edition" on a Stripe checkout run by Manaflow, Inc., which it describes as early access to cmux AI, the iOS app and Cloud VMs.

Is it still alive?

Very. The repo was created on 2026-01-28 and has 19,185 commits on main. 6,633 of them landed in the last 30 days and 13,554 in the last 90. 223 distinct author emails committed in the past year. The last commit was today.

It is a two-person project in practice. Merging each person's several git identities, Lawrence Chen has 7,512 commits (39.2%) and Austin Wang 7,147 (37.3%). Lawrence's total includes 134 commits from a cmux-lawrence machine identity. The next two contributors have 1,756 and 1,694. An automated account has 532.

Releases come in bursts, not on a schedule. v0.64.22 shipped on 2026-08-03 and v0.64.23 not until 2026-09-14. Three stable releases followed within three days, the last being v0.64.25 on 2026-09-17. That is 14 days ago, against 6,633 commits in 30 days. The work is landing on main and in nightly builds faster than it reaches a stable release.

The download downloads. I pulled the v0.64.25 macOS disk image directly: 225,832,896 bytes. Homebrew carries the same version as a cask.

On Trendshift it was the #1 Swift Repository of the Day on 2026-02-20, and peaked at #5 Repository of the Day across all languages on 2026-02-21.

Open and closed issue counts could not be obtained from the research sandbox.

What people say

The main conversation is the Show HN from 2026-02-19, 224 days ago: 198 points and 77 comments. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The interest was immediate:

"Vertical tabs for a terminal emulator seems killer, I'll be trying this out for sure." — mikkupikku

So was the bug report:

"Looks like this could be really cool, but it's a buggy mess. Can't switch top tabs, can't close tabs. Once I lose focus in a tab, I can't ever type again in that terminal tab. Can't switch between the different sidebar tabs, either." — twostorytower

The maintainer replied that it was likely a known issue and that "The latest release (0.57.0) should fix it." The pace was noticed too:

"18 (!) releases in two days. This is some really fast coding." — reconnecting

And one commenter argued against the direction the project has since partly taken:

"My two cents - don’t do it. There’s plenty of terminal editors (and personal opinions about them) to chose from. You will end up reinventing an IDE." — danw1979

Smaller, later threads are about performance. In August, the poster of a thread titled "Cmux SSH Lagging" answered their own question:

"the answer: cmux gui is broken, use cmux-tui in a single tab" — 217

A May post was titled "Why cmux is so lagging when scrolling, also it uses more CPU than Ghostty" and a September one "Ask HN: Why does cmux need 200 settings?" Both are cited by title only; neither drew more than 2 points.

The catch

The terminal app is Mac only. The README says "macOS only, for now." A separate cmux TUI has Linux and Windows builds, and Manaflow ships a nightly Linux build of a different product, cmux Browser, from another repo. There is no stable Windows or Linux version of the app this entry covers.

It is pre-1.0 and moving fast. At 221 commits a day, things change under you. Stable releases lag the code by weeks at a time. The Show HN's first complaint was basic tab handling, and later threads are about SSH lag and scrolling CPU. Session restore, in the project's own docs, "does not checkpoint arbitrary live process state," and scrollback restore is "best effort."

The licence changed three days ago, and it has changed before. A LICENSE file first appeared on 2026-02-14, under AGPL. A commercial dual licence was added in March, and on 2026-03-30 the open-source side moved from AGPL to GPL-3.0, with the commercial option kept. In July the commercial terms were narrowed in scope. On 2026-09-28 the server directories moved to the Business Source License 1.1, which requires a commercial licence from Manaflow for production use, self-hosting included. Each BUSL version converts to GPL-3.0-or-later four years after it is published. The Mac app, iOS app and CLI stay GPL. If you only run the terminal, nothing changed for you. If you planned to self-host the cloud side, it now costs money. The repo also asks contributors to sign a CLA.

The free terminal is the front door to a paid cloud. cmux Pro is $50/mo for cloud VMs that run agents while your laptop is closed, and includes the iOS app. The $30/mo Founder's Edition also lists early access to the iOS app and Cloud VMs. The server code that runs the cloud is the part that is no longer open source. The commit that changed it gives no reason.

"Simple" depends on how far in you go. The sidebar is simple. Someone on HN asked in September why cmux needs 200 settings.

My read

I used Cursor for over a year. It got harder to use, and it got bloated. Somebody put me onto cmux yesterday, and I already like how it works.

It's simple. The left sidebar is the killer feature. I can have multiple projects open at once, easily, instead of a zillion separate screens.

That's a day-one read, not a field report. The real test is a few weeks of daily use with agents running in every workspace. If it survives that, there's a field report in it.

Credits

Built by Lawrence Chen (@lawrencecchen) and Austin Wang (@austinywang) at Manaflow, Inc. (@manaflowai). Abdulaziz Albahar and Leo Li are the next-largest contributors.

Voices quoted: mikkupikku, twostorytower, reconnecting, danw1979 and 217 on Hacker News.

Data: the cmux git history (cloned 2026-10-01), ungh.cc, the cmux README, LICENSE and docs, cmux.com/pricing, warp.dev/pricing, cursor.com/pricing, Trendshift, the Hacker News Firebase and Algolia APIs, and the v0.64.25 release download.

OpenMontage: The Free Skill Pack That Turns Your Coding Agent Into a Video Studio

OpenMontage — a library of skill files that plugs into an existing AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex) and walks it through producing a finished video: research, script, storyboard, generated assets, edit, and final composite.
Alternative to: a freelance video editor, averaging about $58 an hour, with a full edited-and-scored video easily running several hours of billed time — tens to low hundreds of dollars minimum. Also stands opposite RunwayML as a raw generation tool: Standard tier $12/mo for about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 video, scaling to $76/mo for more. OpenMontage's own demoed videos ran $1.33 to $5 in API costs, though that excludes the cost of the coding-agent subscription doing the orchestration.
Cost to run: free code, real usage costs — 60-plus provider integrations (Runway, Veo, Kling, HeyGen, ElevenLabs) bill per generation on top of whatever agent subscription you're already running.
Licence: AGPLv3, confirmed by reading the full license text. A real copyleft: if you run a modified version as a network service, you have to release your changes. It doesn't restrict personal or commercial use of the tool itself.
Runs on: whatever coding agent you already have installed — it's a skill pack, not a standalone app.
Requires: an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, or Codex) plus your own API keys for whichever generation providers a given pipeline calls.
Traction: 59,633 stars · 7,507 forks · 331 watchers · 26 commits in the last 30 days, 346 in the last 90.
Liveness: slowing — last code push was 11 days ago, down from a much faster pace earlier in the project's six-month life. Zero tagged releases; everyone runs off main.
Maturity: unversioned. About 69% of all 449 commits are from one person, calesthio.
Links: repo · site
Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

What it does

OpenMontage isn't an app you open — it's a set of markdown "director skill" files you drop into an AI coding agent's skills folder, and from then on that agent can produce actual finished video. It ships 10 to 12 named pipelines (Animated Explainer, Cinematic, Documentary Montage, Talking Head, Screen Demo, Podcast Repurpose, and others), each walking the agent through the same fixed stages: research the topic, propose an approach, write the script, plan the scenes, generate the assets, edit, and composite the final timeline — with checkpoints for human approval at the creative decisions along the way.

Under the hood it wires up more than 60 provider integrations: Runway Gen-4 and Veo and Kling for video generation (routed through fal.ai), HeyGen for avatars, Google's Chirp3-HD for text-to-speech, and free sources like Pexels, Archive.org, NASA, and Wikimedia for real-footage documentary work that doesn't need paid generation at all. The output is a real rendered video file — the README's own demos include a sci-fi trailer, a 60-second Pixar-style animated short that cost $1.33 in generation fees, and a documentary that weaves real archival footage together with original narration and hand-authored motion graphics.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The README's own framing is that most AI video tools hand you a single generated clip from a prompt, and OpenMontage's pitch is the whole pipeline around that clip — script, editing, music, captions, and a finished composite — which a single-clip generator doesn't give you. Priced against a human alternative: a freelance video editor runs roughly $20 to $40 an hour at the junior end and $130 to $220 an hour at the expert end, with a realistic mid-level average around $58 an hour. A multi-minute edited, scored, and captioned video easily runs several hours of billed time.

Priced against the AI-native alternative it directly integrates — RunwayML, since OpenMontage calls Runway Gen-4 as one of its providers — Runway's own Standard tier is $12 a month for 625 credits, about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 video, scaling to $28 a month for 2,250 credits and $76 a month for 9,500. OpenMontage's own demoed videos cost $1.33 to $5 in raw API spend, though that number doesn't include whatever you're already paying for the coding agent itself.

Is it still alive?

Slowing down, and it's worth being direct about that. The repo went from 449 commits over six months to a last code push 11 days before this was written — a real drop from its earlier pace, even though GitHub's own activity metadata (stars, traffic) still shows movement today. There are zero tagged releases in the project's entire history, so anyone running this is on unpinned main with no version to fall back to. About 69% of all commits are from one person, calesthio, with a real but thin outside contributor base filling in the rest.

A screening pass on this repo raised a serious flag worth resolving directly: several near-identical repos exist under other GitHub accounts with slightly different stats claimed for the number of pipelines and tools. On closer inspection, that isn't a coordinated clone network. Every one of those other repos carries calesthio as its dominant committer, with a commit count matching exactly how far along the real project was on the date each one was forked — in other words, they're ordinary GitHub forks made at different points in the project's growth, and the "differing stats" are just snapshots of a fast-growing project's own README at different moments, not competing authorship claims. One of the flagged accounts doesn't even exist anymore. calesthio's real authorship survives intact in every version checked.

calesthio themselves has a real, multi-year GitHub footprint — nine repos, a separate 11,700-star project called Crucix, and linked X, YouTube, and Instagram accounts that are all cross-consistent with each other and with the OpenMontage README. That's not a burner account, even without a confirmed real legal name behind it.

What people say

Five separate Hacker News submissions exist, from five different accounts, and only two drew any comments at all. The largest, seven points and one comment, was critical: the sole commenter called the project capable of "mass producing ridiculous content," described the demo videos as ranging from hollow to "grotesquely overexaggerated," and pointed to a specific rendering bug — text visibly reflowing mid-animation, which the commenter guessed came from an agent animating a text box's width instead of its scale. The other four threads drew almost no engagement. Outside of Hacker News, coverage is a handful of blog write-ups that mostly restate the README rather than independently testing the tool — no meaningful third-party scrutiny beyond that one critical HN comment.

The catch

The license is real copyleft, not the permissive MIT/Apache you'd get from most of this newsletter's picks: AGPLv3 means if you take OpenMontage, modify it, and run it as a network service for other people, you're obligated to release your changes. It doesn't restrict using the tool yourself, commercially or otherwise, but it matters if you were planning to build a hosted product on top of it.

Zero tagged releases across six months and roughly 69% of the commit history from one person means there's real bus-factor risk here, and the 11-day slowdown in pushes is recent enough to watch rather than dismiss. And the one substantive independent review this project has received — that Hacker News comment — flagged a real, visible rendering defect in the flagship demo material, not a minor nitpick.

Credits

Built by calesthio (GitHub, X: @calesthioailabs). Figures pulled from ungh.cc, a full clone of the repository, and the project's own README, LICENSE, and CONTRIBUTING files. The critical Hacker News comment is quoted from item 48616398.

SlopMonster: The Free Tool That Makes One AI Model Edit Another's Slop

SlopMonster — a lint-rewrite-relint loop for AI-written copy. It scores your draft against five "AI tell" categories, hands it to a different model family for a rewrite, and won't stop until it scores clean.
Alternative to: a manual process, by the project's own design — its README states plainly it will never claim to "beat AI detectors," and that detector-bypass tools are deliberately excluded from what it draws on. The thing it substitutes for is a writer hand-editing an AI draft to strip the AI-ness out. No solid per-piece time figure exists publicly; treat any hours estimate here as directional, not verified.
Cost to run: free code, not free to run — every rewrite pass is a real call to a rival-family model (GPT or Claude) through whichever CLI you have installed and authenticated.
Licence: MIT.
Runs on: Python 3, standard library only, for the scoring step. No dependencies.
Requires: an already-installed, already-authenticated codex or claude CLI for the automatic rewrite step. Without either, it just prints the rewrite prompt for you to paste into a chat window yourself, for zero API cost.
Traction: 364 stars · 39 forks · 5 watchers · 14 total commits, spanning the repo's entire 19-day life.
Liveness: young and actively maintained relative to its age — one open issue is getting real design discussion, and pull requests are merging within days. About 86% of commits are from one person, Jack Roberts.
Maturity: no tags, no releases — a 19-day-old repo, not a mature one.
Links: repo · open issue on rhythm-based tells
Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

What it does

SlopMonster runs a four-step loop on a piece of writing. First, LINT: a dependency-free Python script scores the text out of five, checking for AI vocabulary (matched two ways — by word root, so it catches "elevates" as well as "elevate," and by exact phrase, so present-tense "we craft furniture by hand" scores clean while the AI-tell past tense "crafted" still gets flagged), 17 catalogued AI sentence shapes ("not just X, but Y," self-answered rhetorical questions), punctuation cadence (too many em-dashes in a short window), a narrow rule-of-three rhythm check, and a hard rule against inventing statistics — any number sitting next to a people-noun like "10,000+ happy users" gets flagged unless you explicitly override it.

If it doesn't score five out of five, step two REWRITEs: kill the flagged vocabulary, kill the flagged sentence shapes, then deliberately reintroduce human irregularity — varied sentence length, a rough edge, a specific real number per claim. Step three is the clever part: CLEANSE hands the draft to a different model family than whichever one wrote it. A Claude draft goes to GPT through the codex CLI; a GPT draft goes to Claude. The project's own reasoning: "a model marking its own homework is the one thing this step exists to prevent." Step four always re-lints, because the model doing the cleansing can strip old tells while introducing new ones.

What it replaces, and what that costs

This is a genuinely unusual case for what it stands opposite, because SlopMonster draws a bright line in its own documentation: this skill will never claim to "beat AI detectors." Detectors are noise. The target is a human reader's gut — and it explicitly says detector-bypass repos are excluded from what it builds on. So it isn't positioning itself against Originality.ai or GPTZero, and it isn't positioning itself against paid humanizer tools like Undetectable.ai ($9.99 to $42.50 a month depending on word volume) or StealthGPT (roughly $15 to $50 a month), even though those exist and do something adjacent.

What it actually replaces is a writer manually combing a draft for AI tells and hand-fixing them — which is exactly what its own rewrite instructions describe doing, just automated and cross-checked by a second model. There's no solid public number for how long that takes per piece. The closest data point found, from a writer who tracked a month of AI-assisted copywriting, found she saved only "an hour or so overall" using AI to draft once you count the editing time back out — which suggests manual humanizing can eat most of AI's drafting speed advantage. Treat any specific minutes-per-piece figure as an estimate, not a verified fact.

