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

Twenty-two entries so far. Each name goes straight to its record.

AI Job Search · Archify · Authentik · Awesome GPT Image 2 · better-documents · Blackbird · browser-use · FreeLLMAPI · God's Eye View · go-whatsapp-web-multidevice · Kubescape · Material UI · Open Executive · OpenAI Codex · OpenLogi · OpenScreen · OpenSEO · Planka · RustDesk · Securo · System Design Primer · VeraCrypt

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.

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.

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.

Open Executive — a self-hosted AI system that acts as a company's executive team: one executive voice backed by eight specialist Claude agents.

Alternative to: one fractional executive seat. Go Fractional's own 2026 CFO benchmark: average $176/hr, 25th percentile $125/hr, 75th percentile $220/hr, typical scope 23 hours a week, starting retainer from $11,500/mo — for ONE function, from listing data rather than a rate card.

Cost to run: $0 licence. Compute is Anthropic API at list — claude-opus-4-7 at $5/$25 per million tokens on four specialists, claude-sonnet-4-6 at $3/$15 on the rest, claude-haiku-4-5 at $1/$5 for routing and a background pass after every reply. Per-turn total unmeasured. A no-key local-model path exists.

Licence: Apache-2.0. Free for commercial use, requires attribution.

Runs on: self-hosted — Linux, macOS, Docker. Fly.io configs ship in the repo.

Requires: Python 3.11+, Node 22+, and either an Anthropic API key or a local OpenAI-compatible server. First boot downloads a ~90 MB embedding model. One API instance only.

Traction: 378 stars · 32 forks · 7 watchers · 16 commits on main · 5 contributor accounts · 1 open / 1 closed issue · 11 open pull requests, every one from dependabot.

Liveness: slow — 888 files landed in one commit on 2026-06-11, and main has taken no commit touching code since 2026-06-30; the only two commits in the last 30 days are README demo-video edits made on 2026-08-26. Last commit 2026-08-26.

Maturity: CHANGELOG declares 0.1.0 dated 2026-06-30 and links to a release tag. The repo has no tags and no releases. SECURITY.md says "Always run the latest `man`."

Links: repo · sentelabs.ai · Hacker News thread, 232 points and 143 comments
Figures as of August 27, 2026.

What it does

You describe your company once — industry, stage, headcount, revenue model, competitors, priorities — and upload whatever documents you have. After that you talk to one advisor.

Behind that advisor sit eight specialists: Strategy, Finance, HR, Legal, Operations, Marketing, Product, and Board Communications. A router decides which ones a question needs and calls them in parallel. Each one pulls context from two places: a built-in library of 96 markdown files running to roughly 99,000 words, and a separate index of your own uploaded documents. Their answers get synthesised into a single reply. You never see the handoff.

Two things sit on top of that. After every response, a cheap background pass extracts decisions and initiatives into a SQLite file, so the next session opens knowing what it told you last month. And a scheduler can fire on its own — surfacing a follow-up before you ask for it.

It talks through a web UI, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Google Chat, email, or a CLI.

What it replaces, and what that costs

The reader this is aimed at has a seat nobody is sitting in. Not a full-time CFO — a founder who needs finance judgment eight hours a month, or marketing judgment, or someone to read a contract before it gets signed.

What they do today is hire a fractional executive.

Go Fractional, a marketplace that places them, publishes its own 2026 rate distribution for fractional CFOs:

• 25th percentile: $125/hr

• Average: $176/hr

• 75th percentile: $220/hr

• Typical engagement scope: 23 hours a week

• Starting retainer: from $11,500/mo

Three limits make that comparison honest. It covers one function, not eight. The distribution is built from live listings and candidate profiles, not from a published rate card. And 23 hours a week is near-full-time fractional — the light advisory arrangement most small companies actually buy costs far less, and Go Fractional publishes no tier for it.

Do not multiply that by eight. Open Executive ships eight specialist roles, but nobody hires eight fractional executives. One seat is the honest unit of comparison.

What the repo costs instead

The licence is free. The compute is not.

Open Executive defaults to three Anthropic models, and the repo names them explicitly. At Anthropic's published list prices:

• `claude-opus-4-7` — $5 in / $25 out per million tokens — pinned to four specialists (Strategy, Finance, Legal, Board) with extended thinking on

• `claude-sonnet-4-6` — $3 in / $15 out — the Executive persona and the remaining four specialists

• `claude-haiku-4-5` — $1 in / $5 out — intent routing, plus the memory-extraction pass that runs after every single reply

The architecture is expensive on purpose. One question fans out to several specialists at once. Four of them sit on the most expensive tier. There is a committee mode that runs draft, then three parallel critiques, then a revision — five model calls for one answer.

What a month actually costs is unverified. The project publishes no figure. Nothing in `docs/` estimates one. Nobody in a 143-comment thread posted a measured number. Prompt caching is built in and the README claims up to 85% cache hits after a few turns, which cuts input cost substantially — but 85% of an unknown is still unknown.

There is one way to run it for nothing. The local-model path takes any OpenAI-compatible server — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp — and works with no Anthropic key at all. Server-side web search, prompt caching and extended thinking are disabled on that path, and the README warns that small models route badly because the whole design leans on tool use.

Is it still alive?

This is where the entry turns.

The repository is substantial. 888 files landed in the first commit on 2026-06-11. 508 Python files. A FastAPI backend, a Next.js 15 frontend, 42 eval scenarios scored by an LLM judge, deployment runbooks, a security policy, a code of conduct.

Then look at the log.

The last commit that touched a `.py`, `.ts` or `.tsx` file was 2026-06-30 — 58 days ago. Between 2026-07-03 and 2026-08-26 the repository received no commits at all, a 54-day silence. The only two commits inside the last 30 days both landed on 2026-08-26, both edit the README, and both add a link to a demo video. Hours later the project was submitted to Hacker News.

Eleven pull requests are open. Every one is from dependabot. The oldest was opened 2026-06-30. Two of them — `nanoid` and `dompurify` — are the kind you merge quickly. Neither has been merged, while SECURITY.md tells you to always run the latest `main`.

The CHANGELOG declares a 0.1.0 release dated 2026-06-30 and links to `releases/tag/v0.1.0`. Checked two ways — a full clone and the releases API — the repository has no tags and no releases. The link goes nowhere.

Two issues have ever been filed. One was closed the day after it was opened, in July, by the contributor who filed it and then wrote the patch himself. The other, opened 2026-08-26, is a stranger asking the maintainers to join his Discord. Discussions are enabled and completely empty.

What does work: the deployed instance is real. `openexec-api-dev.fly.dev/health` returns 200 and the UI redirects to a Google sign-in exactly as documented. Nothing 404s. This is not Cattr, where every download was a dead link.

So: slow, not abandoned. Two months of real work, then two months of quiet, then a README edit and a front-page post. Whether the code resumes is the open question, and the log is the only honest answer available today.

One number was moving while this was being written. Stars went from 357 to 378 in about ninety minutes on the morning of August 27. Treat every count here as a snapshot.

What people say

The Hacker News thread hit 232 points and 143 comments. Almost none of it is about the software. It is a referendum on whether executives are replaceable, and the repo is the prompt.

Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so no vote counts from it are claimed here. Hacker News does not expose per-comment scores through its API, so none are printed. The quotes below link to the individual comments.

The sharpest reading came from someone who actually opened the knowledge files and quoted them back:

"CEO here, thanks just fired all my C suite team... 'Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure' — such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights"
— euio757

On cost, one line got there before anyone else:

"looks like a good way to run up a really large anthropic token bill."
— walrus01

The most useful objection is the cheapest one:

"That said, if you look at what it's actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already."
— janalsncm

And the strongest case for it, which is not about CEOs at all:

"A serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters... Everybody has been talking about 'human-level AI', or 'superhuman-level AI'. This is a different kind of AI — corporate-level AI."
— Animats

One question in the thread never got answered. The submission's framing is that a team was fired to make room for AI and built this in response. A commenter asked which company — "I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it." Nobody said. The submitter, GrumpySciGuy, is on the team, and confirmed the story without naming the employer: "Team was let go. Decided to do a startup."

The catch

The story is the product's marketing, and it was posted by the team. "CEO fired developers, developers built an AI CEO" is a good hook. It is also a submission by a company founder about his own company's repo, with the firing employer unnamed and unverifiable. That does not make it false. It makes it unchecked.

