Adobe charges you $19. 99 a month to edit a PDF, and that is only if you commit for a full year. Month-to-month, it's $29.
99. There's a repo on GitHub with 89,000 stars that does 55 different things to your PDF, runs on your own machine from one command, and costs you nothing at all. And there are nine more like it on this list.
All 10 together will save you over $180 a month or $2,200 a year for software that has already been built and is available for free. But, this is not a list of free things. Every one of these is source code, so you do not just install it.
You hand the repo to your agent and tell it to rebuild it around the way you actually work. So, in this video, I'm going through all 10, naming the exact bill each one kills, installing the best ones. By the end of this video, you will know exactly which subscriptions to cancel tonight and what to leave alone.
Let's get started. Midjourney is $10 a month if you're just starting out and $120 a month if you're generating at volume. ComfyUI is a node graph where you wire up open image and video models and run them on your own machine.
It has over 129,000 stars on GitHub, and here's how it works. You get every open model, no generation limits, no queue, and control that Midjourney does not offer at any price. The honest catch, though, is that you cannot really reproduce Midjourney's look fully.
You also need a real graphics card, and this is where it stinks. The good news, though, if you have the power for it, your outputs are yours, and you get to save $2,400 a year. This is an image I generated with it, for example.
My verdict, keep paying for Midjourney if you want the specific Midjourney look, but switch if you want control and you care about owning the hardware. But, the next one is the bill most people on this list are paying without thinking about. Notion is $10 per member per month on the plus plan and $20 on business.
Fine has 69,000 stars. It is documents, wikis, databases, and an infinite whiteboard, which Notion doesn't even have, all in the same app. Here's the part that matters.
You do not have to host anything on your machine. Their cloud free tier is free permanently. 10 GB and three members against $10 per person per month.
The honest catch is that the databases are real, but a little shallow. So, there are no roll-ups and no multi-level relations. If your Notion setup is relational database with formulas across tables, this might not carry it.
Mobile is also not their focus yet. Verdict, switch if Notion is where you write and plan, stay if Notion is where you run a database. And [snorts] the next one takes about 2 minutes to switch, which is the fastest one on this list.
Grammarly is $12 a month. Harper, on the other hand, is built by Automatic, the company behind WordPress. It is Apache licensed, has 14 and 1/2 thousand stars, and it shipped a release this month.
It is entirely offline. It is written in Rust, so it is instant. There's no account, no tier, and no server.
It can work as a Chrome extension, a Firefox extension, in VS Code, in Obsidian, and a language server for everything else. This is probably the easiest one to install and switch to in this list. The honest catch here is that it is English only and it is a correctness checker, not a writing assistant.
So, there is no tone detection and no rewriting, which is a big use case that Grammarly Premium actually sells. It will also not run inside Gmail unless you turn Gmail's own checker off. My verdict is switch if you only ever wanted spelling and grammar, you were paying $144 a year for that.
And the next one is a subscription almost nobody notices they are paying for twice. Loom is $18 per user per month if you pay monthly. That is $216 a year to record your screen and get a link.
Cap is 20,000 stars and it is a better-looking recorder than Loom is. Instant mode uploads while you record, so the link exists the second you stop. And I'm going to be straight with you about the pricing because the free tier is not for everyone.
Free caps your shareable links at 5 minutes and does not allow commercial use. For $29 a year, their subscription gives you commercial rights and unlimited local recording. Against $216 a year, that is an 87% off difference.
The $29 license does not include cloud sharing though. If you want unlimited shareable links, you either pay $12 a month, which is still cheaper than Loom, or you self-host the webpage on Docker with a database and an object storage. Verdict is switch if you want shorter than 5 minutes screen recordings or if you want to save on Loom subscription.
And before the next one, this is the part I actually wanted to make this video for. Everything on this list is source code, which means installing it is the least interesting thing you can do with it. What I strongly suggest you do instead is point your agent at the repo and describe the version you want.
That is the difference between a free tool and a free starting point. A subscription can never be modified, but a repo can be rewritten in an afternoon by something already sitting on your machine. I have written up the exact prompt you can use for this along with all 10 repos, what each one replaces, and the price I quoted down in the description below.
So, feel free to fetch it, check it, steal it. I mean, it is free and it takes a minute and with that, let's get to number six. Adobe Acrobat Pro is $19.
99 a month if you commit to a year and $29. 99 if you do not. Sterling PDF has 89,000 stars and it shipped to release this month.
It runs in your browser from one Docker command and it does over 55 things. It can merge, split, rotate, OCR, redact, compact, sign with a certificate, convert to and from office, and nothing gets uploaded anywhere. The honest catch, and it is a specific one, the single thing people buy Acrobat for, which is editing the text inside an existing PDF, ships as an alpha feature.
Everything around it is excellent. The headline function is the least finished part. Verdict, switch unless you rewrite PDF text for a living, I guess.
And the next one is the tool that quietly runs half the small businesses I know. Zapier is $19. 99 a month on professional and $69 on team.