It's not free to run in practice: every CLEANSE pass is a real call to whichever model CLI you have installed, on top of whatever subscription or credits that CLI already draws from, and a genuinely stubborn draft can need several round trips before it scores clean.

Is it still alive?

Relative to its age, yes — and its age matters here. The repo is 19 days old with 14 total commits, all falling inside the last 30 days by definition. About 86% of those commits are from one person, Jack Roberts (GitHub: ItsssssJack), with two outside pull requests merged by day nine.

Whether commit frequency is even the right way to judge this kind of project is worth asking directly. This isn't a framework with dependencies to patch — it's a Python script plus a set of prompt and rule files, closer to a curated reference than a piece of infrastructure. But it isn't purely static either: the scorer has real logic that can have real bugs, and it already has — one merged pull request's own commit message says "fix two real bugs," and there's a currently open issue (#10) where a user has identified a whole class of AI writing tells the scorer's five rules don't catch: rhythmic and structural patterns, as opposed to vocabulary or punctuation ones. That issue is open with no maintainer reply yet.

What people say

Nothing on Hacker News — checked directly, and the only hits are unrelated uses of "slop monster" as a generic insult in other threads. Reddit is unreachable from where this was researched. The one real venue of discussion is the project's own GitHub issue tracker, where issue #10 is a genuinely sharp piece of feedback: the person points out that the scorer's own README contains a line — "Developers call this a linter. Everyone else can call it a checker that will not let you ship" — that is itself an example of the rhythmic AI-tell pattern the current rules don't catch. That's a good, self-owned irony, and it's real: the maintainer hasn't yet responded to it.

The catch

The scorer is explicitly English-only, and not in a way that fails loudly: the README says copy in another language "scores 5/5 because the scorer cannot read it, not because it is clean." That's a silent false-negative, by design, not a bug someone forgot to fix.

The proof-detection rule is deliberately trigger-happy — it flags any number next to a people-noun even when the number is true and sourced, on the theory that it's safer to make you manually confirm a real stat than to let a fabricated one slip through. And the pipeline has had real, since-fixed bugs of the kind that matter: a timeout used to leave a zero-byte file that the checker then stamped "CLEAN," and a formatting quirk used to corrupt drafts that contained their own markdown rules or frontmatter. Both are fixed, but they're a reminder this is young code, not a mature one.

Credits

Built by Jack Roberts (GitHub: ItsssssJack), who also built the separately popular power-design Claude skill. Figures pulled from ungh.cc, a full clone of the repository, and the project's own README, LICENSE, and source. Pricing for adjacent humanizer tools checked directly on Undetectable.ai's pricing page and a third-party review of StealthGPT's.

Presenton: The Free, Self-Hosted Gamma Alternative With an API

Presenton — a self-hostable AI presentation generator. Give it a prompt, a document, or your own outline, and it builds a full slide deck, exportable as editable PowerPoint or PDF, with a REST API and an MCP server for automated generation.
Alternative to: Gamma Plus, $9/seat/month ($108/yr billed annually), 1,000 credits/month, up to 100 slides per prompt. Gamma Pro, $18/seat/month ($216/yr), 4,000 credits/month, API access. Beautiful AI Pro, $14.50/mo billed annually. Decktopus Pro, $9.99/mo billed annually ($119.88/yr).
Cost to run: free software, bring-your-own-key. You pay only for the LLM and image-API calls it makes — or $0 if you run local models through Ollama or LM Studio.
Licence: Apache-2.0, confirmed by reading the full text. No commercial-use restrictions. "Presenton Cloud" and "Presenton Enterprise" are separate proprietary offerings sitting alongside the open-source core.
Runs on: Docker (docker run ghcr.io/presenton/presenton:latest), or as an Electron desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Requires: an API key from one of over a dozen supported LLM providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure, Bedrock, OpenRouter, and others — or none at all if you run Ollama locally.
Traction: 10,290 stars · 1,584 forks · 56 watchers · 194 commits in the last 30 days, 1,056 in the last 90.
Liveness: very live — last commit 3 days ago, near-200-commits-a-month pace, run by a core team of three (Saurav Niraula, Shiva Raj Badu, Sudip Parajuli) plus outside contributors.
Maturity: v0.9.10-beta — still tagged beta despite the traction and commit volume. 83 tags.
Links: repo · site
Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

What it does

Presenton takes a prompt, an uploaded document, or a slides_markdown outline you write yourself, and turns it into a full slide deck. It ships six built-in templates and lets you turn your own PowerPoint design into a reusable AI template. Output comes back as an editable PowerPoint file or a PDF, and there's a browser-based drag-and-edit interface if you want to tweak the result by hand.

It's built to be automated, not just clicked through: a REST API (POST /api/v1/ppt/presentation/generate) lets you generate decks programmatically with parameters for tone, slide count, and even live web-search grounding, and a built-in MCP server means Claude or another MCP-compatible agent can generate a deck directly. It also ships as a standalone Electron desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux — though the MCP server is turned off in that build to avoid authentication conflicts.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Presenton names its own competition in its README title: it calls itself an alternative to Gamma, Canva, Beautiful AI, Decktopus, and Presentations AI. Checked directly on the vendor pricing pages: Gamma's Plus tier is $9 a seat per month ($108 a year billed annually) for 1,000 credits a month and up to 100 slides per prompt; its Pro tier, marked "most popular," is $18 a seat per month ($216 a year) with 4,000 credits and API access; its top Ultra tier runs $90 a seat per month. Beautiful AI's individual Pro plan is $14.50 a month billed annually, and its Teams plan is $40 a month per user. Decktopus's cheapest annual plan works out to $9.99 a month ($119.88 a year) for 750 AI credits, about 150 slides.

Presenton itself is Apache-2.0, self-hosted, and bring-your-own-key — its own pitch is "only pay for what you use, no hidden fees or subscriptions." The contrast isn't a specific dollar figure; it's the difference between a recurring per-seat subscription that runs forever and paying only for the tokens you actually consume, which can be $0 if you run a local model through Ollama.

Is it still alive?

Very. Presenton is shipping close to 200 commits a month, with the most recent commit three days before this was written. It's run by a small core team of three — Saurav Niraula, Shiva Raj Badu, and Sudip Parajuli — who account for the large majority of its roughly 2,780 total commits, with community contributors filling in the rest. That's a real team, not a single maintainer's side project.

One thing worth noting: the latest release is still tagged v0.9.10-beta. For a project with 10,000-plus stars and daily commits, staying in beta versioning this long is either genuine caution or a sign the maintainers consider it not fully settled yet — worth knowing if you're deciding whether to build something on top of it.

What people say

Hacker News discussion is minimal — two low-traffic Show HN posts, "Built an Open Source BYOK Gamma Alternative for AI Presentations" (2 points) and "Open-Source API for AI Presentation Generation" (2 points, 2 comments, with the founder replying about an early pivot away from Electron toward developer tooling). For a repo with this much GitHub traction, that's thin: whatever conversation exists is mostly happening on LinkedIn and YouTube, not HN. A small YouTube review (under 2,000 subscribers, under 1,000 views) covered it as an open-source alternative worth trying, but there's no meaningful independent community discussion to quote.

No verified official X or Twitter account exists for the project either — it's reachable through its Discord, YouTube channel, and company site, but not through a verified social handle.

The catch

The slides_markdown input path is explicitly not deterministic — the README says plainly that it "is not a deterministic Markdown-to-slide renderer," and your text may get rephrased to fit slide templates, with a 100-word-per-slide and 50-slide cap by default. Presenton also publishes no cost estimator or budget guardrail for the LLM calls it makes on your behalf — you're fully exposed to whatever your chosen provider charges, with no dashboard to track it.

The MCP server — one of the two features that make this different from a consumer deck tool — is disabled in the desktop app and only works in the self-hosted Docker deployment.

Credits

Built by Saurav Niraula, Shiva Raj Badu, and Sudip Parajuli, with community contributors. Figures pulled from ungh.cc, a full clone of the repository, and the project's own README and LICENSE. Pricing verified directly on Gamma's, Beautiful AI's, and Decktopus's own pricing pages.

OpenShorts: The Free Opus Clip Alternative You Can Self-Host

OpenShorts — turns a long video into short, vertical clips automatically: AI picks the highlight moments, tracks faces to reframe for 9:16, burns in styled captions, and can dub the result into 30-plus languages.
Alternative to: Opus Clip Pro, $29/mo ($14.50/mo, $174/yr, billed annually) for 3,600 credits a year and no watermark. Quso.ai (formerly Vidyo.ai) Essential, $39/mo ($26/mo billed annually). Manual editing runs roughly 30 to 60 minutes of an editor's time per finished minute of video — a 20-minute source video is 10 to 20 hours by hand.
Cost to run: free, self-hosted, MIT-licensed core. Not free to run at scale — it needs a Gemini API key (free tier available) for moment detection, and its AI Shorts feature costs $0.65 to $2 per video in third-party API calls (ElevenLabs, fal.ai). Its own hosted cloud tier starts at $12/mo for 100 minutes.
Licence: MIT for the self-hosted core. The cloud/ directory alone carries a separate source-available commercial license — readable and self-hostable for personal or internal use, not resellable as a competing paid service.
Runs on: Docker and Docker Compose, 8GB+ RAM. CPU-only by default (5 to 8 minutes to clip an 8-minute video); an NVIDIA GPU cuts that to about a minute.
Requires: a Gemini API key (or any OpenAI-compatible local model via Ollama, LM Studio, or similar, for moment-picking only — some features hard-require Gemini). ElevenLabs for dubbing. Upload-Post for direct social publishing.
Traction: 4,836 stars · 1,173 forks · 35 watchers · 158 commits in the last 30 days, 326 in the last 90.
Liveness: very live — near-daily commits, last push yesterday. One person, Juan Carlos Cavero Gracia, wrote about 89% of all 426 commits, under two different git identities.
Maturity: no tagged releases and no version numbers in nine months of development — self-hosters run unpinned main.
Links: repo · site
Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

What it does

OpenShorts is three tools bundled into one FastAPI-and-React app. The main one, Clip Generator, transcribes your video word-by-word (faster-whisper), finds scene boundaries (PySceneDetect), then has Gemini score the transcript against those scenes to pick three to fifteen "viral moments," each 15 to 60 seconds. FFmpeg cuts the moments precisely, then an AI reframing step picks a layout per scene — tracking a single speaker's face, blurring the background for a wide shot, splitting the frame for two speakers, or inset-screencasting a presenter over their screen — and burns in styled captions. There's an optional dubbing pass through ElevenLabs that can translate and re-voice the clip in over 30 languages.

A second mode, AI Shorts, goes further: give it a URL or a brief, and it writes a script, generates an AI presenter, voices it, animates it, and composites b-roll into a finished short — no source footage required. A third mode handles YouTube titles, thumbnails, and descriptions, and publishes directly. It also ships as an MCP server and a pip install-able CLI, so an AI agent can call it directly.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Opus Clip's Pro tier is the closest direct comparison: $29 a month month-to-month, or $14.50 a month ($174 a year) billed annually, for 3,600 credits a year and no watermark — its free tier caps you at 60 credits a month and stamps a watermark on everything. Quso.ai, which absorbed the once-separate Vidyo.ai brand, prices its Essential tier at $39 a month, or $26 a month billed annually.

The honest manual-labor comparison is real too: the industry rule of thumb is 30 to 60 minutes of an editor's time per finished minute of video, which puts a 20-minute source video at 10 to 20 hours by hand.

OpenShorts itself isn't zero-cost once you're actually using it — its own hosted cloud tier starts at $12 a month for 100 minutes, and self-hosting still means paying Gemini, ElevenLabs, and fal.ai for the calls it makes on your behalf. AI Shorts alone runs $0.65 to $2 per generated video. This isn't a saving if you weren't already paying Opus Clip or Quso.ai — it's an avoided cost, and the workflows aren't identical, since OpenShorts leans on your own API keys rather than a flat subscription.

Is it still alive?

Very, and moving fast. It's nine months old, created in December, with 158 commits in the last 30 days alone and a push as recently as yesterday. But it's essentially a one-person project: Juan Carlos Cavero Gracia wrote 381 of the repo's 426 commits — about 89% — under his primary git identity, with a handful more under a secondary identity and the GitHub account "mutonby." There are zero tagged releases and zero GitHub releases in nine months of work, which means anyone self-hosting is running unpinned main with no version discipline.

A screening pass on this repo flagged a cluster of near-identical forks under other GitHub accounts as a possible "clone farm." That doesn't hold up on a closer look — the forks in question are legitimate GitHub forks, flagged as forks by GitHub itself, not separate copy-pasted repositories farming stars. The fork-to-star ratio is unusually high, which is more likely explained by people forking specifically to strip the paid-cloud branding and run their own instance for free, since the entire product pitch is "self-host free or pay us $12 a month."

Mutonby is a real, identifiable person. His GitHub profile links to a LinkedIn under the name Juan Carlos Cavero Gracia and an X handle, @fotoexamen, and lists Upload-Post — the same paid social-publishing service OpenShorts requires an API key for — as his own site. He's also the builder of shortcast, a separate macOS clipping app with 381 stars and its own independent traction, which argues for a real, repeat builder rather than a one-off drop.

What people say

Thin. There's a single Show HN post from March, one point and zero comments. No Product Hunt listing. No independent reviews found. What little indirect signal exists: indie hacker Pieter Levels replied to the maintainer's X account once, suggesting some visibility in that circle, though the full context of that exchange wasn't retrievable. Outside of GitHub's own star count, there's essentially no independent press on this project.

The catch

Even skipping Gemini for moment-picking with a local model, Gemini is still hard-required for automatic layout selection, on-screen content detection, and any video without dialogue — it doesn't fully work offline. The local-LLM path is fragile in its own right: Ollama's default context window silently truncates unless you raise it, and smaller models don't reliably return valid output.

The free hosted tier is watermarked and capped at 20 minutes a month; the cheapest paid tier, $12 a month, only buys 100 minutes — about 12 cents a minute. And every social-publishing feature routes through Upload-Post, a separate paid dependency built by the same person who built OpenShorts, beyond its own 10 free uploads a month.

With zero tagged releases in nine months and roughly 89% of the commit history from one person, anyone self-hosting this is betting on one builder's continued attention, with no version pins to fall back to if something breaks.

Credits

Built by Juan Carlos Cavero Gracia (GitHub: mutonby, X: @fotoexamen). Figures pulled from ungh.cc, a full clone of the repository, and the project's own README and LICENSE. Pricing verified directly on Opus Clip's and Quso.ai's own pricing pages.