This is a consulting funnel, and the team says so plainly. Sente Labs sells discovery engagements and paid support for deploying its open tools. On Hacker News: "We open sourced this knowing that if people find this useful we can get a support work out of it (similar to the Redhat model)." That is an honest answer to a fair question. It also explains a repo with 888 files, five contributor accounts and no roadmap.

The first commit is signed by an AI. The 888-file initial release is authored by `Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>`. So are both README commits from 2026-08-26, on a branch named `claude/add-demo-video-readme-tkv5o3`. Of five contributor accounts on the repo, one is dependabot and one is Claude.

You cannot scale it. The scheduler claims jobs with `UPDATE ... RETURNING`, so two API machines double-fire every scheduled action. `max_machines_running = 1` is set in the Fly config and the README says not to override it.

The README has drifted. It states that `evals/` contains 29 scenarios. `evals/` contains a runner and two judges; the 42 scenario files live under `packages/core/openexecutive/evals/_scenarios/`. Small, but it is the kind of drift that accumulates when nobody is committing.

"Harvard MBA-level knowledge" is the project's phrase, not a measured claim. What is actually there is 96 markdown files, roughly 99,000 words, written by the team.

Your company profile leaves your machine. Everything under `company/` is gitignored and stays local, but the profile and retrieved document chunks go into prompts sent to whichever API you configure. On the local-model path, they do not.

My read

Nicholas is not going to run the agent stack. His read is that the knowledge base is the asset.

That is defensible. The 96 markdown files are Apache-2.0, free for commercial use with attribution, and they do not need a maintainer, a scheduler, a vector store, or a single Opus call. They are the part of this repo that cannot go stale in a 58-day silence, because a written framework has no dependencies to bump. Lifting them into an existing Claude setup gets the thinking without the operational surface.

The honest accounting: OutSnapped already pays a bookkeeper, an accountant and a fractional CMO. Doing this stops none of those. Those are people doing work, not a subscription with a cancel button, and a markdown library does not do their jobs. Nothing here reduces an invoice. What it adds is a set of frameworks to think with, at zero marginal cost, which is a different and smaller claim than a saving.

If the commit log wakes up, the agent stack is worth a second look. If it survives that, there's a field report in it.

Credits

Built by Sente Labs (sentelabs.ai). Named contributors on the repository: John "Rufus" Johnson (johnrufusone), Alex Cohen (kilrathu), and Dan Maiale (dtmaiale), whose local-model pull request is the only outside code contribution merged to date and the reason the no-API-key path exists.

Voices quoted: euio757, walrus01, janalsncm, Animats, cactusplant7374 and GrumpySciGuy on Hacker News.

Data sources used for this entry: a full `git clone` of the repository for commit, authorship and branch history; the `ungh.cc` GitHub mirror for counts; GitHub's issue and pull request pages; the Hacker News API for thread and comment permalinks; Go Fractional's published 2026 CFO rate benchmark; and Anthropic's published API price list.

go-whatsapp-web-multidevice (GOWA) -- a Go service that logs into WhatsApp the way the web client does and exposes it as a REST API, a webhook receiver, and an MCP server.
Alternative to: Meta's own WhatsApp Business Platform priced per message -- in the US, $0.025 for marketing, $0.004 for utility and authentication, with customer-initiated service messages free. Twilio adds $0.005 per message on top. Wati Growth is $59/month billed annually with a 3-user cap; 360dialog Regular is €49 per number per month.
Cost to run: a $5-10/month VPS, a phone number you can receive a pairing code on, and negligible media storage. Realistically $5-20/month. The cost that never appears on an invoice is the ban risk.
Licence: MIT. Free for commercial use.
Runs on: prebuilt binaries for Linux x86_64 and ARM64, macOS Intel and Apple Silicon, Windows x86_64. Docker image aldinokemal2104/go-whatsapp-web-multidevice.
Requires: a real WhatsApp-capable phone number and a phone to scan the QR or enter the pairing code. FFmpeg and libwebp for media and stickers. Go 1.25.5+ only if you build from source.
Traction: 4,629 stars · ~1,100 forks · 35 contributors · 576 commits on main · 11 open issues.
Liveness: very live -- v9.1.0 shipped 2026-08-15 and the last commit, updating the upstream WhatsApp library, landed 2026-08-16.
Maturity: v9.1.0. The README's own warning, verbatim: "This project is unofficial and not affiliated with WhatsApp. Please use official WhatsApp API to avoid any issues."
Links: repo · Trendshift peak #1 on GitHub Trending, 2025-06-30
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

GOWA runs on your server, logs into WhatsApp using a real phone number, and then lets your code send and receive messages over plain HTTP.

Start it, open the page, scan a QR code with the phone that owns the number, and the session is linked -- the same mechanism as WhatsApp Web, which is why it works without any Meta account, approval process or business verification.

After that it is an API. POST /send/message sends text. There are endpoints for images, audio, documents, video, stickers with automatic WebP conversion, locations, contacts, polls, link previews and message forwarding. It manages groups, posts to Status, and does mass mentions. Incoming messages fire webhooks at whatever URL you give it.

Since v9.1.0 it also serves an MCP endpoint at `/mcp` with five consolidated tools, so an AI agent can send WhatsApp messages directly. There is a Chatwoot integration for two-way sync with message history import.

The whole thing is one Go binary sitting on top of whatsmeow, the unofficial WhatsApp protocol library.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Meta rebuilt WhatsApp Business pricing around per-message billing, and the rate card in effect from 2026-07-01 is published.

Meta WhatsApp Business Platform (Cloud API), United States: marketing $0.025 per message, utility $0.004, authentication $0.004. Customer-initiated service messages inside the 24-hour window are free and unlimited. There is a 72-hour free window from Click-to-WhatsApp ads. India, for contrast: marketing ₹0.8631, utility and authentication ₹0.115.

Nobody sends those messages directly, though. They go through a provider:

• Twilio -- $0.005 per message handling fee on top of Meta's rate, pay-as-you-go, no monthly platform fee.

• Wati -- Growth at $59/month billed annually ($69 monthly), one channel, three users, no additional users allowed. Pro at $119/month billed annually ($149 monthly), five users, $39/user/month beyond that. Meta's fees pass through on top.

• 360dialog -- €49 per number per month on Regular, €99 on Premium, with Meta's fees passed through at no markup.

Worked, for 5,000 utility messages a month in the US:

• Meta's fee alone -- 5,000 × $0.004 = $20/month

• Through Twilio -- 5,000 × ($0.004 + $0.005) = $45/month

• Through 360dialog Regular -- €49 platform + $20 Meta = ~$69/month

• Through Wati Growth -- $59 annualised + ~$20 Meta = ~$79/month, capped at 3 users

GOWA against that: a small VPS at $5-10/month, a number you probably already own, and no per-message fee at all, because you are not on Meta's billing rails. At 5,000 messages a month that is roughly $5-20 versus $45-79.

That gap is real and it is also not the whole invoice. What the paid providers sell is not throughput, it is standing: an approved business account, delivery reporting, a support contact, and a number Meta will not switch off for using an API it published. GOWA replaces the fee. It does not replace the standing, and the section below is why that distinction is the entire entry.

Is it still alive?

Very live, on both floors of the building.

Release v9.1.0 shipped 2026-08-15, three days before these figures were taken. The last commit, 2026-08-16, was "chore: update whatsmeow to latest." Issue #799 was opened 2026-08-17. The maintainer answers personally and in detail -- his 2026-07-25 reply on the ban-risk discussion cites his own line numbers.

The dependency matters as much as the repo. GOWA is a wrapper around `tulir/whatsmeow`, maintained by Tulir Asokan, Beeper's bridge architect, which had commits on 16, 13, 10, 6, 5 and 4 August 2026. A Hacker News commenter notes whatsmeow "is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues." This project is only as alive as that library, and that library is alive.

Trendshift records GOWA hitting #1 on GitHub Trending on 2025-06-30 and #1 Go Repository of the Day on 2025-11-17.

What people say

Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox -- a relevant r/selfhosted thread surfaced in search but could not be opened, so no vote count is claimed for it. The most useful voices here are in the projects' own discussion boards, where the vote counts are visible.