ActivePieces is 23,000 stars and it is the closest thing to a Zapier clone that exists. It has a visual builder, drag and drop, and per step testing. Self-hosted and there's no cap on runs, no cap on users, and no cap on flows.
Zapier's entire pricing model is a task meter, but with active pieces, the meter goes away completely. The honest catch is active pieces has 705 integrations, while Zapier has roughly 8,000. For mainstream apps, you are fine.
For anything regional or long-tail, check the piece exists before you commit, because the alternative is writing it in TypeScript. The community edition also leaves out projects and API access. Verdict, switch after you spend 30 seconds checking your integrations are in the list.
And the next one is the bill you are the most emotionally ready to cancel. Cursor is $20 a month on Pro and $40 per user on Teams. Client is 63,000 stars.
It's Apache licensed, has over 5 million installs, and it lives inside of VS Code. It plans, edits files, runs terminal commands, and it does all of it with your own API key. So, there's no seat and no per-user payment.
There's just your key. The honest catch is using your own key means you pay per token. Light use lands you around 12 to $15 a month, so you end up saving.
Heavy use, all-day sessions on a premium model, be $20 comfortably. So, you do not. You also lose Cursor's tab completion, which is a model they trained themselves, and it is the thing people miss most when they switch.
My verdict is switch if you use an agent more than auto-complete, or stay on Cursor if tab is how you code. And the next one is the most common subscription on Earth. Or, maybe in our world.
Let's see. ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month, and it is probably on your card right now if you're watching this video. Jan has 44,000 stars, is also Apache licensed, and it is a real desktop app.
It has no Docker and no terminal. You just download it and it runs. Running a local model though means that you don't get ChatGPT models that you get with a ChatGPT plus subscription.
Local models on a normal laptop are worse at recall, flatter in tone, and you lose web search and multi-model features. What Jan actually does is replace the interface. You connect your own API keys, you keep every model in one app, and you pay per token instead of $20 flat.
If you use ChatGPT a few times a day, I mean, there are so many better alternatives for you out there that are completely free. But, if you live inside of ChatGPT all day, you will end up paying more with Jan and with a lot of the other subscription unless you want to switch the model completely. But, the next one is the most expensive tool most creators are paying for.
Descript is $24 a month on hobbyist and $35 on the creator plan. Whisper X has 23,000 stars. It transcribes at around 70 times real time with word-level timestamps and speaker separation.
Speaker separation is the part worth stopping on though. Knowing who said what is what makes a transcript usable, and most tools charge for it. This does it for free.
Setting up speaker separation though does however need a hugging face account and a token. My verdict, keep paying for Descript if you edit video by editing text. Switch if you just need accurate transcripts with speakers.
And number one is the worst value subscription on this entire list. Typeform is $29 a month and it gets you 100 responses. Not 100 forms, 100 responses a month.
Open form shipped to release eight days ago. Their free tier is unlimited forms and unlimited submissions. And it does the thing Typeform is actually bought for.
It has a focused mode, which is one question at a time. It's full screen with a progress indicator and keyboard navigation. It also ships an importer that pulls your existing Typeform forms straight in, so you're not rebuilding anything.
The honest catch, it is a small project with essentially one maintainer, so this is not the one to build your business on without a backup export. The free tier also puts their branding on your forms, and removing it is $25 a month, which is still less than Typeform. Verdict is switch free and unlimited beats $29 for a hundred submissions.
And because I love you, here are three more free repos that I'll cover faster. Kdenlive replaces Adobe Premiere Pro at $22. 99 a month.
It is 20 years old, GPL, and it has whisper plugins that generate subtitles from speech. The catch is that it is a traditional timeline editor, so there are no one-tap effects. Meet AI replaces Otter at $16.
99 a month. It records your meeting audio locally, it transcribes it, summarizes it, nothing gets to leave your machine. The catch is real though, speaker separation is a paid feature there, and that is the main thing you might have wanted.
Type Bolt is the other answer to Typeform if you want it chatbot shaped instead of form shaped. The catch is that its cheapest hosted plan is $39 and the next one up is 89. So, this one only makes sense if you're self-hosting it.
But now, the only question that actually matters. The interesting thing about this list is not that free versions exist. Free versions have always existed.
It is that the honest catch on almost every single one of these is no longer a missing feature. It is operations, uptime, backups, graphic cards, certificates, which means what you're actually paying for in nearly every subscription you have is somebody else being on call. And sometimes that is worth $20 a month and sometimes it's worth nothing.
The only way to find out which is to install one and see whether you ever think about it again. Comment which one you're going to cancel first because I want to see whether it is the same one for everyone. All 10 repos, what each of them replace, the price I quoted, and the prompt I used to hand a repo to my agent are in the first link in the description.
It's free and it takes a minute for you to reach it. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like, and if you're new to my channel, then subscribe because I have a ton more content like this coming your way. Oh, and the algorithm gods told me that you're likely to enjoy this video as well.
So, click it and I'll see you there.