Scrapling: The Free Web Scraper That Adapts When Sites Redesign

Scrapling — a Python web-scraping framework that fingerprints the elements you scrape, so when a site's layout changes, it can relocate the same data instead of breaking.
Alternative to: Bright Data Web Unlocker Scale, $499/mo for 383,000 requests (then $1.30 per 1,000 more). ScraperAPI Hobby, $49/mo for 100,000 credits. Oxylabs Web Scraper API Micro, $49/mo for up to 98,000 non-JS results ($0.50/1,000; JS-rendered jumps to $1.35/1,000). Zyte API charges per request with no subscription, $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 for simple pages, up to $16.08 per 1,000 for the hardest browser-rendered ones.
Cost to run: free, self-hosted. You supply your own proxies and compute.
Licence: BSD 3-Clause, copyright Karim Shoair. Standard terms — attribution required, plus a clause barring use of the author's name to endorse derived products without permission.
Runs on: Python 3.10 through 3.13. Docker images published on Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry.
Requires: the base package is parser-only. Scraping and stealth features need the fetchers extra, which pulls in a patched, stealth-hardened Playwright fork plus browser-fingerprint spoofing — meaning it drives a real headless Chromium under the hood.
Traction: 81,583 stars · 8,281 forks · 299 watchers · 37 commits in the last 30 days, 139 in the last 90.
Liveness: very live — last commit 3 days ago, latest release v0.4.15 shipped Aug. 23. One maintainer, Karim Shoair, wrote about 95% of all 1,621 commits.
Maturity: v0.4.15. 53 tags, dozens of published GitHub releases going back to 2024.
Links: repo · PyPI · Trendshift
Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

What it does

Scrapling is a Python scraping toolkit built around one idea: most scrapers break the moment a site redesigns, and rewriting them is the actual cost of scraping, not the requests themselves. Its fix, verified directly in the source, is genuinely simple. When you scrape an element with auto_save=True, Scrapling fingerprints it — its tag, its text, a set of key attributes, its parent's shape, its siblings — and stores that fingerprint. Later, with adaptive=True, it walks the new page and scores every candidate element against that stored fingerprint using Python's own text-diffing library (difflib). Whatever scores highest above a threshold gets treated as "the same element, moved." No machine learning, no hosted matching service — just structural diffing, done locally.

Around that core, it ships a full stealth stack: TLS/JA3 browser impersonation for plain HTTP requests, a patched stealth build of Playwright for browser automation, fingerprint spoofing, DNS-over-HTTPS so proxies don't leak your real DNS, and built-in ad/tracker blocking across roughly 3,500 domains. There's a Scrapy-style Spider framework for full crawls with concurrency and auto-throttling, an MCP server so agents like Claude or Cursor can scrape through it directly, and a markdown export mode built for feeding scraped pages into a RAG pipeline.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The commercial scraping-and-unlocking market is priced by the request, and it isn't cheap. Bright Data's Web Unlocker Scale tier runs $499 a month for 383,000 requests, with overage at $1.30 per 1,000 after that. ScraperAPI's Hobby tier is $49 a month for 100,000 credits. Oxylabs charges $49 a month for its Micro tier, with plain results running $0.50 to $1.15 per 1,000 depending on the target site — Amazon is priced lowest, general sites highest — while JS-rendered pages, the kind that actually need a real browser, run $1.35 per 1,000. Zyte skips the subscription model entirely and charges per request, from $0.13 per 1,000 for simple pages up to $16.08 per 1,000 for the hardest browser-rendered, anti-bot-protected ones.

Scrapling is free and BSD-licensed, which means the honest trade isn't price — it's that you supply your own proxies and compute, and it doesn't claim to beat every anti-bot system out of the box. Its own README is upfront about this: Scrapling handles Cloudflare's Turnstile and interstitial challenges directly, and for anything tougher — Akamai, DataDome, Kasada, Incapsula — it points you at a paid sponsor, Hyper Solutions, rather than pretending to solve them itself.

There's no clean industry number for what it costs a team to hand-maintain brittle scrapers. The closest figures come from two different sources: ScrapeHero, citing Monte Carlo Data, puts engineers at spending roughly 40% of their time fighting broken feeds and reprocessing missing data; a separate ProWebScraper estimate puts in-house scraping infrastructure — proxies, monitoring, tooling — at $50,000 to $100,000 a year for a team. Neither is scraper-breakage-specific, but together they're the shape of the problem Scrapling's adaptive matching is aimed at.

Is it still alive?

Very. Scrapling is not quite two years old — its first commit was October 2024 — and it's already at 81,583 stars with a commit landing three days before this was written. It's Trendshift's #1 Python Repository Of The Day and #1 Python Repository Of The Week (first hit in February 2026), and #2 across all languages on both counts. The latest release, v0.4.15, shipped August 23 with a Cloudflare solver rework and RAG markdown support — real feature work, not maintenance patches.

One thing worth flagging: this is almost entirely a one-person project. Karim Shoair (GitHub handle D4Vinci) wrote 1,544 of the repo's 1,621 commits — about 95%. The next-largest contributor has 14. That's a lot of velocity riding on one person.

What people say

Hacker News has barely registered it — two posts, both from the author himself, four points and one comment on the first, one point and zero comments on the second. Given 81,000-plus stars, the real conversation is clearly happening somewhere else: the project's own Discord and its dedicated X account, @Scrapling_dev, not on HN.

The catch

Scrapling's own README carries a formal disclaimer: it's built "for educational and research purposes only," and using it means agreeing to comply with local and international data-scraping and privacy laws — the authors aren't responsible for misuse, and you're expected to respect each site's terms of service and robots.txt.

The bigger practical catch is scope. The base pip install scrapling is parser-only — no browser, no fetchers, nothing that actually scrapes a live page — and the README flags this explicitly because it trips people up. And despite the marketing language around bypassing "all types" of Cloudflare protection, the README's own words are more modest: it handles Cloudflare specifically, and for the anti-bot systems that actually stop enterprise scraping operations — Akamai, DataDome, Kasada, Incapsula — it upsells a paid third-party API rather than claiming to solve them.

Credits

Built by Karim Shoair (@D4Vinci1 on X, @Scrapling_dev for the project). Figures pulled from ungh.cc, a full clone of the repository, PyPI's package API, and the project's own README, pyproject.toml, and LICENSE.

Archify — an agent skill that turns a codebase or a plain description into an interactive architecture, workflow, sequence, data-flow or lifecycle diagram, delivered as one self-contained HTML file.
Alternative to: Ilograph Pro at $18/month billed annually, or $22/month billed monthly, where exporting a self-contained HTML file is itself the paid feature · Eraser Starter at $15/member/month billed annually, or $20/month monthly, metered at 40 AI credits a month · Lucidchart Individual at $9/month billed annually, against a free tier limited to 3 editable documents and 75 shapes per document · Structurizr, the architecture-diagrams-as-code incumbent, whose cloud service is now end of life and whose self-hosted server licence runs GBP 300/month for 1 to 20 users, billed annually.
Cost to run: free. The rendering and validation are local Node. You pay whatever your coding agent already costs you, and nothing else.
Licence: MIT — free for commercial use.
Runs on: anywhere Node runs, driven from Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI or OpenCode.
Requires: Node.js and one of those agents. No repository is required — you can describe a system in chat and get a diagram back.
Traction: 54,109 stars · 3,542 forks · 236 commits on main · open/closed issue counts unknown; issue and PR numbering has reached at least #354.
Liveness: very live — 105 commits in the last 30 days, 201 in the last 90, 25 authors in the last year, last commit 2026-09-08.
Maturity: latest stable release v2.16.0, 2026-08-30, across 19 tags, with v2.17.0-dev.1 named in the README as the current development version. Past 2.0 and cutting releases regularly.
Note on defaults: Archify makes an outbound network request on a roughly 72-hour cycle to check for a newer stable version. Its README states the server receives normal HTTP metadata only — IP and time — and no version, agent, project data, prompts, account or device ID. It never downloads or installs anything. Set ARCHIFY_UPDATE_CHECK_DISABLED=1 to turn it off.
Links: github.com/tt-a1i/archify · tt-a1i.github.io/archify · Trendshift #31352 · a Hacker News submission on 2026-09-07 scored 1 point and drew a single comment.
Figures as of 2026-09-08.

What it does

You ask your coding agent to map a system. The agent produces typed JSON describing the components and their connections, and Archify compiles that JSON deterministically into HTML and SVG. The output is one file with no external dependencies that you can open, present from, or attach to a pull request.

The design choice underneath is that the agent is not allowed to draw. It emits a typed intermediate representation, and Archify validates and renders it. That is what stops the usual failure where a language model produces a confident diagram of a system that does not exist.

Five diagram types, four visual presets, dark and light themes. The viewer does more than display: you can search nodes, trace upstream and downstream reach along authored edges, compare two validated snapshots as before, delta and after to review an architecture change before merge, and play guided named chapters through a diagram. Export covers PNG, SVG, WebM and a 1200x630 share card.

Install is npx skills add tt-a1i/archify -g.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The headline is not a price. It is that the closest incumbent stopped selling the product.

Structurizr's cloud service is end of life. structurizr.com/pricing returns HTTP 404. The Structurizr homepage carries a site-wide banner reading "Cloud service end of life announcement," and the page at docs.structurizr.com/cloud is now filed under a docs section titled "End of life," containing a migration guide that tells existing users to export their workspaces and move to the playground, to Structurizr Lite, or to a self-hosted server.

What Structurizr still prices is that self-hosted server:

Structurizr server, self-hosted — GBP 300/month for 1 to 20 unique users, rising through GBP 600 (21 to 50), GBP 900 (51 to 100) and on to GBP 2,400 (1001+).
Billed annually and does not auto-renew. Payments are non-refundable. There is no self-serve checkout — purchase is by email quote.
A "unique user" explicitly includes viewers, iframe embeds, image embeds and automated API processes, not just people who edit diagrams.

So the smallest band is GBP 3,600 a year, and the meter counts everyone who so much as looks at a rendered diagram.

The commercial products still selling in this space:

Ilograph Pro — $18/month billed annually, $22/month billed monthly. The relevant detail: Ilograph's own feature list puts "Export your diagrams to 100% self-contained HTML files that can be hosted anywhere" behind Pro. That is precisely Archify's output format, sold as an upgrade.
Eraser Starter — $15/member/month billed annually, $20/month monthly. AI generation is metered in credits: 5 AI diagrams on Free, 40 monthly AI credits on Starter, 250 monthly on Business at $45/member/month annually. Free is separately capped at 3 files.
Lucidchart Individual — $9/month billed annually. Free is capped at 3 editable documents and 75 shapes per document.

Archify's own cost is zero, and that figure is honest rather than hidden, because the compute is local. There is no inference bill hiding behind it: the agent you already run writes the JSON, and Node renders it.

One caution on the comparison. Lucidchart and Miro are general diagramming canvases where people draw org charts and flowcharts by dragging boxes. Archify does not do that, and nobody should cancel a Lucidchart seat expecting to replace it. The overlap is narrow and specific: producing an architecture diagram that reflects a real system. Against Ilograph and Eraser, which sell exactly that, the comparison is direct. Against Lucidchart, it is partial.

Is it still alive?

Aggressively. 105 commits in the last 30 days, 201 in the last 90, from 25 authors over the past year, with the most recent landing 2026-09-08. Nineteen tags, latest stable v2.16.0 on 2026-08-30, and the README naming v2.17.0-dev.1 as the in-flight version.

The release notes for v2.16.0 credit 21 pull requests by number and author, from nine contributors other than the maintainer, plus a New Contributors block naming six first-timers. That is a project taking contributions rather than a solo repo with a comments section. Maintainer concentration is still meaningful: tt-a1i accounts for 170 of the recorded contributions across two addresses, with sunsunsun-java next at 30 across three.

The tracker moves in days. Issues filed on 2026-09-04, 09-05 and 09-06 carry numbers in the 300s and 320s against a project that has reached at least #354.

Star growth is steep enough to be worth dating precisely: this entry recorded 52,220 stars on 2026-09-07 and 54,109 on 2026-09-08.

What people say

Almost nothing, publicly, and that is the finding. The only relevant Hacker News submission is "Archify", posted 2026-09-07 by saikatsg. It scored 1 point. It received one comment, from soltanov, reading in full:

"It is useful architecture tool."

That is the entire public conversation on Hacker News about a repository with 54,109 stars. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The issue tracker carries the real signal, and it is unusually high quality. Citing titles rather than threads read in full: macawi-ai opened #301 on 2026-09-04, "repository-evidence: identity binding is hard-coded to github.com, blocking self-hosted Git (Gitea/GitLab/Forgejo)." jmvassoler opened #277 on 2026-09-02 reporting that adaptive reader width depends on reaching Google Fonts, shifting from 960 to 987 offline, and that the pinned desktop-reader test only passes online. julianwirawan-hash opened #310 on 2026-09-04 on a live-preview crash with a native libuv assertion on short-name-aliased Windows paths.

Windows is a recurring theme — a separate issue, #274, reports that --repo-root is rejected as not-top-level when the Windows drive letter is lowercase.

The sharpest one is the dissent, and it is aimed straight at the project's central claim. On 2026-09-05, ronenamr opened #324: "3 of 5 packaged examples fail archify's own visual-check containment gate."

The catch

Take #324 seriously. Archify's entire pitch is deterministic validation — the diagrams are trustworthy because the tool checks them. An outside reporter's issue title says three of five packaged examples fail the tool's own visual-check containment gate. The entry does not restate that as a count of what the repository ships, because the examples directory on the default branch holds more than five files and the issue's scope was not read in full. That is cited here as a filed issue title, not a verified reproduction, and it is the first thing to test before trusting the output on anything that matters.

The update check is a network call the tool makes on its own. The project discloses it clearly, scopes it narrowly, and ships an environment variable to disable it, which is better behaviour than most. It is still an outbound request from a diagramming tool, and it is listed in Quick Facts rather than buried here for that reason.

The README carries paid sponsor placements, including an affiliate link with a discount code for an API reseller and a link to a sponsor's own agent product. That is disclosed on the page and does not touch the licence, but it is worth knowing that the README is partly a commercial surface.

The README on the default branch offers no social handle, only a QQ email address. Outreach and questions therefore go to the GitHub issue tracker rather than to a public mention.

Open and closed issue counts are not obtainable from this research sandbox, so the traction row reports the highest number reached instead of a ratio.

My read

The story here is not that a free tool undercut a paid one. It is that Structurizr, the incumbent for architecture-diagrams-as-code, shut down its hosted service and left GBP 300 a month with an email-only checkout as the on-ramp — where the meter counts anyone who views a diagram, not just the people making them.

That is not a product losing to a better product. That is a vendor walking away from the easy tier and leaving a hole.

Archify sits in that hole. It did not arrive in response — its first commit is dated 2026-04-15 and it was already at version 2.0 — but a free MIT tool that produces a shareable HTML file is standing exactly where a team that just lost its cloud workspace is standing. Ilograph, meanwhile, is over there charging $18 a month with self-contained HTML export as the upgrade trigger.