A user reporting an instant restriction on a fresh number, 2025-12-07:

"I've already tried changing my WhatsApp account several times, and it's getting worse--I'll just send one test message through the app and immediately get hit with a restriction/limitation."

-- Fandhiprayoga, 1 vote, discussion #489

Another user in the same thread, with the mitigation that actually seems to matter:

"My observations show that if a new number sends messages to contacts who haven't interacted with you before, the account will almost certainly get restricted immediately... I highly recommend using a number that has been registered and active for a significant amount of time."

-- sonarta, 2 votes, discussion #489

And upstream, on whatsmeow's own board:

"When I sent approximately 5 messages to the number, my WhatsApp was banned. I came to the conclusion that this ban rule is not related to whatsmeow, but applies to the 'possibility' of being considered a spammer"

-- hrizal, whatsmeow discussion #567

The maintainer's own answer, from 2026-07-25, is the most honest thing in this entry:

"There is no limit on this side, and I cannot confirm any number as safe. This project is an unofficial client on top of whatsmeow. A send request goes straight to WhatsApp with no queue, no throttle and no delay... the blocking decision is made entirely on WhatsApp's side and nothing in this repo can influence it... If you need guaranteed volume with an SLA, use the official WhatsApp Cloud API."

-- discussion #667

The catch

It violates WhatsApp's Terms of Service, and the terms say so directly. The Acceptable Use section prohibits users from "directly, indirectly, through automated or other means" accessing or using the services "in impermissible or unauthorized manners," including creating "software or APIs that function substantially the same as our Services and offer them for use by third parties in an unauthorized manner."

Bans are real, documented, and unappealable in practice. WhatsApp publishes a Help Center article on unauthorised automated or bulk messaging, and another on what to do when your number is banned. The maintainer confirms GOWA has no mechanism to reduce this: no queue, no throttle, no delay, and the decision is Meta's alone.

No delivery guarantees and no support. There is no SLA. Meta will not help you with an account you ran through an unofficial client.

Sessions drop. Device unlinking, long inactivity or a protocol change forces a re-pair, which means a human scanning a QR code. That is not a headless operation.

The protocol moves under you. whatsmeow ships near-daily protocol updates precisely because WhatsApp keeps changing, and unofficial clients break without notice when it does.

The practical read, from the reports above: an aged, established number messaging people who already messaged you is a very different risk profile from a fresh number cold-messaging strangers. The second one gets restricted almost immediately. Nothing in the software changes that.

Credits

Aldino Kemal Adi Gumawang (aldinokemal), software engineer in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, who built it and answers his own ban-risk threads with more candour than most vendors manage. No X handle is listed on his profile and none could be verified, so none is cited; he links LinkedIn and Threads. Tulir Asokan and the tulir/whatsmeow project, without which none of this exists. The users Fandhiprayoga, sonarta and hrizal, quoted above, for publishing what happened to their numbers. Pricing verified against Meta's developer pricing page, Twilio, Wati and 360dialog; ToS language from WhatsApp's own terms; peak rank from Trendshift.

Material UI -- a React component library implementing Google's Material Design. Buttons, dialogs, tables, theming, the lot.
Alternative to: Telerik KendoReact at $649-$1,199 per developer per year on subscription, and Tailwind Plus at $299 one-time for a personal licence or $979 for a team of up to 25. The closer comparison is MUI's own paid line: MUI X Pro at $299/developer/year and MUI X Premium at $599/developer/year.
Cost to run: free. No licence fee, no seat count, no application count. The costs that remain are bundle weight, a runtime CSS-in-JS engine, and migration labour.
Licence: MIT. Free for commercial use. The repo's own tagline is "Free forever."
Runs on: React 17, 18 or 19. Next.js App Router and Pages Router via the separate @mui/material-nextjs adapter.
Requires: react, react-dom, and @emotion/react plus @emotion/styled as peer dependencies. Not React Server Component--native: Material UI components are Emotion-based client components and need "use client".
Traction: 98,850 stars · 32,600 forks · 3,130 contributors · 28,541 commits · 1,377 open issues / 19,130 closed · 8,703,878 npm downloads in the week of 9-15 August 2026.
Liveness: very live -- last commit 2026-08-17, patch releases landing every one to two weeks.
Maturity: v9.3.1, released 2026-08-06. Material UI v9.0 shipped 2026-04-08 and skipped v8 entirely to sync major versions with MUI X. In the project's own words: "Material UI moves from v7 straight to v9 (there is no Material UI v8, like there is no v2)."
Links: repo · mui.com · Trendshift peak #1, 2025-11-09
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

Material UI gives a React application a full set of interface components that already look finished. You import a Button or a Dialog or a DataGrid, and it arrives styled, accessible, themed and responsive, following Google's Material Design rules.

The value is not that it draws a button. It is that somebody already argued about focus rings, keyboard navigation, right-to-left layouts, dark mode, and what a date picker does on a phone -- and shipped the answer. A team adopting it skips a design system it would otherwise have to build and maintain.

It is also, by download volume, one of the most-used front-end packages in existence: 8.7 million downloads in a single week, and 41.4 million over the trailing thirty days.

The styling engine underneath is Emotion, which generates CSS at runtime. That single fact drives most of the criticism in this entry.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Two different comparisons matter here, and conflating them would be dishonest.

The first is commercial component libraries -- the things a team buys instead of adopting an open-source one.

• Telerik KendoReact -- $649 to $1,199 per developer per year depending on discount tier. The broader multi-framework Kendo UI bundle runs $799 to $1,299 per developer per year.

• Tailwind Plus, formerly Tailwind UI -- a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Personal licence $299; Team licence, up to 25 people, $979. Lifetime access, future updates included.

• Syncfusion Essential Studio -- per developer, quote-based rather than a published flat number.

Against those, Material UI Core costs nothing. For a five-developer team over one year:

• KendoReact at the top tier -- 5 × $1,199 = $5,995

• KendoReact at the entry tier -- 5 × $649 = $3,245

• Tailwind Plus Team -- $979 once, covering up to 25

• Material UI Core -- $0

The second comparison is MUI's own paid tier, and it is the one that decides real projects. MUI Core is MIT and always has been. MUI X -- the advanced Data Grid, Charts, Date Pickers and Scheduler -- is not.

• MUI X Pro: $299 per developer per year ($24.92/month). Unlocks the Pro Data Grid: column pinning, row pinning and reordering, advanced filtering.

• MUI X Premium: $599 per developer per year ($49.92/month). Adds pivoting, aggregation, row grouping and Excel export.

• MUI X Enterprise: $1,399 per developer per year, 15-seat minimum. As of the April 2026 pricing change, Enterprise is the only tier that carries priority support.

That same five-developer team, if it needs Excel export from a grid: 5 × $599 = $2,995 a year.

One licensing detail is easy to miss and expensive to get wrong. On 2026-04-08 MUI moved Pro and Premium to application-based licensing, with separate single-app and multi-app options. If you are scoping cost by headcount alone, check the app count.

So: adopting Material UI Core avoids a licence bill entirely, and that is a real avoided cost against KendoReact or Syncfusion. It does not avoid the MUI X bill, because MUI X is a different product solving a different job. Nothing about installing the free library reduces what the Pro data grid costs. Those two numbers do not subtract.

Is it still alive?

Very live, with an honest asterisk.

The last commit landed 2026-08-17, about fifteen hours before these figures were taken. Material UI v9.0 shipped on 2026-04-08 as a coordinated relaunch across the whole MUI product line, and patch releases are arriving every week or two -- v9.3.1 came six days after v9.3.0. Recent issues carry maintainer-applied scope and status labels, and named MUI engineers are filing RFCs within the last few weeks.

The asterisk: 1,377 open issues against 19,130 closed. That is a large backlog. It is normal for a project at this scale and it is not evidence of neglect, but a directory that only reported the good number would be lying by omission.

Trendshift records the repo reaching #1 on GitHub Trending on 2025-11-09.

What people say

Reddit is unreachable from the research sandbox, so the highly relevant r/reactjs and r/nextjs threads are named but not quoted. Hacker News comments below carry permalinks; HN does not display per-comment scores, so none are claimed.

The dissent first, because it is the loudest thing in this repo's orbit:

"Every Material UI library I've seen in existence is a bloated wreck full of bugs... I wish Material UI would either get significantly better or just die already."

