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
Fifteen entries so far. Each name goes straight to its record.
AI Job Search · Authentik · better-documents · Blackbird · browser-use · go-whatsapp-web-multidevice · Kubescape · Material UI · Open Executive · OpenScreen · OpenSEO · Planka · RustDesk · System Design Primer · VeraCrypt
Identity and access
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
SEO and keyword research
OpenSEO — self-hosted SEO dashboard: rank tracking, keyword research, site audits and AI visibility checks, running on the DataForSEO API.
Alternative to: Ahrefs Lite at $129/month list — one user, 750 keywords updated weekly — so $1,548/year. Semrush SEO plan at $117.33/month billed annually, $1,407.96/year. Not free to run: DataForSEO is pay-per-call with a $50 minimum top-up, and matching Ahrefs Lite’s own limits works out to about $8.53/month self-hosted.
Licence: MIT · Liveness: very live — 79 commits in 30 days, v0.1.6 on 2026-08-19 · Figures as of 2026-08-24.
Fractional executives
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
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
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
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
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.
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.