I would not read the 54,000 stars as 54,000 people using this. But I would read the issue tracker as real — those Windows path bugs and the self-hosted Git request are what people file when they are actually trying to run something, not when they are browsing. That is the more useful signal, and it is the one I would watch.

Before I trusted it on anything that mattered, though, I would run issue #324 down first. A validation tool that cannot validate its own examples is a specific claim, and it is cheap to check.

Credits

tt-a1i maintains Archify and wrote 170 of its recorded contributions. sunsunsun-java, YunyueLi, NgoQuocViet2001, ClaireXi99, smf-h, yunaremaia, simaba and seekskyworld are credited in the v2.16.0 release notes. Issue reporters cited by title: macawi-ai, jmvassoler, julianwirawan-hash, ronenamr. Hacker News commenter soltanov, quoted in full, and submitter saikatsg.

Figures came from the Archify repository and its README, ungh.cc for counts and releases, a blobless clone for commit history, and the published pricing pages of Ilograph, Eraser, Lucidchart and Structurizr, plus Structurizr's own end-of-life documentation. The Hacker News score and comment came from the Algolia HN API.

God's Eye View — a browser app that puts live public feeds (aircraft transponders, ship AIS beacons, satellite orbital elements, earthquakes, active fires, public cameras, radio) onto one photorealistic 3D globe you can fly, track targets on, and talk to by voice.
Alternative to: no single product does this, and the entry does not manufacture one. The nearest priced things it touches, each doing one slice: Flightradar24 Business at $499.99/year, the only tier its own pricing page labels for commercial use · MarineTraffic Essential at $100/month, which buys satellite AIS coverage for exactly one vessel · Cesium ion Commercial at $149/month for an individual or $524/month for a team · Maltego Professional at EUR 7,500/year, billed per seat, capped at 5 users. These are four different jobs and they do not add up to a bill this replaces — see below.
Cost to run: free for most of it. Flights, satellites, earthquakes, public cameras, radio and launches run with no key and no signup. Ships, fires and traffic flow need free-tier keys. The one line that costs real money is OpenAI realtime voice, which the app meters itself: a live session-spend readout, a $2 warning, and a $5 hard cap that ends the session.
Licence: MIT — free for commercial use. Note that the licence on the code says nothing about the data providers' terms, which apply separately.
Runs on: Windows, macOS and Linux, in the browser, locally.
Requires: Node.js 24.14.0 or later, or 26.x. The project's own setup doctor warns against Node 25 as end-of-life. Pinokio 8.2 or later for the one-click path. Optional keys for Cesium ion, Google Maps, OpenAI, AISStream, NASA FIRMS and TomTom.
Liveness: live, but barely started — 22 of its 24 total commits landed in the last 30 days, last commit 2026-09-05. Publicly released 2026-08-24, 15 days before these figures were taken.
Traction: 19,127 stars · 3,858 forks · 24 commits on main · open/closed issue counts unknown; issue and PR numbering has reached at least #192.
Maturity: v0.1.1, released 2026-09-01, the second of two tags ever. The release is described by its author as a reliability patch for one-click setup and live-data ingestion.
Links: github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view · Hacker News, 2026-08-26 — 12 points, 2 comments.
Figures as of 2026-09-08.

What it does

The premise in the README is the honest one: it looks like a forbidden military cockpit, and every feed behind it is public. Flight transponders, ship beacons, orbital elements, seismographs and public cameras already exist as open data. God's Eye View puts them on the same globe and lets you move between the global picture and one individual aircraft, ship or street corner.

The specifics are what make it more than a map. You can click any contact and the camera locks on and draws a fading trail. You can ride inside a tracked flight with the terrain holding under you. A 250 km "contacts" roster lists everything near your target. A tracked fire or vessel hands you off to the nearest live public camera in one click. You can speak annotations onto the world, reskin the globe through CRT, night-vision, thermal and noir shaders, and serialize your camera, style, layers and current target into a share link.

The project is candid about which layers are real time and which are not. Most feeds are live or regularly refreshed. Traffic is simulated along real roads from aggregate location data. Camera poses and rocket-launch trajectories are described as coarse estimates.

What it replaces, and what that costs

This is where most write-ups of this repo would print a large number, and the number would be fiction.

There is no product that sells "live aircraft plus ships plus satellites plus fires plus public cameras on one talkable globe." What exists is four separate vendors that each sell one slice, at these published prices:

Flightradar24 Business — $499.99/year. Its pricing page labels Free, Silver and Gold as "Personal use" and Business as "Commercial & personal use," so commercial use of Flightradar24 starts here. API access is not included at any subscription tier; that is a separate product starting at $9/month.
MarineTraffic Essential — $100/month. Satellite AIS, which is the only way to see open ocean rather than coastal traffic, covers exactly one vessel at this tier. Enterprise pricing is not published.
Cesium ion Commercial — $149/month for an individual, $524/month for a team. The free Community tier is restricted to personal and non-commercial use; Cesium's own FAQ triggers the paid licence at $50K in company revenue or funds raised, at government projects, or at funded educational research.
Maltego Professional — EUR 7,500/year, billed per seat, "up to 5 users," metered at 20,000 credits a month on the Standard variant. Enterprise pricing is not published.

Do not add those together. Adding them produces a number nobody pays and this tool does not save. Maltego is an investigation platform for link analysis, not a globe. MarineTraffic sells vessel data God's Eye View does not carry; it reads the free AISStream feed instead. Flightradar24 sells a polished consumer product with history and bookmarks that this does not have. And Cesium ion is not an alternative at all — God's Eye View is a customer of it, in the sense that a Cesium ion token is one of the two ways to get photorealistic 3D terrain into the app.

That last point deserves care, because it inverts the usual framing. If you use this commercially and route 3D tiles through Cesium ion, you are inside Cesium's commercial-licence triggers and owe $149/month. The free tool can hand you a paid dependency. The alternative route is a direct Google Maps key. Google's own SKU table prices Photorealistic 3D Tiles at $6.00 per 1,000 requests after a free usage cap of 1,000 a month. The project's README describes the same allowance in sessions rather than requests, saying the first 1,000 sessions each month are free and that one root request supports roughly three hours of rendering. Those are different units and the entry does not convert between them.

So the Quick Facts row says "alternative to" nothing you can buy, because there is no bill anywhere in this entry that stops.

Is it still alive?

Live, and barely out of the gate. The repository was created 2026-06-22, but its early commits are release placeholders — the public open-source release landed 2026-08-24, which is 15 days before these figures were taken. Twenty-four commits exist in total, and 22 of them landed in the last 30 days, the most recent on 2026-09-05. Six people have committed; Bilawal Sidhu accounts for 18 of the 24 across three email addresses.

Two tags exist. v0.1.1 shipped 2026-09-01 and its notes read as a list of things that were broken for new users: Pinokio installs that returned to "Install" instead of "Start," a macOS launch script that crashed under the stock Bash 3.2, and an active-fires layer that dropped data when record counts exceeded a JavaScript engine argument limit.

The commit count is the number to sit with. Nineteen thousand stars against 24 commits is not a maintenance signal, and reading it as one would be wrong in either direction. It is not evidence of abandonment — the public release is two weeks old and moving. It is evidence that the stars did not come from developers evaluating the code.

What people say

Hacker News engaged once and lightly. The one thread that landed is "A spy satellite simulator in the browser, except the data is real", submitted 2026-08-26 by bauerpl — 12 points and two comments, both warm:

"This looks awesome. I am definitely trying this. I might lose more time to this than factorio." — `dismalpedigree`

"This would be impressive work for a mid sized game studio. Free, real, and from a solo dev is incredible." — `yodon`

Algolia returns no score for individual comments, so none is claimed for either. Two further submissions the following days — "God's Eye View: A spy-satellite simulator in the browser" on 2026-08-27 and "God's Eye View" on 2026-08-28 — scored 3 points each with no comments. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed.

The README carries a set of claims this entry has not independently verified: #1 on GitHub Trending daily and weekly in August 2026, #8 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, a two-word compliment attributed to Brendan Eich, and a companion YouTube series with 5M+ views. They are the project's own claims, presented here as such.

The issue tracker is where real users show up, and it says one thing loudly. On 2026-08-25, CrazyMat opened #52, "Feature Request: Simplify deployment for non-developers (Docker & One-Click Cloud Deploy)." The same day, kareemaiman opened #44, "Feature Request: Add Docker & Docker Compose installation/deployment option." Two people, independently, on one day, asking for the same thing.

The OSINT crowd found it too and wants more taps into it. Tom-Neverwinter opened #57 requesting a local RTL-SDR / dump1090 receiver layer and #56 requesting a Rayhunter cellular IMSI-catcher layer, both on 2026-08-25.

And a cluster of engineering issues arrived from jsawyerdev the same day — #41 "Split security-sensitive middleware out of the 7k-line Vite config," #40 "Reduce oversized production chunks and data assets," #39 "Run allocation performance gates on every supported Node version," #38 "Update remaining high-risk dev transitive dependencies." Those are titles cited as filed, not threads read in full, and they are the closest thing to dissent in the tracker: someone read the build and did not love it.

The catch

There is no Docker image. For a browser app aimed at people who want to look at satellites, the install is a Node version requirement, npm ci, and a setup doctor — or a third-party launcher. Two separate users filed for Docker on the same day, and as of the last commit neither issue is closed.

The voice feature is the one that bills you. Realtime audio runs a few cents per active minute, and the project's own README puts an evening of heavy use in single-digit dollars. To its credit the app meters this rather than letting it run: a spend readout beside the microphone, a model toggle, a $2 warning and a $5 hard cap that ends the session. That is unusually honest design, and it is still a metered API on your card.

The free path to photorealistic 3D runs through a Cesium ion Community account, which is licensed for personal and non-commercial use only. Commercial users need the $149/month tier or a metered Google key. This is the sharpest edge in the whole entry, because it is easy to demo the free thing and then be outside the licence the moment you use it for work.

Data accuracy is stated by the project rather than discovered here: traffic is simulated, and camera poses and launch trajectories are coarse estimates. Anyone treating this as an intelligence product rather than an exploration toy should read that line first.

My read

Nineteen thousand stars on 24 commits tells you exactly what happened here, and it is not what a star count usually means.

This repo did not get discovered by developers reading the code. It got pointed at by an audience that already existed — the README is upfront that it comes out of a viral video series — and those people clicked the star because the demo looks like something out of a Bourne film. Which it does. That is a real achievement and I am not knocking it.

But it changes what the number means. Two different people filed Docker requests on the same day because the audience that arrived cannot deploy a Node app, and the repo was not built for them yet. The stars are an audience metric wearing a developer metric's clothes.

The thing worth watching is whether commit 25 through commit 100 ever arrive. Right now this is a companion artifact to a video series first, and software second. If a Docker image ships and those issues close, that flips. If the commits stop at 24, the stars were the whole story.

Credits

Bilawal Sidhu (bilawalsidhu, X: @bilawalsidhu) built God's Eye View and wrote 18 of its 24 commits. Ethan Stoner (ethanstoner) contributed two. Issue reporters cited by title: CrazyMat, kareemaiman, Tom-Neverwinter, jsawyerdev. Hacker News submitter bauerpl and commenters dismalpedigree and yodon, quoted verbatim.

Figures came from the God's Eye View repository and its README, ungh.cc for counts, a blobless clone for commit history, and the published pricing pages of Flightradar24, MarineTraffic, Cesium, Google Maps Platform and Maltego. The Hacker News submission scores came from the Algolia HN API.

awesome-gpt-image-2 — a library of 544 structured prompt "cases" and 20+ templates for OpenAI's GPT-Image-2, organised as reusable, composable blocks rather than prose.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy. Today you type prompts yourself and iterate. The paid comparisons all fail an honesty test — PromptBase Select is $19/mo for ten prompts, so matching 544 cases would take 4.5 years and about $1,026, and nobody makes that trade. On Gumroad, a 165,000-prompt bundle currently sells for $0.00. The category has no price floor.
Cost to run: the library is free. The images are not: GPT-Image-2 at 1024x1024 costs $0.006 low, $0.053 medium, $0.211 high per image via the API, or a ChatGPT Plus subscription at $20/mo, for which OpenAI publishes no image quota.
Licence: MIT for the repository. The prompt cases are a separate question — see The catch.
Runs on: anything. It is markdown and images.
Requires: access to GPT-Image-2, via the API or a ChatGPT plan.
Traction: 25,853 stars · 2,541 forks · 167 commits · 5 committers in the last year.
Liveness: live for what it is — 13 commits in 30 days, last commit 2026-08-28 adding cases 539 to 544. Commit frequency is the wrong yardstick here; this is a reference library, not software with dependencies to bump.
Maturity: no versioning beyond style-library tags. 544 cases and counting.
Links: repo · gpt-image2.canghe.ai · Trendshift 28623
Figures as of 2026-08-31.

What it does

It turns prompt-writing into something closer to configuration. Rather than 544 paragraphs of prose, each case is split into composable parts — subject, lighting, materials, layout, visual details — so that a prompt can be edited by component and reused across a batch. The project calls this "Prompt as Code," and its stated goal is to "compress prose-style prompts into structured protocols" for agents, scripts and automation workflows.

There are 20-plus templates on top of the cases, a gallery split across three markdown files, and README translations in English, Chinese and Japanese.

There is also a companion website that renders the gallery as a browsable product, with large previews, copy-to-clipboard prompts, and filtering by style or scenario.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Nothing you were paying for, and this entry will not invent an incumbent to make the comparison look better.

PromptBase is the closest structural match and it is the wrong comparison. Individual prompts sell there for $2.99 to $9.99, and PromptBase Select is $19/month for "any 10 Select prompts each month." Reaching 544 cases that way is four and a half years and roughly $1,026, or about $2,700 buying à la carte. Nobody does that. Quoting it as "what this replaces" would be exactly the two-true-numbers-one-false-sentence trap this column tries to avoid.

The prompt-pack market has collapsed toward zero anyway. Alongside a $30 pack of 50 prompts on Gumroad sits a "165,000+ Prompts Bundle" at $0.00, and a "500,000+ AI Prompts Mega Bundle" also free. When 165,000 prompts are free, a 544-prompt library has no priced incumbent. That is the finding, not a gap in the research.

Midjourney, Firefly and Canva are the tool, not the library — you still have to write the prompt. For reference: Midjourney Basic $10/mo, Standard $30, Pro $60, Mega $120. Adobe Firefly Standard $9.99/mo for 2,000 generative credits, Pro $19.99 for 4,000. Canva Pro $180/yr.