-- WorldMaker, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005749

A more measured version of the same argument, in the same thread:

"I tend to agree with your criticisms. FWIW, I do think mui has peaked, at least for greenfield projects. A new wave of tailwind-based libraries are rising fast, the most prominent of which are Mantine and Shadcn. IME, both perform MUCH MUCH better than mui."

-- Octoth0rpe, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44006336

And the case for it, from a thread on building an internal component library:

"Libraries like Material UI are battle tested and cover the vast majority of components you're going to need. You can extend or theme them to match your needs and often include a built in design system. The likelihood of building something better from scratch are low."

-- mindfulmark, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41607286

The catch

Runtime CSS-in-JS is the recurring complaint, and the fix is stalled. Pigment CSS was MUI's answer -- zero-runtime styling, no Emotion dependency. Maintainer Olivier Tassinari, on the open tracking issue, 2025-03-31:

"In the current trajectory Pigment CSS is in, it feels like we would need a miracle to fix 1., 2., 3. soon enough to be used in the next major of Material UI, so I don't think it's realistic."

The v9 announcement instead promises to "explore refactoring the styling layer" in a future major, targeting "independence from Emotion and better integration paths for teams using Tailwind CSS." That is a plan, not a shipped fix.

It is not RSC-native. Material UI components are client components. The @mui/material-nextjs adapter exists specifically to make the App Router workable via a cache provider. Compared with copy-in, server-renderable alternatives, that is friction you inherit on day one.

The version numbers lie to you. v7 is followed by v9. There is no v8. This is documented and deliberate, and it still catches people.

The data grid wall is real. Column pinning, row pinning and reordering sit behind Pro at $299/dev/year. Pivoting and Excel export sit behind Premium at $599.

MUI Toolpad is not actively maintained, per the banner on its own repository. If you were evaluating MUI's low-code admin story specifically, that is the answer.

Credits

Olivier Tassinari (oliviertassinari), MUI co-founder, whose own assessment of Pigment CSS is quoted above. José Freitas (joserodolfofreitas), co-author of the v9 announcement. MUI (@MUI_hq) and the 3,130 contributors on the repo. The Hacker News commenters quoted above. Download figures from the npm registry API; pricing verified against MUI, Telerik, Tailwind and Syncfusion's own pages; peak rank from Trendshift.

Kubescape -- a Kubernetes security platform. Scans clusters, manifests, Helm charts and images against CIS Benchmarks, NSA-CISA and MITRE ATT&CK, then watches the cluster at runtime.
Alternative to: Wiz Essential at $24,000/year for 100 cloud workloads -- roughly $240 per workload per year -- the base tier exposed on AWS Marketplace. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security is metered at $0.028 per vCPU per hour, about $245 per vCPU per year, across every vCPU on the secured cluster.
Cost to run: free licence. The CLI is a single Go binary and costs seconds of CPU. The in-cluster operator runs a node-agent DaemonSet on every node plus a storage layer for SBOMs, so budget real memory and one engineer's part-time attention.
Licence: Apache-2.0. Free for commercial use, no copyleft.
Runs on: CLI on Linux, macOS and Windows via Homebrew, Krew, PPA, NixOS, Chocolatey, Scoop and a PowerShell installer. In-cluster via the kubescape-operator Helm chart.
Requires: nothing but the binary to scan local YAML, Helm or Kustomize files. Cluster scanning needs kubectl and a kubeconfig. Continuous and runtime protection need Helm, a live cluster and eBPF. Image patching needs buildkitd or Docker. No ARMO account required.
Traction: 11,700 stars · ~1,000 forks · 4,613 commits on master · 52 open issues · 37 open PRs.
Liveness: very live -- commit landed 2026-08-17, dozens of issues closed in the preceding 24 hours, v4.0.12 shipped 2026-08-12.
Maturity: v4.0.12. The 4.0 line went GA 2026-03-26. The Helm config marks the auto-upgrade capability, in the project's own words, "an experimental capability with an elevated security risk."
Links: repo · kubescape.io · CNCF Incubating since 2025-02-26 · Trendshift: not listed
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

Kubescape looks at a Kubernetes setup and tells you which parts of it are configured badly.

It runs in two shapes. As a CLI, it reads YAML manifests, Helm charts, Kustomize output or a live cluster and grades them against published control frameworks -- CIS Benchmarks, the NSA-CISA hardening guidance, MITRE ATT&CK mappings. That mode needs no cluster and no account. You can point it at a directory on your laptop.

As an in-cluster operator, installed by Helm, it keeps scanning on a schedule, builds SBOMs for the images actually running, tracks vulnerabilities against them, and -- since the 4.0 line -- watches process and network behaviour at runtime using eBPF, learning what normal looks like for each workload and flagging what is not.

The output is a list of findings with a control ID, a severity, and the specific resource at fault.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Cloud-native application protection is one of the most expensive categories in security software, and it is also one of the most secretive about price.

Wiz is the one you can actually cost, because its AWS Marketplace listing exposes base-tier numbers that its website does not. Wiz Essential is $24,000/year for 100 cloud workloads, about $240 per workload per year. Wiz Advanced is $38,000/year for the same 100 workloads, about $380 each. The SMB bundle, Wiz Go, lists at $222,000 across a 36-month term -- roughly $74,000 a year. Full multi-cloud CNAPP is private-offer only.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, formerly StackRox, also leaks a real number through AWS Marketplace: $0.028 per vCPU per hour, on demand, metered across every vCPU on the clusters it secures. Annualised that is about $245 per vCPU. A modest 200-vCPU estate is roughly $49,000 a year.

Then the wall. Palo Alto Prisma Cloud is priced in credits, and the dollars-per-credit rate and the minimum commitment live inside a gated PDF licensing guide. Aqua Security publishes no list price at all; every tier routes to "Request a Trial." Sysdig Secure publishes nothing either -- G2's own page notes its Sysdig pricing information was last updated in September 2023 and was supplied by nobody since.

That opacity is the finding, not a gap in the research. Four of the five leading vendors in this category will not tell you what it costs until you are on a call.

ARMO, the company that built Kubescape, sells ARMO Platform on the same model: the pricing page is a lead-generation form that says your needs "deserve a tailored pricing" and routes you to a Slack sales chat. What that money buys, versus the free tool, is not better detection -- the scan engines are the same -- but operability: a multi-cluster dashboard, multi-tenancy, SSO, data retention and history, attack-path analysis, an RBAC visualiser, Slack/Teams/Jira integration, and a support SLA.

Running Kubescape yourself has no licence line. The costs that do not disappear are the node-agent DaemonSet sitting on every node, the aggregated-API storage layer holding SBOMs and application profiles, and a person to tune out false positives and keep the Helm chart current. Against a five-figure floor from every vendor above, that is a favourable trade -- but it is a trade, not a free lunch, and it is an avoided cost rather than a saving unless you are cancelling a contract.

Is it still alive?

Very live.

The last commit landed 2026-08-17, eight hours before these figures were taken. Release v4.0.12 shipped 2026-08-12, six days earlier, in a run of roughly weekly patch releases. The closed-issues feed shows dozens of issues closed in the preceding 24 hours, dated 15 to 17 August, with maintainers triaging same-day.

The binaries download: the v4.0.12 checksums.sha256 asset returns HTTP 200 on a direct request.

The governance signal is the one worth stating plainly. Kubescape entered the CNCF Sandbox in November 2022 and was voted to Incubating on 2025-02-26. It has not graduated. All four core maintainers -- matthyx, slashben, rotemamsa and amirmalka -- work for ARMO. ARMO's own blog was still publishing as recently as 2026-07-01, so there is no evidence of a backer walking away, but a single company sets the direction.

Trendshift has no entry for it, which is worth noting honestly: this repo has never had a viral trending moment. Its credibility comes from the CNCF, not from a spike.

What people say

Reddit was unreachable from the research sandbox, so no r/kubernetes quotes or vote counts are reported here. Hacker News comments are quoted with permalinks; HN does not expose per-comment scores, only story points, so none are claimed.

Scepticism about the open-core model that funds projects like this, on the CNCF-acceptance thread (story at 27 points):

"In the short to medium term, most of the development ends up being done by the company who created the project... though [for] simple stuff like typo bugs, people will submit PRs."

-- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343527

And the sharpest dissent about the whole category, from a self-identified former GitHub Security Products PM:

"To a developer, think of them as glorified linters... they aren't going to catch anything you're not already looking for, they're just going to make it easier to remedy/enforce the problems you already know about."

-- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34344432

Maintainer Matthias Bertschy, on incubation in February 2025, quantified the community as "growing from a small group to over 130 contributors, including many first-time open-source participants."

The catch

False positives and false negatives are documented, not theoretical. Issue #1647, "Evaluating C-0037 seems to report false positives as well as false negatives," is a maintainer-acknowledged report against a specific control. Any rules engine carries this; the question is whether you have someone to tune it.

The architecture churned recently. Version 4.0, in March 2026, removed the host-sensor DaemonSet and folded its job into the node-agent, because -- in the project's own account -- the old design "was often perceived as intrusive and difficult to monitor from a security perspective." Anyone running the pre-4.0 operator had to re-plan their deployment.

Runtime detection is young. The node-agent and the aggregated-API storage layer only reached GA in March 2026. Adopting them means running capabilities roughly five months out of beta.

The free tier is complete on detection and thin on operations. One cluster, one team, no history, no SSO, no support number. That is fine until it is not.

Governance is concentrated. Four maintainers, one employer, incubating rather than graduated.

Credits

Matthias Bertschy (matthyx), Ben Hirschberg (slashben, ARMO co-founder and CTO), Rotem Refael (rotemamsa) and Amir Malka (amirmalka) -- the four core maintainers listed in the project's governance file. ARMO (@armosec) and the project account (@Kubescape). The CNCF, for the incubation record and the 4.0 announcement. The Hacker News commenters quoted above. Pricing verified against AWS Marketplace listings for Wiz and Red Hat ACS, and against Aqua, Sysdig, Palo Alto and ARMO's own pages.

authentik -- a self-hosted identity provider. One login for every app you run, spoken in SAML, OAuth2/OIDC, LDAP, RADIUS and SCIM.
Alternative to: Okta Workforce Identity Starter at $6/user/month billed annually, with a $1,500 annual contract minimum -- so a five-person team pays the $1,500 whether it uses it or not. Microsoft Entra ID P1 is $7/user/month on annual commitment.
Cost to run: free licence. A VPS that meets the documented floor is roughly $15-25/month; a real instance for a few hundred users is closer to $40-80/month.
Licence: MIT for the core. Free for commercial use. Everything under authentik/enterprise/ carries a separate proprietary licence.
Runs on: any Linux host with Docker or Podman Compose, or Kubernetes via Helm. Admin UI is browser-based. Outposts ship for Linux and macOS, amd64 and arm64.
Requires: Docker or Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, and a domain with TLS before any real SSO flow will work in a browser. Documented floor is 2 CPU cores and 2GB RAM.
Traction: 24,916 stars · 1,928 forks · 432 contributors · 847 open issues / 3,685 closed.
Liveness: very live -- a commit landed 2026-08-17, one day before these figures were taken, against an active 2026.8.0 milestone.
Maturity: 2026.5.6 stable, released 2026-07-22, with 2026.8.0-rc7 already in test. CalVer, quarterly majors, and breaking changes are documented as a routine part of each release rather than avoided.
Links: repo · goauthentik.io · Trendshift peak #1, 2024-08-17
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

Authentik sits between your users and everything they log into. A user hits an app, the app hands them to authentik, authentik checks who they are, and hands back a token the app trusts. That is single sign-on, and it is the same job Okta does.

It speaks the protocols the apps already expect. SAML and OAuth2/OIDC for modern web apps. LDAP for the old ones that never learned anything else. RADIUS for network gear. SCIM for pushing user accounts out to services that want their own copy. It also does MFA, self-service password reset, and the flow builder that decides what a login actually has to survive.

The pieces you run are a server, a worker, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Optional "outposts" sit in front of applications that cannot speak any auth protocol at all and put a login wall in front of them.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Enterprise identity is priced per person per month, forever, and the floor is often higher than the headline.

Okta Workforce Identity Cloud. The Starter suite -- SSO, MFA and Universal Directory -- is $6/user/month billed annually. The Essentials suite is $17/user/month. Both carry a $1,500 annual contract minimum, which is the number that actually matters for a small team: at ten people you are not paying $720, you are paying $1,500. Professional and Enterprise tiers are not published at all.

Microsoft Entra ID. P1 is $7.00/user/month on annual commitment. P2 is $10.00/user/month. The Entra Suite is $12.00/user/month and requires a P1 subscription underneath it.

Auth0, now Okta's, prices by monthly active users rather than seats: free to 25,000 MAU on the B2C tier, then Essentials at $35/month and Professional at $240/month, both capped at 500 MAU. Enterprise is contact-sales.

JumpCloud bundles SSO and MFA at $11/user/month billed annually. Ping publishes nothing.

Here is the addition for a 50-person company, one year, list price:

• Okta Starter -- 50 × $6 × 12 = $3,600

• Entra ID P1 -- 50 × $7 × 12 = $4,200

• JumpCloud SSO & MFA -- 50 × $11 × 12 = $6,600

• authentik Enterprise -- 50 × $5 × 12 = $3,000

• authentik community edition -- $0 in licence, plus roughly $480-960/year for a VPS that can actually carry it

That last line is an avoided cost, not a saving. If you are not currently paying Okta, adopting authentik does not reduce a bill -- it means you never start one. If you are paying Okta for 50 seats, the bill that stops is $3,600 a year and the bill that starts is your hosting plus your own time.

The project's own paid tier is the honest complication. authentik Enterprise is $5/user/month plus $0.02 per external user per month, billed annually. It adds Google Workspace and Entra ID sync, Chrome Enterprise Device Trust, the Shared Signals Framework, mTLS client-certificate auth, RADIUS EAP-TLS, enhanced audit logging and ticketed support. Enterprise Plus starts at $20,000/year and adds FIPS and FedRAMP compliance, SLAs and multi-instance support.

What keeps that from being a bait-and-switch is written down. Authentik's own pricing FAQ asks "Will any feature of the open source version ever become enterprise-only?" and answers: "No." That sentence is the reason this entry exists. Very few open-core projects put it in writing.

Is it still alive?

Very live, and not marginally so.

The last commit landed 2026-08-17, roughly nine hours before these figures were pulled. The releases page runs 36 pages deep, working out to a release every one to two weeks over a period of years. Issues opened between 12 and 17 August 2026 already carry maintainer-applied labels -- bug/confirmed, status/reviewing -- and milestone assignments against the 2026.8.0 release. The founder himself opened issue #24878 on 2026-08-07.

The downloads download. A 2026.5.6 release asset -- authentik-outpost-ldap_linux_amd64 -- returns HTTP 200 and a real 28MB payload from GitHub's release CDN.

Trendshift records it hitting #1 on GitHub Trending across all languages on 2024-08-17, which is a two-year-old peak that the current commit cadence has outlived.

What people say

Hacker News carries the most useful comments; Reddit was unreachable from the research sandbox and no vote counts from it are reported here rather than invented.

Fletcher Heisler, authentik's CEO, disclosing his own interest, on 2026-06-25:

"Just for clarity: Cloudflare runs authentik for their workforce identity. (source/disclosure: am CEO). Glad to see them making use of Hydra for OAuth apps!"

-- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676777

A user on 2026-08-06, describing where he draws the buy-versus-run line:

"I'll never vibe-code PostgreSQL. I don't want to maintain my own Kubernetes codebase. I happily pay for GitLab Enterprise and Authentik Enterprise."

-- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193286

The dissent is consistent and it is about weight. An r/selfhosted thread titled "Switching to Pocket-id from Authentik" carries the line "Authentik is utterly and needlessly complex, however, it's also audited and probably a lot more scanned than pocketID" -- retrievable only as a search snippet, so it is reported here without a vote count.

The catch

The documented hardware floor is understated. In issue #21413, filed 2026-04-06, an operator running roughly 1,400 users reported the worker process peaking at about 7.4GB of RAM and PostgreSQL at 1.4GB, against docs that say 2GB is the minimum. They asked for the documentation to recommend 10GB for production. A maintainer replied on 2026-04-09 that they were "looking to improve the documentation about how to scale resources for different use cases." The issue was auto-closed as stale on 2026-08-17 with no documentation fix landed.