What it actually compresses is iteration. There is one citable measurement. A controlled study of 20 participants across 10 target images and 10 iterations each — 2,000 prompts total — found that iterations one through six each scored significantly better than the tenth, and that "by iteration 7 and beyond, the effect is no longer statistically significant." Objective gains flatten around six or seven rounds. Starting from a working structured prompt instead of a blank box is a saving measured in generations, not dollars. At OpenAI's medium tier, seven iterations is about $0.37 per finished image; at high quality, about $1.48.

There is one priced product here, and it belongs to the maintainer. The companion site at gpt-image2.canghe.ai is not a free demo. Its public billing endpoint returns live membership tiers of $9, $19 and $49 per month for 700, 1,800 and 5,200 credits, and credit packs at $5, $15 and $39 for 300, 1,000 and 3,000 credits. The free allowance is one image, once — the interface string reads "Free generation used. Buy credits or start a membership to keep generating." There is also a separate one-time ¥9.90 payment for access to a WeChat community group.

What a paid credit buys is fixed in the site's own source: a single `gpt-image-2` call at `quality: 'low'`, `size: '1024x1024'`, not user-selectable, routed through a third-party relay rather than to OpenAI directly. OpenAI's list price for exactly that call is $0.006. The site's tiers work out to $0.0094 to $0.0167 per generation. That is roughly 1.6x to 2.8x OpenAI's own price for its cheapest quality setting. Both numbers are published; the arithmetic is the reader's to do.

For completeness: the membership pages are currently unlinked from the site's navigation and `/pricing` and `/membership` return 404, though the billing API answers and reports Stripe checkout available. The ¥9.90 community purchase is fully reachable.

Is it still alive?

Yes, on the right yardstick. 13 commits in the last 30 days and 41 in 90, with the most recent on 2026-08-28 adding cases 539 through 544. Cases are still being added weekly.

Commit frequency is the wrong measure for this artifact and this entry says so rather than pretending otherwise. A prompt library has no dependencies to bump and no CVEs to patch. The honest liveness question is whether new cases keep arriving, and they do. The comparison point is this column's own entry on the System Design Primer, judged "slow" at 364,000 stars because its last merge was a link fix — an artifact where the content had genuinely stopped moving. This one has not.

The concentration is worth flagging: five committers in the past year, 135 of 167 commits from one account, plus 20 more under the maintainer's Chinese name from the same email address. This is one person's library.

What people say

Very little, and the reason is structural. There are 28 issues in the repository's entire history. It has no meaningful Hacker News presence — searches return only unrelated 1-and-2-point submissions from other projects. Reddit is blocked from this column's research sandbox, so no Reddit vote counts are claimed here.

This is the "thin signal is a finding" case in its purest form: a file people copy is not a project people join. 2,541 forks against 28 issues is the signature of a resource being taken rather than a codebase being contributed to.

The issues that do exist are mostly requests — Bengali language support, a plea to add search and user-uploaded prompt sharing to the site, a marketplace listing notice. The one substantive piece of dissent is issue #3, reporting that case 326 is "明显和提供的提示词不一致" — plainly inconsistent with the prompt provided. A user checked whether a case reproduces and said it did not.

The catch

The MIT licence does not cover the thing you came for, and the repository says so itself. The README states the project "is open source under the MIT License. You can use, modify, distribute, and build on it freely while preserving the license notice." Eleven lines earlier, the disclaimer says something different:

"This repository does not guarantee that third-party content can be used commercially. Please obtain authorization from the original rights holder before commercial use."

Both sentences are in the same file. MIT explicitly grants the right to sell copies; the disclaimer says the maintainer cannot promise the cases are yours to use commercially. The MIT grant covers the repository's own scaffolding. For the 544 prompt cases, a commercial user cannot rely on it.

The provenance is disclosed, and it does not match the badge. The README carries a badge reading `100% Original AI Rewritten` and a headline describing "500+ Reverse-Engineered Cases." The disclaimer names the source: the project "references public prompt-library content from YouMind and OpenNana for learning, summarization, and methodology research. Copyright belongs to the original authors or platforms," and "all prompt cases and generated images in this repository were initially inspired by public community sources, especially YouMind and OpenNana." It offers a takedown path for rights holders. This entry reports what the repository says about itself; how much of each case is transformed rather than copied is not something it verified, and it does not claim to know.

The sponsors are four API relay services, and three carry undisclosed referral codes. APIMart, hiapi and PackyCode links in the README all include `?aff=` parameters; PPToken's does not. No affiliate disclosure appears anywhere in the README in any of its three languages. All four describe themselves as API aggregation or relay platforms for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models.

Readers can weigh the pricing themselves. PPToken's own homepage advertises OpenAI capacity billed at "16% of OpenAI's official price," subscription cards such as ¥789 (about $110) for "$10,000 额度/月" of list-price capacity, an architecture it describes as 多账号负载均衡 — multi-account load balancing — and payment by WeChat Pay, Alipay or USDT. Set against that, OpenAI's Services Agreement §3.1 states "Customer may not resell or lease access to its Account or any End User Account," and §3.3(g) prohibits customers from "buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to, or with a third party." Anthropic's Commercial Terms §D.4 bars using the services "to build a competing product or service... or resell the Services except as expressly approved."

This entry names no company as violating anything. It reports the advertised prices, the advertised architecture, and the vendors' published terms, and leaves the comparison to the reader. One smaller note for accuracy: the README's sponsor blurb claims GPT-Image-2 "from $0.006/image" via APIMart, but that site's own pricing page shows $0.0085, and $0.006 is precisely OpenAI's list price for the same call.

Most of the value is in Chinese. The README is translated three ways, but the community, the WeChat group and much of the surrounding material are not.

It is one person's library, with the same person running the free repository and the paid site.

Credits

Maintained by freestylefly (苍何), Founder at WeSight, based in Wuhan, on X as @canghe — 135 commits under that account and 20 more as 苍何 from the same address. Contributions from canghe (9), 冷雄伟, sscodeai and ImgBotApp.

Source libraries credited by the repository itself: YouMind and OpenNana.

Issue reporters referenced: the filer of issue #3 on case 326, and the requesters on issues #25 and #27.

Prices verified against the live billing endpoints at gpt-image2.canghe.ai, developers.openai.com image-generation and pricing docs, help.openai.com, promptbase.com, the named Gumroad listings, docs.midjourney.com, adobe.com/products/firefly/plans.html, canva.com/pricing, apimart.ai/pricing and pptoken.cc. Iteration study: Trinh et al., "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Prompts?", arXiv:2504.20340. Licence and disclaimer text quoted from the repository's own README and docs/disclaimer.md. Repository figures from a blobless clone and ungh.cc, both read 2026-08-31.

OpenAI Codex — a terminal coding agent from OpenAI. Reads your repo, edits files, runs commands, works in a loop.
Alternative to: Cursor Pro $20/mo, Pro+ $60/mo, Ultra $200/mo, Teams Standard $40/user/mo. GitHub Copilot Pro $10/mo, Pro+ $39/mo, Max $100/mo, Business $19/seat/mo. Claude Code, included in Claude Pro at $20/mo monthly or $17/mo billed annually, and Max from $100/mo.
Cost to run: not free. The client is free; running it needs a ChatGPT plan — Go $8/mo, Plus $20/mo, Pro $100 or $200/mo, Business $20/user/mo annual or $25 monthly — or API credits. There is a genuinely free local path against Ollama or LM Studio, documented by OpenAI, which costs hardware instead.
Licence: Apache-2.0. Free for commercial use.
Runs on: macOS, Linux, Windows. Terminal, VS Code extension, and desktop app.
Requires: an OpenAI account and a paid plan or API credits, unless you point it at a local model.
Traction: 120,183 stars · 18,361 forks · 10,021 commits · 474 committers in the last year.
Liveness: very live — 1,217 commits in 30 days; stable rust-v0.151.0 on 2026-08-29, with alpha prereleases shipping most days.
Maturity: rust-v0.151.0 stable. Alpha tags cut daily.
Links: repo · pricing and rate limits · config docs
Figures as of 2026-08-31.

What it does

It is a coding agent that lives in your terminal. You give it a task, it reads the repository, plans, edits files, runs commands, and iterates. It also ships as a VS Code extension and a desktop app, and the same account works across all three.

It is written largely in Rust, released under Apache-2.0, and developed in the open at a pace that is genuinely unusual: 1,217 commits in the last thirty days from a contributor list 474 people long.

What it replaces, and what that costs

This is the entry's whole point, so it gets stated flatly: "free and open source" describes the client, not the cost of using it.

The competition is priced per month and priced honestly. Cursor is $20 for Pro, $60 for Pro+, $200 for Ultra, $40 per user for Teams Standard. GitHub Copilot is $10 for Pro, $39 for Pro+, $100 for Max, $19 per seat for Business. Claude Code comes with Claude Pro at $20/mo billed monthly or $17/mo billed annually, and with Max from $100/mo.

Codex is on every ChatGPT tier including Free — OpenAI's help centre says "Codex is included across ChatGPT plans, including Free and Go" — but the feature table grades Free and Go as "Limited," Plus as "Yes," and Pro as "Expanded." So the practical price of using Codex seriously is a ChatGPT Plus subscription at $20/mo, the same number Cursor and Claude Pro charge. Annual billing is not offered on Plus or Pro; OpenAI states so directly.

Nobody in this category publishes an absolute usage number, and Codex is no exception. OpenAI does publish per-plan Codex rate limits, which is more than Cursor does — but as ten-times-wide bands. GPT-5.6 Sol on Plus: "10–100" local messages per five-hour window. On Pro 20x: "200–2,000." Cursor expresses its tiers as multiples of an undisclosed base ("3x Pro limits," "20x Pro limits"). Copilot has moved to dollar-denominated AI Credits — $15/mo on Pro, $70 on Pro+, $200 on Max — which is the most legible scheme of the three. Codex Business and Enterprise also run on credits, and OpenAI's rate card does not publish a dollar value per credit. It does say Codex "costs ~$100-$200/developer per month" on average.

On API pricing, two OpenAI pages disagree, and this entry reports both rather than picking. openai.com/api/pricing lists GPT-5.6 Sol at $5.00 in / $30.00 out per MTok; developers.openai.com lists the same model at $2.00 / $10.00. The likely reconciliation is on the developers page itself, which notes GPT-5.6 Sol has "promotional pricing available at least through November 21, 2026" — but OpenAI does not label either page as the promotional one, so both numbers are printed here as found.

The free path is real and OpenAI documents it. Codex accepts arbitrary OpenAI-compatible base URLs, and `ollama` and `lmstudio` are reserved built-in provider IDs, not community workarounds. You can run the whole agent against a local model for nothing. What that costs instead is hardware, and the frontier models the entire rate-limit table is about.

Is it still alive?

This is the least interesting liveness question in the batch, and the answer is yes, overwhelmingly. 1,217 commits in 30 days, 2,977 in 90, 474 committers in the past year, 10,021 commits total since the first one on 2025-04-16. Stable rust-v0.151.0 shipped 2026-08-29; alpha tags rust-v0.152.0-alpha.4 through alpha.6 all landed within 36 hours of this being written.

The issue tracker is past #41,700, and the open issues read like a shipping product's: high RAM usage and PC crashes on launch, Deep Research disappearing on Windows, Android remote voice failing after working on 23 August, deleted conversations stuck in Recents on macOS, VS Code chat blocks losing syntax highlighting.

The more useful liveness question for a vendor repo is not whether the code moves but whether the terms under it hold still. They do not.

GitHub's signed-out "Issue creation is restricted" banner appears here too, on a repo taking dozens of outside issues a day. Disregard it.

What people say

There is no single large Hacker News thread for Codex, which is surprising for a 120,000-star repository and is worth saying rather than padding around. The closest is a February 2026 "Tell HN: OpenAI's Codex CLI is currently free to use" at 6 points, and an ANSI escape-code injection report at 2 points. Reddit is blocked from this column's research sandbox, so no Reddit vote counts are claimed.

What exists instead of discourse is OpenAI's own changelog, and it is more informative than a comment thread would have been. From the ChatGPT release notes, 9 April 2026: "As the temporary Codex promotion on Plus ends, we're rebalancing Plus usage to support more sessions across the week." That is OpenAI, in its own words, confirming it reduced what a $20 subscriber gets. The same entry defines Pro at $100/month with "up to 10x more Codex usage than Plus."

11 June 2026: "Eligible Plus and Pro users now have rate-limit reset banking, including one free reset at launch" — a concession in the other direction.

And today, 31 August 2026, GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 mini stop being available in Codex, per OpenAI's own plan documentation. If you pinned that model, this is the day it stops.

Community threads speculating about exact Codex limits are user testing, not documentation, and one of the most-cited says so itself: "Everything above is based on practical testing and approximation, not on official OpenAI documentation." This entry does not cite those as fact.

The catch

The economics are identical to every competitor. The client is free; the tokens are not. That is true of Codex, and equally true of Cline, Aider, OpenHands and Goose. Open-sourcing the client changes who can audit and fork the harness. It does not change the bill.

Codex is not the only open-source option, and the alternatives are not fringe. Cline is Apache-2.0 with 63,900 stars. Aider is Apache-2.0 with 48,600 stars. OpenHands is MIT with 85,700 stars. Goose is Apache-2.0 with 53,600 stars — and it moved, from Block to the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation, so `block/goose` is no longer the address. All four run against whatever provider you point them at.

Two corrections for anyone comparing: Continue.dev is archived. Its repository banner reads "no longer actively maintained and is read-only for all users," and its 35,700 stars are a vanity number now. And there is an open issue on Goose arguing its Acceptable Use Policy may impose Apache-2.0-incompatible restrictions, so "cleanly open source" deserves a hedge there.

Windsurf has effectively disappeared as a comparable. windsurf.com/pricing now redirects to devin.ai/pricing under Cognition. This entry quotes no Windsurf price, because there is no vendor page left to quote.

The vendor sets the limits and can move them, which it has. This is the structural difference between Codex and everything else in this directory. A self-hosted tool's capabilities are whatever you deployed. Codex's capabilities on your machine are whatever OpenAI's rate limits say this week, and April's release note is the receipt.

The published limits are bands, not numbers. "10–100 messages" is a ten-fold spread. Business gets the same per-window band as Plus at the same or higher price.

Credits

Maintained by OpenAI. The last year's commits are led by jif-oai (1,013), Michael Bolin (695), Eric Traut (568), pakrym-oai (548), jif (524) and Ahmed Ibrahim (518), among 474 committers in total. @OpenAI on X.

Prices and limits verified against learn.chatgpt.com/docs/pricing, help.openai.com articles 11369540, 6950777 and 9793128, chatgpt.com/pricing, the Codex rate card, openai.com/api/pricing, developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing, cursor.com/help/account-and-billing/pricing, docs.github.com Copilot plans, claude.com/pricing and code.claude.com/docs. Limit-change history from OpenAI's own ChatGPT release notes. Competitor licences read from each project's LICENSE file. Repository figures from a blobless clone and ungh.cc, both read 2026-08-31.