It is a stack, not a container. PostgreSQL, Redis, a reverse proxy for TLS, and a worker process are all yours to back up, patch and monitor. Nobody is on call for you.

Breaking changes are routine. Each quarterly release documents its own. An upgrade is a review, not a version bump.

The Enterprise line is real. Google Workspace and Entra ID sync, mTLS, RADIUS EAP-TLS and the Shared Signals Framework are not in the free edition today. The written promise is that nothing already free will move -- not that everything new will be.

Credits

Jens Langhammer (BeryJu), who made the first commit in November 2018 and is now founder and CTO of Authentik Security Inc. Fletcher Heisler (@fheisler), CEO. Marc "risson" Schmitt, Marcelo Elizeche Landó and the 432 contributors on the repo. The Hacker News commenters quoted above. Pricing verified against Okta, Microsoft, Auth0 and JumpCloud's own published pages; traction and peak rank from GitHub and Trendshift.

Blackbird -- an OSINT tool that takes a username or an email address and checks hundreds of sites for a matching account.
Alternative to: Maltego Professional at €7,500 per seat per year for the 20,000-credit tier. Spokeo's consumer tier runs a $0.95 seven-day trial into $19.95/month, with "all sales are final" written into its own payment policy. Pipl publishes nothing; procurement data from Vendr puts the average annual contract at $58,342, ranging $3,000 to $130,000.
Cost to run: free to install. No API key needed for the core searches. At any volume you will need your own proxies, because it fires unauthenticated requests at 700+ third-party sites with no rotation built in.
Licence: none. There is no LICENSE file and the GitHub API returns license: null. That means default all-rights-reserved copyright applies and commercial reuse or redistribution rights are legally ambiguous.
Runs on: anything with Python -- Linux, macOS, Windows -- or the bundled Dockerfile. CI tests against Python 3.11. No minimum version is documented.
Requires: git clone plus pip install -r requirements.txt. It is not on PyPI -- pip install blackbird-osint returns 404. The optional AI profiling add-on needs a key from the project's own backend, free with an undisclosed daily limit.
Traction: 7,680 stars · 871 forks · 18 contributors · ~645 commits · 10 open issues / 61 closed.
Liveness: stalled -- last commit 2025-07-13, no release ever tagged, and the issues that close are being closed by a stale-bot rather than a person.
Maturity: no version number exists. The project has never cut a release.
Links: repo · Trendshift peak #3 on GitHub Trending, 2025-07-22
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

You give Blackbird a username. It goes and asks several hundred websites whether that username exists there, and hands back a list of the ones that said yes, with links.

It does the same trick for email addresses against a much smaller set -- Gravatar, Adobe, Duolingo, Chess.com, Notion, Spotify, Strava, Twitter, and a handful of others.

This is account enumeration, and it is the first move in most open-source-intelligence work: establish where a person exists online before looking at what they posted. Investigators, recruiters, fraud teams and journalists all do a version of it. So do people with worse motives, which is why the tool ships a disclaimer.

Two numbers about coverage are worth separating. The README advertises "600+" sites. The username list is not in the repo at all -- it is pulled live at runtime from the WhatsMyName project's data file, which currently holds 716 sites. The email list is bundled and static, and it has 16 entries. One of those numbers self-heals as somebody else maintains it. The other has not moved since July 2025.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Commercial OSINT is priced like enterprise software and sold like it too.

Maltego is the only one in this category that prints a real number. Maltego Professional -- the Standard tier, 20,000 credits a month -- is €7,500 per seat per year, published openly. The Advanced tier at 40,000 credits, and Enterprise above it, are both contact-sales.

Social Links, which sells SL Pro and Crimewall into the same buyers, publishes nothing. Their own FAQ says it plainly: "Customers' needs differ greatly, which is why Social Links practices flexible, individual pricing. Contact the sales team for a quote."

Pipl publishes nothing either. The only real figures come from third-party procurement data: Vendr reports an average annual contract value of $58,342, with observed deals from $3,000 to $130,000. That is transaction data, not a price sheet, and it should be read as such.

At the consumer end, Spokeo sells the same lookup to individuals with a different trap. Checkout pricing runs a $0.95 seven-day trial, converting to $19.95/month, or $44.85 quarterly, with a "Professional" tier at $69.95/month. Spokeo's own payment policy is the part to read: trials "convert to an ongoing subscription" unless cancelled before 11:59 PM Pacific on the last trial day, plans "automatically renew," and "all sales are final."

Blackbird costs nothing to install and needs no key. The cost that shows up in practice is infrastructure rather than licensing: it fires direct outbound requests at 700-plus third-party endpoints per run, with no proxy rotation and no throttling. Anyone running it at volume trips rate limits and IP blocks, and buys proxies to get around that. Blackbird neither provides nor documents this.

And the licence status is not a footnote. With no LICENSE file, "free" describes the price, not your rights. A company that wants to build this into a paid workflow has no grant to point at.

Is it still alive?

No. This entry is an autopsy, and the liveness evidence is the reason it is worth publishing.

The last commit was 2025-07-13 -- over thirteen months before these figures were taken. No release has ever been tagged; the Releases page reads "There aren't any releases here."

The activity that looks like maintenance is not. The repo runs .github/workflows/auto-close-issues.yaml, an actions/stale@v7 bot that closes any issue or pull request after 30 days of inactivity plus a seven-day grace period. The healthy-looking 61-closed count is substantially that bot.

Issue #197, opened 2026-08-04, has no maintainer response and is still open. The maintainer's X account last posted in October 2023.

The rot shows up exactly where you would predict for a tool that scrapes other people's sites. Issue #160, "Instagram feature not working," has been open since 2026-03-04 and cannot be fixed by anyone because nobody is committing. Issue #139, titled simply "False Positive," has been open since 2025-07-13 -- the same day as the last commit. Issue #82 reports inconsistent results across identical searches, which is what throttling looks like from the client side.

The one part still improving is the part somebody else owns: the WhatsMyName dataset it pulls at runtime keeps growing whether Blackbird is maintained or not.

For what it is worth, it did have a moment. Trendshift records #3 on GitHub Trending on 2025-07-22 -- nine days after the last commit.

What people say

Thin signal, and the reason is worth stating. Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox: Firecrawl returns "we do not support this site" and direct fetches return 403. I could reach search-engine snippets but not comment permalinks, so no vote counts are claimed as verified below.

The original r/netsec announcement thread, "Blackbird: An OSINT tool to search for accounts by username," indexes at 237 upvotes and 8 comments: reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/wirjlz

From r/OSINT's "List some of your favourite and most useful osint tools," an excerpt surfaced without a retrievable permalink:

"For usernames I like maigret, alfred, and blackbird. Sherlock sucks."

-- thread: reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/195rd2a

And the dissent, from a thread about a competing tool, attributed to u/cjvacopa about six months ago: "What makes this better than blackbird?" -- reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/1rgqnso

Hacker News has no dedicated thread for it at all. That silence is itself part of the record.

The catch

Nobody is fixing anything. Thirteen months without a commit, and an issue filed this month with no reply.

False positives are an open, acknowledged bug. Issue #139, unresolved since July 2025. Results are string and status-code matches against live third-party endpoints; a green tick is a hypothesis, not a finding. Every hit needs manual confirmation.

Site modules rot faster than anything else in software. Targets add bot protection continuously. Instagram support has been broken since March 2026 with no path to a fix.

No licence. Not permissive, not copyleft -- absent. Commercial use rests on nothing.

The legal and ethical exposure is yours. The project's own disclaimer, verbatim:

"This or previous program is for Educational purpose ONLY. Do not use it without permission. The usual disclaimer applies, especially the fact that me (P1ngul1n0) is not liable for any damages caused by direct or indirect use of the information or functionality provided by these programs."

Running username enumeration against a real person without their consent is the line the author himself draws, and disclaims all liability for crossing.

If you want a maintained free option, Sherlock occupies the same space and is still developed. Blackbird's advantage was the interface and the email module, and the email module is 16 sites frozen in July 2025.

Credits

Lucas Antoniaci (p1ngul1n0, @p1ngul1n0), who built it and named himself Project Developer in the README. The WebBreacher/WhatsMyName project, which maintains the 716-site dataset Blackbird depends on and is the only part of this stack still being updated. The 18 contributors on the repo. Pricing verified against Maltego and Spokeo's own pages, Social Links' FAQ, and Vendr's procurement data for Pipl; peak rank from Trendshift.