FreeLLMAPI — a self-hosted router that stacks the free tiers of 34 LLM providers behind a single OpenAI-compatible `/v1` endpoint, with automatic failover and per-key quota tracking.
Alternative to: OpenRouter, which takes no markup on inference but charges 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum on credit purchases (5% via crypto), and whose own free models are capped at 20 requests/minute and 50/day until you have bought $10 of credit. Also the raw API bills it routes around: OpenAI gpt-5-nano at $0.05/$0.40 per MTok, Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5 per MTok.
Cost to run: the router is free. Its own live catalog is $19/yr or $49 once. Free installs get a monthly snapshot that trails the live feed by 30 days — currently "about 303 models behind," by the project's own count. Plus your own hardware.
Licence: MIT. Free for commercial use.
Runs on: Docker, macOS, Windows, Android. There is a CLI and a desktop app.
Requires: your own API keys, one per provider. Docker for the standard install.
Traction: 22,940 stars · 3,163 forks · 647 commits · 66 committers in the last year.
Liveness: very live — 182 commits in 30 days, v0.9.0 tagged 2026-08-26.
Maturity: v0.9.0, pre-1.0, and the README's Disclaimer opens: "This project is for personal experimentation and learning, not production."
Links: repo · freellmapi.co · Hacker News, 4 points
Figures as of 2026-08-31.

What it does

Every major AI lab publishes a free tier. Individually each one is a toy — a few million tokens a month, a few thousand requests a day. FreeLLMAPI's argument is that stacked together they add up to real capacity, and that the painful part is not the capacity but the plumbing: 34 different SDKs, 34 different rate limits, 34 places a request can fail.

So it collapses them into one endpoint. You add your own keys, locally, encrypted. A router picks an available model per request, fails over when one is rate-limited, and tracks per-key usage so you stay under each cap. Point any OpenAI-compatible client at your local server and it routes underneath.

It also accepts arbitrary custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints, which is how people wire it into coding agents.

The project's own headline number is roughly 7.4 billion tokens per month across 474 model families and 635 free endpoints. Treat that as the project's count of listed free-tier capacity, not an independently verified figure — the README itself hedges it as "roughly" and "listed," and publishes no methodology.

What it replaces, and what that costs

OpenRouter is the honest incumbent, and it is cheaper than people assume. Its FAQ is explicit: "We pass through the pricing of the underlying providers; there is no markup on inference pricing (however we do charge a fee when purchasing credits)." That fee is 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum on card top-ups, 5% on crypto. There is no subscription.

OpenRouter also has free models — and its limits are the thing FreeLLMAPI exists to escape: 20 requests per minute, and 50 requests per day until you have bought at least $10 of credit lifetime, after which it rises to 1,000/day.

Under both sits the actual price of tokens. OpenAI's cheapest current model runs $0.05 in / $0.40 out per million tokens. Anthropic's Haiku 4.5 is $1 / $5. Google's Gemini Flash tiers have a genuine free column on the pricing table.

So what does FreeLLMAPI save? For a hobbyist prototyping against small models, the honest answer is a few dollars a month, and a lot of plumbing. The plumbing is the real product. Anyone whose workload would cost hundreds of dollars on paid APIs is, by the project's own Disclaimer, not the intended user.

And it has a price of its own. The router is MIT and, in the project's words, "stays MIT-licensed and fully free, forever." What costs money is the model catalog it depends on: $19/year or $49 once. Free installs pull the same signed catalog from a monthly snapshot, so a model reaches them 30 days after it joins the live feed. The README quantifies today's gap at about 303 models behind.

That is worth stating precisely, in both directions. Nothing is crippled and nothing expires — routing, failover and quota tracking are free forever, and the project says so plainly. But the entire value proposition rests on tracking a landscape the README itself describes as shifting weekly, and the free build tracks it a month late. Open core, with the delay applied to the one thing that decays.

Is it still alive?

Very. 182 commits in the last 30 days and 566 in 90, across 66 committers in the past year. v0.9.0 landed 2026-08-26, v0.8.9 and v0.8.8 the day before, v0.8.7 on 2026-08-24. The last commit was 2026-08-28.

The issue tracker is busy and heavily Chinese-language. Open issues from the last week include a Groq 400 on `reasoning_content` when replaying history after a reasoning-model turn, models being force-classified as chat so multimodal categorisation fails, a request for a QwenPaw setup guide, and — the interesting one — #1065, reporting that the monthly token budget bar counts shared pools once per model and displays 2.37B where the actual figure is 294M. A user checking the project's own headline arithmetic and finding it eight times high in the UI is exactly the kind of open issue worth knowing about before you trust a capacity number.

The star count moved from 22,912 to 22,940 during the hours this record was compiled.

GitHub's signed-out view shows an "Issue creation is restricted" banner here too. It is false — outsiders are filing issues daily.

What people say

Almost nothing, in English, and that is a genuine finding for a 22,940-star repository. Its best Hacker News showing is 4 points and zero comments on 2026-08-15; an earlier submission in May got 2 points and no comments. There is no Trendshift placement. Reddit is blocked from this column's research sandbox, so no Reddit vote counts are claimed.

The community that exists is on the issue tracker and it is largely Chinese-speaking. The most on-point thread for a prospective user is issue #1062, titled 有升级高级版的么？好用么？值不值得？ — "Is there a premium upgrade? Is it any good? Is it worth it?" The question people are actually asking about this project is whether to pay for it.

The most credible voice on the project's risks is the project itself, which is unusual enough to note. Its architecture documentation carries a provider-by-provider terms-of-service review, dated May 2026, that rates Cohere "❌ Avoid" because its terms forbid "personal, family or household purposes," flags Google as "⚠️ Caution" over the March 2026 narrowing to "professional or business purposes, not for consumer use," and closes with a rule of thumb: "one account per provider, no reselling, no sharing your endpoint with other humans, don't hammer a free tier as a paid production backend."

That is more candour about legal exposure than most projects in this category manage.

The catch

Read the Disclaimer, because it is the most honest paragraph in the repository. In full: "This project is for personal experimentation and learning, not production. Free tiers exist so developers can prototype against them; they aren't a stable, supported inference substrate and shouldn't be treated as one. If you build something real on top of FreeLLMAPI, swap in a paid API before you ship. Your relationship with each upstream provider is governed by the terms you accepted when you created your account — those terms still apply when the traffic is proxied through this project, and you're responsible for complying with them."

Now the clause nobody quotes. Groq's Acceptable Use Policy, effective 2025-10-15, prohibits customers from using the services "beyond published parameters, rate limits, or use limitations, including by registering multiple accounts or orchestrating usage between multiple organizations." That is the exact behaviour named and prohibited.

Read carefully, this does not condemn the tool. Running your own single key through your own single-user proxy is not prohibited by Groq, or by OpenAI, or by Google, or by Mistral — this column checked all five providers' actual terms and found no clause banning it. What every one of them prohibits is transferring or selling keys, granting third parties access, and deliberately exceeding published limits. FreeLLMAPI's own "one account per provider" rule is precisely what keeps a careful user on the right side of that line. The tool makes it very easy to cross anyway.

Two things the project's own ToS review gets wrong, and both matter:

• It rates Cerebras "✅ Likely OK." Cerebras no longer has a free tier at all. Its own documentation, asked whether there is a permanently free tier, answers: "No. The Free Trial is time- and credit-bounded: $5 in credits that expire 30 days after they're granted." And the credits require a verified payment method before API access activates.

• It rates Groq "✅ Likely OK" citing only the Services Agreement, without engaging the Acceptable Use Policy clause quoted above.

Google's free tier is paid for with your prompts. Its Gemini API terms are unambiguous: on unpaid services "Google uses the content you submit to the Services and any generated responses to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies," and "human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output." The instruction that follows is Google's own: "Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services." Groq, by contrast, is contractually barred from training on your data.

The quality ceiling is real and the project states it. From the Limitations section: "no frontier models, variable latency, no SLA — and the effective intelligence of the endpoint dips late in the day as top models hit their daily caps, then resets at UTC midnight."

The headline numbers do not reconcile. The homepage says 605 models; the README says 474 model families and 635 endpoints. Both claim 7.4B tokens/month. Nothing in the repository reconciles the two, and open issue #1065 suggests the in-app budget display is separately inflated.

Credits

Maintained by Tashfeen Ahmed, who wrote 443 of the last year's commits. Contributions from suantea (56 across two accounts), OhOkThisIsFine (18), tashdroid (12), Jasnoor Gill (9) and 61 other committers. Premium is sold by Neu Software LLC via Stripe.

Issue reporters referenced: amansingh909 (#1065), Wan7451 (#1062), silvertakana, yangq626, QRBG3376, growster.

Terms and pricing verified against console.groq.com/docs/legal/ai-policy and its services agreement, ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms, developers.google.com/terms, openai.com/policies/services-agreement, inference-docs.cerebras.ai/support/rate-limits, legal.mistral.ai, openrouter.ai/docs/faq and its limits page, developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing, and platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing. Project claims quoted verbatim from the repository's README and docs/architecture.md. Repository figures from a blobless clone and ungh.cc, both read 2026-08-31.

Securo — a self-hosted personal finance manager: accounts, transactions, budgets, goals, net-worth reporting, and optional bank sync, all running on your own hardware in Docker.
Alternative to: YNAB $109/yr ($14.99/mo); Monarch Money Core $99.99/yr, Plus $199.99/yr; Copilot Money $95/yr ($13/mo); Tiller $99/yr; Quicken Simplifi $3.99/mo billed annually for year one, renewing at $6.99/mo.
Cost to run: the software is free. Bank sync is not. In the US, SimpleFIN at $1.50/mo or $15/yr. In Brazil, Pluggy publishes no free individual tier and starts "from R$500." In Europe, Enable Banking publishes no price at all. Plus your own hosting.
Licence: AGPL-3.0. Free for commercial use, but network use triggers the source-sharing obligation.
Runs on: anything with Docker or Podman — Linux, macOS, Windows.
Requires: Docker. A bank-sync provider account if you want automatic imports.
Traction: 2,728 stars · 347 forks · 391 commits · 60 committers in the last year.
Liveness: very live — 103 commits in 30 days, v0.14.5 tagged 2026-08-27.
Maturity: v0.14.5, pre-1.0. Git tags exist but no GitHub Releases have been published — distribution is the container image.
Links: repo · usesecuro.com · live demo · Discord
Figures as of 2026-08-31.

What it does

It tracks money you already have records of. Multiple accounts with running balances, transactions with search and filters and CSV export, file import from OFX, QIF, CAMT and CSV, a rules engine that auto-categorises, recurring transactions, budgets, savings goals, and asset tracking with valuation. Reports cover net worth and income versus expenses.

It is multi-currency with automatic FX conversion, multi-user with an admin panel, and supports TOTP two-factor and OIDC login through providers like Authentik.

Optional bank sync pulls transactions automatically through one of three aggregators: SimpleFIN for the US and some international banks, Pluggy for Brazilian banks, and Enable Banking for roughly 2,500 European PSD2 banks. There is also an optional self-hosted LLM chat feature with tool access over your own data.

Install is one command against Docker, then localhost:3000.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The paid category is crowded and the prices are real. Verified from each vendor's own pricing page:

• YNAB — $109/yr, or $14.99/mo. 34-day free trial, no card. Free for a year for students with proof of enrolment. No intro-versus-renewal gap; the headline price is the renewal price.

• Monarch Money — $99.99/yr Core, or $14.99/mo. Plus is $199.99/yr, annual only. Household members are included at no per-seat charge. There is a 30%-off-first-year code, so year two costs more than year one.

• Copilot Money — $95/yr, or $13/mo. No intro gap.

• Tiller — $99/yr, 30-day trial. No monthly option published.

• Quicken Simplifi — $3.99/mo billed annually for the first year, then $6.99/mo. That is a 75% renewal increase, disclosed in Quicken's own offer text.

One arithmetic warning, because it matters for anyone checking this: do not multiply Quicken's monthly figure by twelve. Quicken explicitly disclaims that operation — "The final price may differ from the monthly discounted price multiplied by 12 months" — and its real annual totals sit behind an account-gated cart. This entry does not print a Quicken annual figure, because Quicken does not publish one.

Empower is free and belongs in a different bucket. Its dashboard costs nothing; it monetises by upselling advisory at 0.89% of assets under management on the first $1M, with a $100,000 minimum. Free to use, not free of interest.

Now the part most write-ups skip. Securo's licence is free. Running it is not.

If you want your transactions to arrive automatically rather than importing OFX files by hand, you need an aggregator, and the honest US number is SimpleFIN at $15/yr. That is the whole cost-to-run story for a US self-hoster, plus whatever the box costs. Against YNAB's $109/yr, the delta is $94/yr — a real number, but not $109, and anyone who tells you the free tool is free is skipping the line item.

Outside the US it gets worse, not better. Pluggy has no published permanent free individual tier — a two-week trial, then "from R$500," with the billing period not stated on the page. Enable Banking publishes no price whatsoever: pricing is "volume based," quoted through sales, with a monthly invoicing minimum. A third-party tracker describes a free "Restricted Production" tier that would cover exactly the self-hoster case, but Enable Banking's own site never names or confirms it, so this entry does not claim it.

And the reason all three of these exist is instructive: Plaid will not quote a price without a sales process. Its own billing documentation says "A price list is not available in the documentation. To view pricing, apply for Production access." Securo does not support Plaid.

Is it still alive?

Very. 103 commits in the last 30 days, 228 in 90, across 60 committers in the past year. v0.14.5 was tagged 2026-08-27, four days before this was written. CI runs, coverage is published, there is a Helm chart and an Artifact Hub listing.

The issue tracker is answering real users about real banks — open issues from 19 and 20 August cover mBank credit cards displaying available credit as used credit, high-precision decimal handling for crypto quantities, currency-conversion precision, Vietnamese Dong support, and a request for Mobills migration. That is the issue mix of a project people have actually pointed at their own money.

Two honest flags. Distribution is container-only in practice: git tags exist through v0.14.5, but no GitHub Releases have been published, so there is no release page, no changelog artifact and no downloadable installer to verify. What you install is the image. And this is pre-1.0 software holding your financial records — a combination that deserves a backup routine regardless of how healthy the commit graph looks.

GitHub's signed-out view shows an "Issue creation is restricted" banner on this repo. It is false — outside accounts are filing issues weekly. Disregard it.

What people say

Very little, publicly, and that is itself the finding. Securo has no Hacker News thread — a search of the HN index returns nothing for the project. It has no Trendshift placement. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox used for this column, so no Reddit vote counts are claimed here.

What exists instead is a Discord and an issue tracker, and both are busy. The community for this project is a support channel, not a discussion forum, which is what you would expect for software whose users are quietly reconciling their own bank statements rather than arguing about architecture.

The absence is worth stating plainly rather than padding around: at 2,728 stars this is the smallest project in this batch by a wide margin, and it has not had its moment of public attention yet.

The catch

The free alternative to the paid tools may already be a different free tool. Actual Budget is MIT-licensed, actively maintained, has 27,200 stars, and syncs through the same SimpleFIN at the same $15/yr. Firefly III is AGPLv3 and shipped v6.6.6 on 2026-07-01. A reader shopping for "not YNAB" has more than one free answer, and Securo has to win on features rather than on being the only option.

Avoid Maybe Finance, which still surfaces in search results with 54,300 stars. It was archived by its owner on 2025-07-27 and its README says it is no longer actively maintained. The live successor is Sure, a community fork, AGPLv3.

AGPL-3.0 is the strictest licence in this batch. Personal use is unaffected. But if you run a modified Securo as a network service for anyone else, the licence obliges you to release your modifications.

Bank sync coverage is uneven by geography. Excellent in Brazil and Europe if you can pay for it, workable in the US for $15/yr, and manual OFX import everywhere else.

It is version 0.14.5. The demo is public and works, the CI is green, and the maintainer publishes a calendar link — but this is early software, and the data it holds is the kind you cannot casually reconstruct.

Credits

Maintained by Tássio Noronha, who wrote 213 of the last year's commits. Contributions from Danny Feliz (15), Geovane Pereira (13), Romulo Gatto (11), Leonardo Dias (11) and 55 other committers.

Bug reports quoted or referenced from METZGERRR, lethanhviet, uneaser, szddawe and felipe-cordeiro-cpb.

Prices verified against ynab.com/pricing, monarch.com/pricing, copilot.money, tiller.com/pricing, quicken.com/compare, empower.com and its published fee schedule, beta-bridge.simplefin.org, pluggy.ai/en/pricing, enablebanking.com/docs/faq and plaid.com/docs/account/billing. Competitor licence and status checks against the actualbudget, firefly-iii, maybe-finance and we-promise/sure repositories. Repository figures from a blobless clone and ungh.cc, both read 2026-08-31.

OpenLogi — a native, local-first desktop app that configures Logitech mice, keyboards and Litra lights directly over HID++, with no account and no background service.
Alternative to: Logi Options+, which is $0. There is no paid Logitech tier for this. The nearest paid equivalents are third-party: BetterMouse $7.99 one-time, BetterTouchTool $15 (2-year updates) or $25 lifetime, SteerMouse $19.99, USB Overdrive $20, GlowWorm Lighting $7.99 for the Litra lights.
Cost to run: free.
Licence: dual Apache-2.0 OR MIT. Free for commercial use.
Runs on: macOS, Linux, Windows.
Requires: nothing to install alongside it. On macOS it needs Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions.
Traction: 17,938 stars · 523 forks · 1,173 commits · 68 committers in the last year.
Liveness: very live — 542 commits in 30 days and v0.8.3 shipped 2026-08-30, one day before this was written.
Maturity: v0.8.3. The README's own first line: "OpenLogi is under active development and not yet stable — features and config may still change."
Links: repo · openlogi.org · Hacker News, 1,635 points · Trendshift 42303
Figures as of 2026-08-31.

What it does

It talks to Logitech peripherals over HID++, the protocol Logitech's own software uses, and exposes the settings that protocol carries: button remapping, DPI presets, SmartShift wheel behaviour, per-direction gestures on any capable button, battery state, and power and colour temperature on Litra lights. Configuration is a single TOML file. There is a CLI as well as a GUI.

Per-application profiles switch on app focus. That works on macOS and Windows, and on Linux only under X11 or XWayland.

It is written in Rust and ships as a native binary. No Electron, no login, no background telemetry service.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Nothing, in dollars. This is the honest answer and the entry will not manufacture a better one.

Logi Options+ is free. Logitech's own FAQ calls it "a free customization app for your Logitech devices." Logitech publishes exactly two consumer applications, Options+ and G HUB, and both are free downloads. Every predecessor — Options, SetPoint, Logitech Control Center, the Unifying Software — is discontinued and points users at Options+. There is no paid tier to price against. Logitech Sync does have one, at $199 per room per year, but Sync is video-conferencing room management and citing it here would be dishonest.

So what does the reader pay today? Zero dollars and four conditions:

• A Logi ID for the headline feature. Logitech's documentation: "You will have to be logged in to your Options+ account to use Smart Actions," and "logging out will disable Smart Actions." Cloud settings backup also requires an account.

• Consent-gated analytics, plus telemetry that is not consent-gated. Options+ has a "Share diagnostic and usage data" toggle covering button and key customisations and device settings. Separately, and unconditionally, Logitech's privacy policy states its servers "automatically record certain information, including the IP address, the software version, and the connected devices."

• Accessibility, Input Monitoring, and for some features Screen Recording grants on macOS.

• Memory. Cult of Mac, 2026-08-16: "On average, I have seen it using between 400MB and 500MB of memory on my Mac." Logitech has acknowledged the general shape of this itself — a 2023 Options+ release note fixed "high CPU usage during shutdown of Options+ backend on some systems."

If a reader has already refused Options+ and pays for a replacement, the real numbers are small and one-time. BetterMouse is $7.99, perpetual, five activations, and is the closest like-for-like on macOS; its own limitation is that it does not replicate Logitech Flow or Smart Actions. BetterTouchTool is $15 for two years of updates or $25 lifetime. SteerMouse is $19.99, perpetual, but does not support the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad. USB Overdrive is $20 and is nagware rather than crippleware — the unregistered version has no feature or time limits. Add GlowWorm at $7.99 for the Litra lights and a full paid macOS stack lands somewhere around $16 to $28, once.

On Windows there is effectively no paid market at all. X-Mouse Button Control is free, and its licence text says so aggressively: "If you have paid for this software, please request a refund from the person or organization that you paid!"

This is an avoided cost of about twenty dollars, once, for a Mac user who was going to buy BetterMouse. For everyone else it is not a saving of any kind, because they were not paying anything. What changes is the account, the telemetry and the memory, not the bill.

Is it still alive?

Very. 542 commits in the last 30 days and 1,000 in the last 90, across 68 committers in the past year. The last commit landed on 2026-08-31, the morning this was written. v0.8.3 was tagged 2026-08-30, v0.8.2 the same day, v0.8.1 on 2026-08-26 — a release cadence measured in days.

The issue tracker is being used by outsiders, daily, with real triage labels. Issues filed on 2026-08-29 and 2026-08-30 alone cover a G102 mouse, fractional wheel deltas dropped on macOS, scroll stutter on non-HiRes mice like the Lift, Homebrew installs failing to get Input Monitoring permission, and Windows Dynamic Lighting claiming the G-logo LED. That is what a live tracker looks like.

One caveat on the traction figure: the star count moved from 17,930 to 17,938 during the twenty minutes this record was being compiled. Treat the number as a snapshot of a curve, not a level.

A note on sources: GitHub's signed-out view of this repo shows an "Issue creation is restricted" banner. It is a logged-out artefact and it is false — outside accounts are demonstrably filing issues every day. This column has now caught that banner lying twice.

What people say

OpenLogi reached the Hacker News front page on 2026-08-19 with 1,635 points and 413 comments, submitted by a third party, not the maintainer. That is a very large thread, and the top of it is not praise.

The dominant argument is about the project's landing-page copy. demibabs opened it: "Cool project, but I hate how every new site has this obviously LLM generated copy :( I feel like most people who use it for their copy don't realize how obvious it is." That subthread runs for dozens of replies.

The most damaging comment for a prospective user is breznev's, because it is about the software rather than the prose: "Oh it's not just the site—the app is obviously LLM generated too and feels like it. I gave up and went back to Mos within 20 minutes."

There is substantive defence too. thiht: "I'm interested in this tool because Logi Options+ sucks, and it clears out every question I have for a replacement. I know what features it offers, what devices it's compatible with, what it looks like." And jdboyd, who separates the two claims: "While it does look extremely likely that AI is used for the copy writing, and probably for some of the code maintenance, I'm not convinced that this is being vibe coded."

Linux users mostly shrugged. JeremyNT: "I came here looking for a reference to Solaar, which is what I currently use. AFAICT there's no reason to switch to OpenLogi for Linux users."

And the thread surfaced a fact worth more than any of the opinions — armadyl pointed out that Logitech does publish an offline build of Options+ for air-gapped systems, and gohanlon maintains a Homebrew tap that tracks it. aobdev then supplied the limit that makes it matter: onboard memory storage "only works with 'G' brand gaming devices. Their entire MX line does not allow you to store customizations in onboard memory."

Hacker News comment scores are not exposed by the API this column uses, so no vote count is claimed for any individual comment above; the 1,635-point figure is the story score, which is published. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no Reddit vote counts are claimed either.

The catch

It fights with the software it replaces. The project documents this itself: quit Logi Options+ before launching, because "the two fight over HID++ access, and only one app can own a receiver at a time. On Linux, the same applies to Solaar." You cannot run both.

It is pre-1.0 and says so. Version 0.8.3, with the README warning that features and config may still change.

Linux is a first-class platform with an asterisk. Per-application profile overlays work on X11 and XWayland only. Wayland users get less.

On Linux there is already Solaar, which several Hacker News commenters use and see no reason to leave.

The LLM-copy criticism is unresolved, and it is not nothing. The most common inference in that thread — that generated prose implies generated code — is contested and unproven either way. But this is software that takes Input Monitoring permission on your machine, which is the permission that sees your keystrokes. Commenters raised that directly. The counterweight is that the code is Apache-2.0 and MIT, in Rust, on a repository with 68 committers in the last year and an issue tracker that answers people.

Credits

Maintained by AprilNEA (@AprilNEA), with 814 of the last year's commits. Substantial contributions from Xuan Zhang (109), David Budnick (53), Marton Cserbak (25) and Tagawa (8), plus 63 other committers.

The Hacker News thread was submitted by amatheus. Comments quoted from demibabs, breznev, thiht, jdboyd, JeremyNT, armadyl, aobdev and gohanlon.

Prices verified against Logitech's own FAQ, software index and privacy policy; better-mouse.com; folivora.ai/buy; plentycom.jp; usboverdrive.com; highrez.co.uk; and the GlowWorm Lighting App Store listing. Memory figure from Cult of Mac, 2026-08-16. Repository figures from a blobless clone and ungh.cc, both read 2026-08-31.

Every row below is one open-source project, the expensive thing it stands opposite with a real price attached, and a liveness verdict with evidence behind it. Star counts and licences are on a hundred auto-generated repo sites. The priced comparison and the liveness check are the parts nobody else does.

The index below is alphabetical. The priced rows under it are grouped by the category of thing being replaced, because that is the shape of the question people actually ask. Figures are dated, because figures age.

Every entry, A to Z

Thirty-four entries so far. Each name goes straight to its record.

AI Job Search · Archify · Authentik · Awesome GPT Image 2 · better-documents · Blackbird · browser-use · CleanYourTV · cmux · FreeLLMAPI · God's Eye View · go-whatsapp-web-multidevice · Hypit · Kubescape · MailCheap · Material UI · Open Executive · OpenAI Codex · OpenCode · OpenLogi · OpenMontage · OpenScreen · OpenSEO · OpenShorts · Planka · Presenton · REA · RustDesk · Scrapling · Securo · SlopMonster · System Design Primer · VeraCrypt · VoiceStudio

Identity and access

The open-source alternative to Okta Workforce Identity Starter.

Authentik — self-hosted single sign-on. SAML, OAuth2/OIDC, LDAP, RADIUS, SCIM.
Alternative to: Okta Workforce Identity Starter, $6/user/month billed annually, with a $1,500 annual contract minimum — so a five-person team pays $1,500 either way. Microsoft Entra ID P1, $7/user/month.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — commit 2026-08-17 · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Cloud and Kubernetes security

The open-source alternative to Wiz Essential.

Kubescape — scans clusters, manifests and images against CIS, NSA-CISA and MITRE ATT&CK, then watches runtime.
Alternative to: Wiz Essential at $24,000/year per 100 cloud workloads, the base tier exposed on AWS Marketplace. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security at $0.028 per vCPU per hour. Prisma Cloud, Aqua and Sysdig publish no price at all.
Licence: Apache-2.0 · Liveness: very live — commit 2026-08-17, CNCF Incubating · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Disk encryption

The open-source alternative to Symantec Endpoint Encryption.

VeraCrypt — full-disk and container encryption with no key held by anyone else.
Alternative to: Symantec Endpoint Encryption at $41.24/device/year; ESET Full Disk Encryption at $33.80/seat/year at 1-10 seats; Sophos Central Device Encryption at $24.57/seat/year retail. BitLocker is free only on Windows Pro — Pro lists at $199.99. FileVault is free on every Mac.
Licence: Apache-2.0 + TrueCrypt 3.0 · Liveness: live, with a caveat — 54 weeks between the last two stable releases, and one person wrote 76% of the last year's commits · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Project management

The open-source alternative to Trello Premium.

Planka — self-hosted kanban boards.
Alternative to: Trello Premium at $10/user/month billed annually — $1,200/year for a team of ten. Asana Starter $10.99/user/month. Monday.com bills in blocks of three seats minimum.
Licence: not OSI open source — PLANKA Fair Use License, free inside your own organisation, forbidden for reselling access · Liveness: live — security release 2026-08-10 · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Messaging APIs

The open-source alternative to Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform.

go-whatsapp-web-multidevice — a REST and MCP server over WhatsApp, self-hosted.
Alternative to: Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform at $0.004 per utility message in the US, plus a provider on top: Twilio adds $0.005/message, Wati Growth is $59/month annually with a three-user cap, 360dialog is €49 per number per month. At 5,000 utility messages a month that is $45-79 versus $5-20 self-hosted.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — v9.1.0 on 2026-08-15. Read the entry before you run it: this violates WhatsApp's Terms of Service and numbers get banned. · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Front-end components

The open-source alternative to Telerik KendoReact.

Material UI — a React component library, 8.7 million npm downloads a week.
Alternative to: Telerik KendoReact at $649-$1,199 per developer per year; Tailwind Plus at $299 personal or $979 team, one-time. The closer comparison is MUI's own line: MUI X Pro $299/developer/year, Premium $599.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — commit 2026-08-17, 1,377 open issues against 19,130 closed · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Interview preparation

The open-source alternative to Educative Premium.

System Design Primer — a free guide to system design and the system design interview.
Alternative to: Educative Premium $199/year, ByteByteGo $189/year, Design Gurus $149.20/year. It does not replace interviewing.io mock sessions at $225 each — nothing in the repo tells you your answer was wrong.
Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Liveness: slow — nothing merged since 2026-03-19, and 332 open pull requests, the oldest from April 2017 · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

Agent skills

Replaces a default, not a product.

better-documents — a SKILL.md file that applies five review passes to any business document Claude writes or reviews.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy. It replaces a default, not a product. The nearest paid market is AI deck generation — Beautiful.ai Pro at $14.50/month billed annually, Team at $40/user/month — but that sells generation, and this sells judgement.
Licence: GPL-3.0 · Liveness: slow — content unchanged since 2026-05-28; the only commit since added the licence. For a one-file prompt artifact that reads differently than it would for software · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

OSINT

The open-source alternative to Maltego Professional.