Planka -- a self-hosted kanban board. Projects, boards, lists, cards, labels, due dates, attachments, real-time updates.
Alternative to: Trello Premium at $10/user/month billed annually -- $1,200/year for a team of ten. Trello's free tier caps at 10 collaborators, 10 boards per Workspace and 250 automation runs a month. Asana Starter is $10.99/user/month annually; Monday.com bills in blocks of three seats minimum even for one person.
Cost to run: free licence for internal use. A small VPS running Planka and PostgreSQL together is realistically $8-12/month -- users report the app container sitting around 210-235MB of RAM plus roughly 20MB for Postgres.
Licence: not OSI open source. The PLANKA Fair Use License (Community License v1.1, 2025-05-20) for community code; a separate proprietary PLANKA Commercial License (v1.2, 2025-11-28) for anything marked Pro or Enterprise. Free for commercial use inside your own organisation. Not free to host for third parties.
Runs on: Docker and docker-compose (official), Kubernetes via Helm, or a manual Debian/Ubuntu install. Web only -- there is no mobile client for the board app.
Requires: PostgreSQL, a BASE_URL and a SECRET_KEY. No built-in TLS; front it with your own reverse proxy and domain.
Traction: 12,400 stars · 1,400 forks · 154 contributors · 1,129 commits · 63 releases · 24 open issues · 39 open PRs / 506 closed. The official container has 11.1M downloads across all tags.
Liveness: live -- a security release shipped 2026-08-10 and the last commit is the same day.
Maturity: v2.2.1. The v2.2.0 notes carry the project's own warning: "⚠️ Breaking changes -- read before updating... OIDC/SSO has been removed from PLANKA Community... If your only admin account is SSO-based, you will be locked out."
Links: repo · planka.app · Trendshift peak #1 JavaScript Repository of the Day, 2024-03-18
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

Planka is a kanban board you run on your own server. Boards hold lists, lists hold cards, cards hold checklists, attachments, comments, due dates and members. Everything updates live for everyone looking at it.

If you have used Trello, there is nothing to learn. That is deliberate -- the interface is a close study of it, down to the drag behaviour.

What it adds is location. The data sits in your PostgreSQL database, on your machine, inside your network if you want it there. For anyone who cannot put client work, case files or unreleased product plans on someone else's SaaS, that is the whole argument.

You get it running with Docker Compose, point a domain at it, put TLS in front, and that is the install.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Project management is sold per person per month and the free tiers are built to run out.

Trello. Free caps at 10 collaborators, 10 boards per Workspace, and 250 automation runs a month. Standard is $5/user/month billed annually. Premium is $10/user/month annually, $12.50 monthly. Enterprise is $17.50/user/month annually -- $210 per person per year.

Atlassian Jira. Standard $7.91/user/month, Premium $14.54/user/month, on tiered pricing that shifts with team size. The free plan stops at 10 users and 100 automation runs a month.

Asana. Starter $10.99/user/month billed annually. Advanced $24.99/user/month. The free Personal tier caps at 2 users.

Monday.com. Basic $9/seat/month, Standard $12, Pro $19, billed annually -- and billing is enforced in blocks of three seats minimum, so a solo user pays for three.

Worked, for a team of ten over one year:

• Trello Premium -- 10 × $10 × 12 = $1,200

• Asana Starter -- 10 × $10.99 × 12 = $1,318.80

• Monday.com Standard -- 10 × $12 × 12 = $1,440

• Jira Standard -- 10 × $7.91 × 12 = $949.20

• Planka Community, self-hosted -- $0 licence, plus roughly $96-144/year for the VPS and domain

If that team is currently paying Trello Premium, moving to Planka stops a $1,200 bill and starts a $120 one. If the team is currently on Trello's free tier and about to hit the 10-collaborator cap, Planka does not save anything -- it avoids a cost that had not started yet. Those are different sentences and only one of them is true for any given reader.

Planka's own paid tier is where the picture gets more complicated. Pro Self-Hosted is €7.20-€7.90 per user per month, minimum one user. It unlocks custom branding, Worker and Guest roles, calendar and map views, recurring cards, cross-company use -- and OIDC/SSO, which used to be in the free edition. Pro Hosted is €8.50-€9.40 per user per month, minimum five users. Enterprise starts at a 1,000-user minimum. An installation service is sold separately from €469 plus VAT.

At ten users, Planka Pro Self-Hosted at €7.90 is roughly €948 a year -- which is within a rounding error of Trello Premium. The free edition is the thing that beats it on price, and the free edition is the thing that just lost SSO.

Is it still alive?

Live, and actively developed -- but read the licence before you read the commit log.

Release v2.2.1 shipped 2026-08-10, an emergency security fix for a path-traversal vulnerability, and the last commit to master is the same day. The maintainer opened a 51-comment issue thread on 2026-08-07 and was answering in it through the 17th. The official container image on GHCR was last published seven days before these figures were taken and shows 11.1M downloads across all tags.

One trap worth flagging: the old meltyshev/planka image on Docker Hub still exists with over 500,000 pulls and was last pushed nearly four years ago. The live image is ghcr.io/plankanban/planka.

The bigger story is the licence. Planka was AGPLv3. In release v2.0.0-rc.2, published 2025-05-09, it moved to the proprietary "Fair Use License." The release note said: "For most community version users, nothing will change -- please take a moment to review the new license here."

What the licence actually says, verbatim, is that you may use or modify Planka "(a) for personal, hobby, or educational purposes, (b) internally within your own organization, (c) for private hosting for a typical number of friends, family, or personal projects, (d) to provide free access to non-profit organizations... or (e) public educational institutions." And then: "Sharing accounts/credentials with third parties for business purposes or operating PLANKA as a hosted service for third parties for any commercial gain whatsoever is prohibited."

Internal company use: free. Reselling access: forbidden without a commercial licence. The project does not call itself open source -- its own README says "fair-code... Source Available."

Trendshift records it at #1 JavaScript Repository of the Day on 2024-03-18, back when it was still AGPL.

What people say

Reddit is unreachable from the research sandbox. Two directly relevant r/selfhosted threads exist -- "Planka now has Pro options (and they aint cheap)" and "Planka removing SSO from Community edition" -- and neither could be opened, so nothing from them is quoted and no vote counts are claimed.

Hacker News, on a thread titled "Planka is not open-source." HN shows points on submissions, not on individual comments, so none are given.

"Planka is not open-source."

-- senorrib, opening the thread, 2025-06-02, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44158668

"Its license has strict limitations on what you can use it for. It's not open source in any reasonable sense."

-- kstrauser, 2025-06-02, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159640

"There is fork of Planka with MIT license: https://github.com/RARgames/4gaBoards"

-- xet7, 2025-06-03, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164938

The clearest quantified sentiment is on GitHub rather than in a forum: the v2.2.0 release removing SSO from the free edition drew 20 "eyes" reactions, and the maintainer's explainer issue for it, #1754, drew 51 comments.

The catch

The licence forbids reselling access. You cannot run Planka as a paid or ad-supported service for other organisations without buying a commercial licence. Internal use is explicitly fine.

It is not OSI open source and does not claim to be. "Fair-code," "Source Available," in the project's own README. If your procurement process requires an OSI-approved licence, this fails it.

SSO moved to Pro, and the upgrade locked people out. Version 2.2.0 removed OIDC/SSO from Community. Issue #1759 -- "No warning before the 2.2.0 update deactivated my accounts -- and the license docs never said SSO was Pro-only" -- was closed 2026-08-15. The release notes did warn, in the notes. The people who upgraded without reading them found out afterwards.

A real MIT fork exists. RARgames/4gaBoards forked when Planka left AGPL, is functioning, and pitches itself directly against this kind of paywalling. It also sells its own Pro tier, so it is not a pure-free escape hatch -- but it is a live project, not vapour.

No mobile app. Web only. There is a separate "Notes" companion app in TestFlight beta on iOS and a third-party download elsewhere, which is not the board client.

Feature gaps against Trello. Native iOS and Android apps, Butler automation, and the Calendar/Timeline/Table/Dashboard view set. Planka's calendar and map views are behind Pro.

Credits

Maksim Eltyshev (meltyshev), founder and original lead engineer. Daniel Hiller (daniel-hiller), currently the most active maintainer -- 13 commits in August 2026 alone, author of the v2.2.0 and v2.2.1 release notes and the Pro-licensing explainer. PLANKA Software GmbH of Kempten, Germany, managing directors Nicolaus Berglmeir and Lothar Hinz. The 154 contributors on the repo. The Hacker News commenters quoted above, and xet7 for pointing at the fork. Pricing verified against Trello, Atlassian, Asana, Monday.com and Planka's own pages; peak rank from Trendshift. No X handle for the project could be verified, so none is cited.

system-design-primer -- a free guide to system design and the system design interview: a topic index, worked interview solutions, and three Anki flashcard decks.
Alternative to: Educative Premium at $199/year, ByteByteGo at $189 for one year or $499 lifetime, Exponent at $144/year, Design Gurus at $149.20/year, and interviewing.io mock interviews with a working engineer from $225 each.
Cost to run: free. What you give up is a feedback loop -- nobody grades your answer, nobody pushes back on your design, and the material only improves when the maintainer merges something.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, covering code and resources together. Free for commercial use with attribution. GitHub displays "Other" because CC BY is not on its list of recognised software licences.
Runs on: anything that renders a README. Anki, free and cross-platform, for the flashcard decks. Basic Python to read the code samples.
Requires: nothing.
Traction: ~364,000 stars · 57,900 forks · 121 contributors · 274 open issues / 127 closed · 332 open pull requests, the oldest opened 2017-04-07.
Liveness: slow -- the last commit to master was a batch of link fixes merged 2026-03-19, and nothing has been merged in the five months since.
Maturity: no version. The README calls it "a continually updated, open source project" while its "Under development" section -- MapReduce, consistent hashing, scatter-gather -- has been unchanged for years.
Links: repo · Trendshift peak #1, 2023-12-31
Figures as of 2026-08-18.

What it does

It is one enormous README that teaches you how large systems are put together, organised so you can revise from it.

The first half is a topic index: DNS, CDNs, load balancers, reverse proxies, database replication and sharding, caching strategies, message queues, asynchronous patterns, security, and the famous table of latency numbers every engineer should know. Each topic gets a short explanation, the trade-offs, and links out.

The second half is interview practice. A dozen or so classic system design questions -- design Pastebin, design a web crawler, design a key-value store for a search engine -- each with a worked solution: requirements, back-of-envelope estimates, a diagram, and a discussion of the choices. There is a parallel set of object-oriented design questions with solutions in Python.

Then there are the three Anki decks -- System Design, System Design Exercises, and OO Design -- which are the part people actually use daily.

It exists in Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Fifteen other translations are marked "Stalled" in the project's own tracking file.

What it replaces, and what that costs

Interview preparation is a real market with real prices, and it is aimed at people who are between jobs.

• Educative -- Grokking the Modern System Design Interview is not sold standalone; it comes inside the Premium subscription at $17/month billed annually, $199/year. List price is $398 before a discount that appears to run continuously.

• ByteByteGo -- $189 for one year (list $399) or $499 lifetime (list $999). No monthly plan.

• Exponent -- $12/month billed annually, $144/year, against a $79/month list.

• Design Gurus -- $149.20/year, against a $373.44 list.

• interviewing.io -- a single mock interview with a FAANG-level engineer starts at $225 and rises with the coach's seniority. Prices are not posted publicly before signup.

A candidate preparing seriously for one cycle, buying the obvious combination:

• Educative Premium, one year -- $199

• ByteByteGo, one year -- $189

• Two interviewing.io mock sessions -- 2 × $225 = $450

• Exponent annual, for peer mocks -- $144

• Total: $982

before any one-to-one coaching.

The primer is $0 against that. But the honest comparison is not "$982 saved," because those products are not all selling the same thing. Educative, ByteByteGo and Design Gurus sell material -- and on material, the primer competes directly and for free. interviewing.io and Exponent sell a person on the other side of the table, and the primer has no answer to that at all. Nothing in this repo tells you your answer was wrong.

So: for the material line, roughly $199 to $189 a year is a genuinely avoidable cost. For the mock-interview line, $450 buys something the repo does not contain, and no amount of free reading substitutes for it. Subtracting the whole $982 would be arithmetic this entry has not earned.

Is it still alive?

Slow. Not archived, not abandoned -- but not maintained in any sense a contributor would recognise.

The last commit to master is `ae9bbd7`, "Fix link for UDP vs TCP (#1153)," merged by Donne Martin on 2026-03-19. That is the only documented maintainer activity found in 2026, and it was a link fix.

Against that: 332 open pull requests. The oldest, #52, "Grammar issues in README.md," was opened 2017-04-07 and has been open for more than nine years. There are 274 open issues against 127 closed -- more open than closed, which is what a stalled triage queue looks like from the outside.

Three things happened after that March merge, and none of them got a response:

• Issue #1312, 2026-06-28, documenting that the content is dated for 2025-2026 practice.

• Issue #1331, 2026-07-13, in which a contributor explicitly volunteered to take on a maintainer reviewer role. No reply.

• PRs #1342, #1343 and #1344, all opened 2026-07-27, written specifically to fix the gaps raised in #1312. Unreviewed and unmerged.

The star count keeps rising. Trendshift records #1 on GitHub Trending, first reached 2023-12-31, and #1 Python Repository of the Week as recently as Week 23 of 2025 -- a repo that keeps trending on reputation while its pull request queue calcifies.

Donne Martin has made no public statement about the repo's maintenance status.

What people say

Reddit is blocked from the research sandbox, so relevant r/leetcode and r/ExperiencedDevs threads are not quoted and no vote counts from them are claimed. Hacker News permalinks below; HN shows points on submissions only, so story-level figures are given where they exist.

The most specific technical criticism, from someone who builds the thing being described, on a 2023 thread at 112 points:

"I had a look at the 'design a crawler' part, since that's something I have experience with. It makes some pretty sketchy assumptions and weird design choices. First in the back-of-the-envelope calculation it overestimates the size of a document by about two orders of magnitude."

-- marginalia_nu, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059816

And the argument about who this is actually for, in the same thread:

"This thing has 233k stars. I dare to say, without evidence, that the vast majority of devs does not know what e.g. the CAP theorem is----and they'll never need it. The vast majority of 'systems' are small-scale. Who's this massive audience?"

-- rollulus, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058815

Worth noting how different the early days were. The 2017 launch thread reached 508 points and 57 comments, and Donne Martin was answering in it: "Thanks for the feedback! I'll see if I can work in some of these suggestions. Pull requests are welcome :)" -- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838474

The catch

Specific sections have aged, and the fixes are sitting in the queue. The latency-numbers appendix still uses roughly 2012 figures -- L1 cache at 0.5ns, SSD random read at 150µs, a 1Gbps network -- rather than anything reflecting NVMe. The database section still centres on MySQL master-slave replication and the MySQL query cache, which was removed in MySQL 8.0, with no mention of distributed SQL, vector databases or lakehouse formats. Both are documented in issue #1312, and PR #1342 fixes the first one. It has been open since July.

The fundamentals are still correct. CAP, consistency models, load-balancing algorithms, sharding versus federation versus denormalisation, cache invalidation -- none of that expires. If you are using this to learn the vocabulary and the trade-offs rather than the current product landscape, it holds up.

There is no feedback loop. The solutions are static reference text. Nothing evaluates your answer, and in a system design interview the evaluation is the exam.

The interview-theatre criticism is fair and worth sitting with. Several of the HN commenters argue the material trains pattern-matching for a panel rather than production judgement. That is a criticism of the format as much as the repo, but the repo is the best-known instance of the format.

Community fixes do not land. 332 open PRs, an offer to help with review that went unanswered, and three targeted freshness fixes ignored for three weeks and counting. If you find an error, expect to fix it in your own fork.

Credits

Donne Martin (donnemartin, @donne_martin), Tech Lead at Meta, who wrote it and merged the last change to it. savasva, whose link fix is the most recent commit on master. The 121 contributors on the repo, and the 332 whose pull requests are still waiting. The Hacker News commenters quoted above. Pricing verified against Educative, ByteByteGo, Exponent and Design Gurus' own pages, and a third-party review for interviewing.io, which does not publish rates before signup; peak rank from Trendshift.