Blackbird — checks 716 sites for a username. Listed as an autopsy, not a recommendation.
Alternative to: Maltego Professional at €7,500 per seat per year. Spokeo at $19.95/month after a $0.95 trial, with "all sales are final" in its own payment policy.
Licence: none — there is no LICENSE file · Liveness: stalled — no commit since 2025-07-13, no release ever tagged, and the issues that close are closed by a bot · Figures as of 2026-08-18.

God's Eye View — live aircraft, ships, satellites, earthquakes, fires and public cameras on one photorealistic 3D globe you can fly, track targets on, and talk to.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy. No single product sells this. The nearest priced neighbours each do one slice: Flightradar24 Business at $499.99/year, the only tier its own pricing page licenses for commercial use; MarineTraffic Essential at $100/month, which buys satellite AIS for exactly one vessel; Maltego Professional at €7,500 per seat per year. Those are four different jobs and this row does not add them up.
Not free to run: most layers need no key and no signup. The one metered line is OpenAI realtime voice, which the app caps itself at $5 a session. Commercial use routed through Cesium ion triggers their $149/month licence, so the free tool can hand you a paid dependency.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: live, but barely started — 22 of its 24 total commits landed in the last 30 days; public release 2026-08-24 · Figures as of 2026-09-08.

SEO and keyword research

The open-source alternative to Ahrefs Lite.

OpenSEO — self-hosted SEO suite: keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks, site audits and AI visibility, plus an MCP server so a coding agent can query it directly.
Alternative to: Semrush's SEO plan at $139.95/month billed monthly, $117.33/month billed annually, covering 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily, with a second seat at $45/month on top. Ahrefs Lite at $129/month for one user, 1,000 credits and 750 tracked keywords. Moz Pro Starter at $49/month for a single website.
Not free to run: you bring your own DataForSEO key. Minimum top-up $50, no expiry, no monthly floor, drawn down only when a request returns a result. Google SERPs cost $0.60 per 1,000 top-10 results on the standard queue. The hosted option is $10/month and adds 28% to every DataForSEO call, which the project states in its own README. These figures do not subtract from the subscriptions above: DataForSEO's backlink index is not Ahrefs' index.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 82 commits in the last 30 days, 19 authors in the last year, v0.1.7 on 2026-09-02 · Figures as of 2026-09-08.

Fractional executives

The open-source alternative to hiring a fractional executive.

Open Executive — one executive persona backed by eight specialist Claude agents, over a 96-file knowledge base, reachable from Slack, Discord, Telegram, email or the web.
Alternative to: one fractional executive seat. Go Fractional’s published 2026 CFO benchmark: average $176/hour, typical scope 23 hours a week, starting retainer from $11,500/month — for one function, not eight. The licence is free; the compute is not, and no per-turn figure is published anywhere.
Licence: Apache-2.0 · Liveness: slow — last commit touching code 2026-06-30, no tags and no releases · Figures as of 2026-08-27.

Remote desktop

The open-source alternative to TeamViewer Premium.

RustDesk — remote desktop access you can point at your own relay server instead of somebody else’s cloud.
Alternative to: TeamViewer Premium at US$120.90/month billed yearly — $1,450.80/year, and that buys 15 licensed users but only one concurrent connection.
Licence: AGPL-3.0 · Liveness: very live — 91 commits in 30 days, last commit 2026-08-27, stable 1.4.9 on 2026-07-06 · Figures as of 2026-08-27.

Screen recording

The open-source alternative to Screen Studio.

OpenScreen — GPU-accelerated screen recorder and demo editor. No watermarks, no subscription.
Alternative to: Screen Studio at $9/month billed yearly — $108/year, or $20/month if you pay monthly — and it is macOS only. OpenScreen runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 989 commits in 30 days, v1.10.0 on 2026-08-24 · Figures as of 2026-08-27.

Browser agents

The open-source alternative to Browserbase Startup.

browser-use — lets an AI agent drive a real browser, on your own machine or your own container.
Alternative to: Browserbase Startup at $99/month for 100 concurrent browsers and 500 browser hours. The Developer tier is $20/month, and there is a free tier at 3 concurrent browsers and one browser hour.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 131 commits in 30 days, 0.13.8 on 2026-08-16 · Figures as of 2026-08-27.

Job hunting

The open-source alternative to TopResume.

AI Job Search — a Claude Code framework that reads postings, tailors the CV and cover letter and tracks the applications. Its author used it to get hired in 69 applications.
Alternative to: TopResume, whose own page lists one-time packages at $179, $229, $349 and $599. Those are one-time fees, not a subscription — so this avoids a purchase, not a recurring bill.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 108 commits in 30 days, v1.6.0 on 2026-08-19 · Figures as of 2026-08-27.

Peripheral configuration

Replaces a default, not a product.

OpenLogi — a native, local-first app for Logitech mice, keyboards and Litra lights, over HID++.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy — Logi Options+ is $0, but wants a Logi ID for Smart Actions and runs 400–500MB. The nearest paid like-for-like is BetterMouse at $7.99, once.
Licence: Apache-2.0 or MIT · Liveness: very live — 542 commits in 30 days, v0.8.3 on 2026-08-30 · Figures as of 2026-08-31.

Personal finance

The open-source alternative to YNAB.

Securo — a self-hosted finance manager: accounts, budgets, net worth and optional bank sync, in Docker.
Alternative to: YNAB $109/yr; Monarch Core $99.99/yr; Copilot Money $95/yr; Tiller $99/yr — though the bank sync is not free either, at $15/yr for SimpleFIN in the US.
Licence: AGPL-3.0 · Liveness: very live — 103 commits in 30 days, v0.14.5 on 2026-08-27 · Figures as of 2026-08-31.

LLM API routing

The open-source alternative to OpenRouter.

FreeLLMAPI — stacks the free tiers of 34 providers behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with failover and quota tracking.
Alternative to: OpenRouter, which takes no markup on inference but charges 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum on credit purchases, and caps its own free models at 50 requests a day until you have spent $10.
Licence: MIT — but its live model catalog is $19/yr, and free installs run 30 days behind · Liveness: very live — 182 commits in 30 days, v0.9.0 on 2026-08-26 · Figures as of 2026-08-31.

Coding agents

The open-source alternative to Cursor Pro.

OpenAI Codex — a terminal coding agent that reads your repo, edits files and runs commands.
Alternative to: Cursor Pro $20/mo; GitHub Copilot Pro $10/mo; Claude Code in Claude Pro $20/mo — though Codex itself needs a ChatGPT plan from $8/mo, or API credits.
Licence: Apache-2.0 · Liveness: very live — 1,217 commits in 30 days, rust-v0.151.0 on 2026-08-29 · Figures as of 2026-08-31.

OpenCode — a terminal coding agent that works with 75+ model providers.
Alternative to: Claude Code in Claude Pro, $20/mo or $200/yr; Cursor Premium $30/mo; GitHub Copilot Pro $10/mo. It can’t use a Claude subscription, and the model it calls still bills you.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 1,246 commits in 30 days · Figures as of Oct. 24, 2026.

Prompt libraries

Replaces a default, not a product.

Awesome GPT Image 2 — 544 structured, reusable prompt cases and 20+ templates for GPT-Image-2.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy — a 165,000-prompt bundle sells for $0.00 on Gumroad. The only priced product in the category is the maintainer's own site, at $9 to $49 a month.
Licence: MIT for the scaffolding — the repo's own disclaimer says the prompt cases may not be free for commercial use · Liveness: live — 13 commits in 30 days, cases still landing 2026-08-28 · Figures as of 2026-08-31.

Architecture diagrams

The open-source alternative to Ilograph Pro, and to a cloud service that shut down.

Archify — turns a codebase or a plain description into an interactive architecture, sequence or data-flow diagram, delivered as one self-contained HTML file.
Alternative to: Ilograph Pro at $18/month billed annually, where exporting a self-contained HTML file is itself the paid feature. Eraser Starter at $15/member/month billed annually, metered at 40 AI credits a month. Structurizr, the architecture-diagrams-as-code incumbent, has retired its cloud service entirely; the surviving self-hosted licence is £300/month for 1 to 20 users, billed annually, and counts viewers and embeds as users, not just editors.
Cost to run: free. The rendering and validation are local Node, with no inference bill of its own.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 105 commits in the last 30 days, v2.16.0 on 2026-08-30 · Figures as of 2026-09-08.

Web scraping

The open-source alternative to Bright Data.

Scrapling — a Python scraping framework that fingerprints the elements you scrape, so when a site's layout changes, it can relocate the same data instead of breaking.
Alternative to: Bright Data Web Unlocker Scale at $499/month for 383,000 requests, then $1.30 per 1,000 more. ScraperAPI Hobby at $49/month for 100,000 credits.
Licence: BSD 3-Clause · Liveness: very live — last commit 3 days ago, one maintainer wrote 95% of 1,621 commits · Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

Video clipping

The open-source alternative to Opus Clip.

OpenShorts — turns a long video into short, vertical clips automatically: AI picks the highlight moments, reframes for 9:16, burns in captions, and can dub into 30-plus languages.
Alternative to: Opus Clip Pro at $29/month ($14.50/month billed annually) for 3,600 credits a year and no watermark.
Licence: MIT (self-hosted core) · Liveness: very live — near-daily commits, last push yesterday, one person wrote 89% of 426 commits · Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

AI presentations

The open-source alternative to Gamma.

Presenton — a self-hostable AI presentation generator. Give it a prompt, a document, or your own outline, and it builds a full slide deck, exportable as editable PowerPoint or PDF.
Alternative to: Gamma Plus at $9/seat/month ($108/year billed annually) for 1,000 credits a month and up to 100 slides per prompt.
Licence: Apache-2.0 · Liveness: very live — last commit 3 days ago, near 200 commits a month, a team of three · Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

AI writing checks

Replaces a default, not a product.

SlopMonster — a lint-rewrite-relint loop for AI-written copy. It scores your draft against five "AI tell" categories, hands it to a different model family for a rewrite, and won't stop until it scores clean.
Alternative to: nothing you can buy. The project's own documentation says it will never claim to beat AI detectors; it replaces a writer manually combing a draft for AI tells.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: young and active — 19 days old, pull requests merging within days, one person wrote 86% of 14 commits · Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

AI video production

The open-source alternative to RunwayML.

OpenMontage — a library of skill files that plugs into an existing AI coding agent and walks it through producing a finished video: research, script, storyboard, generated assets, edit, and final composite.
Alternative to: a freelance video editor at roughly $58 an hour average, or RunwayML Standard at $12/month for about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 video.
Licence: AGPLv3 · Liveness: slowing — last push 11 days ago, zero tagged releases, one person wrote 69% of 449 commits · Figures as of Sept. 17, 2026.

Agent terminals

The open-source alternative to Warp.

cmux — a native macOS terminal built on Ghostty, with a vertical sidebar of workspaces for running many AI coding agents in one window.
Alternative to: Warp. Like for like it is $0 against $0, since Warp Free also takes your own AI; Warp's paid tiers are prepaid AI usage, pay as you go from $20/mo. Cursor Pro, an editor rather than a terminal, is $20/mo.
Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later for the app and CLI; server code BUSL-1.1 since Sept. 28, 2026 · Liveness: very live — 6,633 commits in 30 days, last stable release v0.64.25 on Sept. 17 · Figures as of Oct. 1, 2026.

Reverse engineering

The open-source alternative to Binary Ninja Sidekick.

REA — an add-on that lets a coding agent take apart apps, binaries and websites and explain how a feature works.
Alternative to: Binary Ninja Sidekick Basic, $30/mo billed monthly or $24/mo billed annually, inside a Binary Ninja licence (Commercial $1,799 one-time). REA still needs a decompiler underneath; Ghidra is free.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 2,677 commits in 30 days · Figures as of Oct. 16, 2026.

Voice cloning

The open-source alternative to ElevenLabs.

VoiceStudio — a desktop app that clones voices, dubs video and makes audiobooks on your own computer.
Alternative to: ElevenLabs Starter $6/mo (the first tier with a commercial licence); Creator $22/mo.
Licence: AGPL-3.0 for the app; the default voice model’s weights are CC-BY-NC (non-commercial); Pro is a closed build at $99/yr · Liveness: very live — 1,611 commits in 30 days · Figures as of Oct. 24, 2026.

Android TV and Google TV

Replaces a default, not a product.

CleanYourTV — a coding agent switches off ads and bloat on an Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi and installs a small launcher.
Alternative to: the stock sponsored home screen, which Google says can’t be turned off. Nothing to buy; the usual way out is a new box.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 2,227 commits in its first week · Figures as of Oct. 24, 2026.

AI video ads

The source-available alternative to HeyGen.

Hypit — a coding agent rebuilds a sample video’s whole edit and renders variants with your words, voice and product.
Alternative to: HeyGen Creator, $29/mo monthly or $24/mo billed annually.
Licence: source-available, not open source (a modified Apache 2.0; GitHub classifies it as other) · Liveness: slow — no code since 2026-10-14 · Figures as of Oct. 24, 2026.

Newsletters

The open-source alternative to beehiiv.

MailCheap — a self-hosted newsletter app on Amazon SES. You pay per email sent, not per subscriber.
Alternative to: beehiiv Lite at 10,000 subscribers, $139/mo monthly or $119/mo billed annually.
Licence: AGPL-3.0 (MIT until 2026-10-14) · Liveness: very live — one author, synced from a private repo · Figures as of Oct. 24, 2026.

How to read a row

"Alternative to" is not "replaces." A bill only stops if you were already paying it. If you are not currently paying Okta, adopting Authentik does not save $3,600 a year — it means you never start. Both are worth knowing; they are not the same sentence, and this directory keeps them apart.

Liveness is a verdict with evidence, not a vibe. Very live means commits this week. Live means shipping, with the caveat named. Slow means the maintainer is present but the queue is not moving. Stalled and abandoned mean what they say. Every verdict carries the date it was checked, and any row older than 90 days gets re-checked before it is trusted.

Some rows say "nothing you can buy," and they mean it. Most entries here stand opposite a product with a price. A few stand opposite a default — the way something behaves when nobody configured it. Those rows are not a failure to find the incumbent. They are the honest answer, and inventing a competitor to fill the column would make the whole directory less trustworthy.

Free software still costs something. Hosting, a database to back up, an engineer's afternoon, a feature behind the project's own paid tier. Every entry states what does not disappear.

New entries are added here as they ship. If a row looks stale, it probably is — the date on it is the honest answer.