21:02The Next New Thing · Listicle
10 GitHub Repos That Will Save You Money
Ten paid subscriptions, and the open-source GitHub repo built to replace each one.
September 2ndThe argument in one line.
Nine free, open-source GitHub repositories can replace expensive SaaS subscriptions for analytics, SEO, invoicing, scheduling, billing, forms, CRM, email, and support, and because you own the code, the same swap doubles as a paid consulting offer for businesses still stuck on the paid version.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're a solo founder or bootstrapped operator paying monthly for analytics, SEO, invoicing, scheduling, or CRM software and want a free self-hosted swap.
- You want to build a freelance or consulting offer around installing and customizing open-source business tools for other companies.
- You're a creator or coach looking for a booking, billing, or follow-up stack you fully own instead of renting.
- You're already using AI agents for operations and want ready-made tools you can hand them to manage.
SKIP IF…
- You need enterprise SLAs and vendor support contracts, not DIY self-hosting and troubleshooting.
- You have zero interest in any setup, hosting, or configuration work — every tool here still needs to be installed and run somewhere.
The full version, fast.
The video runs through nine free, open-source GitHub repos that replace common paid SaaS tools: PostHog (analytics vs. Mixpanel), OpenSEO (SEO vs. SEMrush), Invoice Ninja (billing vs. FreshBooks), Cal.diy (scheduling vs. Calendly), Autumn (usage-based billing vs. ChargeBee), Typebot (forms/chatbots vs. Typeform), Frappe CRM (vs. Pipedrive), Mautic (email marketing vs. GoHighLevel), and Chatwoot (support inbox vs. Intercom). For each, the host shows GitHub star count, the paid alternative's price and common complaints, how to run it and hand it to an AI agent, and a specific consulting offer built around finding businesses already paying for the expensive version.
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00:00 – 00:18
01 · Cold open
The host states the premise directly: nine GitHub repos that cost nothing and can be customized with an AI agent, sponsored by Zapier.
00:18 – 02:51
02 · PostHog
Self-hosted product analytics (funnels, retention, session replay, A/B tests) compared to Mixpanel's cost complaints, with a StoreLeads/BuiltWith consultant play for pitching it to Shopify stores and SaaS companies.
02:51 – 06:09
03 · OpenSEO
Self-hosted SEO tooling (keyword research, rank tracking, dashboards) compared to SEMrush's pricing, runnable free on Cloudflare, with an SEO-agency consultant play aimed at solo practitioners via Google Maps.
06:09 – 09:45
04 · Invoice Ninja
Self-hosted invoicing and auto-billing compared to FreshBooks' per-seat pricing, pitched for turning one-off payments into retainers and for a home-service maintenance-club consultant play.
09:45 – 11:15
05 · Sponsor: Zapier Next-Gen Zaps
Mid-video sponsor segment: Zapier's Next-Gen Zaps let code handle repetitive, deterministic automations so AI is reserved for tasks that actually need reasoning, cutting automation costs.
11:15 – 14:15
06 · Cal.diy
Self-hosted scheduling compared to Calendly's per-seat pricing, with a consultant play of selling paid, open-ended consultation calls booked and charged for up front.
14:15 – 16:57
07 · Autumn
Self-hosted usage-based and token billing compared to ChargeBee Flow's pricing, with a consultant play of setting up metered billing for small software companies.
16:57 – 20:15
08 · Typebot
Self-hosted branching chat-forms and chatbots (including WhatsApp) compared to Typeform's response caps and pricing, with a consultant play of adding qualifying questions after email opt-in.
20:15 – 22:21
09 · Frappe CRM
Self-hosted, fully customizable CRM compared to Pipedrive's per-seat pricing and paid add-ons, with a consultant play of setting up CRMs for small sales teams.
22:21 – 24:45
10 · Mautic
Self-hosted email marketing and automation compared to GoHighLevel's pricing and lock-in, with a consultant play of turning info-product mailing lists into a follow-up sales machine.
24:45 – 27:49
11 · Chatwoot
Self-hosted, no-per-seat customer support inbox with bring-your-own-key AI compared to Intercom's per-seat and per-resolution pricing, with a consultant play of migrating support teams off the paid tool.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- PostHog has 39,978 GitHub stars, and roughly 97% of its users stay on the free self-hosted tier without ever paying the company.
- Mixpanel, PostHog's paid alternative, can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year once a company scales past its free tier.
- OpenSEO has 21,591 GitHub stars, was accepted into Y Combinator, and can run for free on Cloudflare's free hosting plan, or $10 a month if OpenSEO hosts it for you.
- SEMrush, the paid SEO alternative, commonly runs hundreds of dollars a month and adds up to thousands of dollars a year.
- Invoice Ninja has over 10,000 GitHub stars; its paid alternative FreshBooks charges around $70 a month plus roughly $11 a month for every extra team member.
- Cal.diy has 48,716 GitHub stars, the highest count of any tool in the roundup, and keeps your booking page live on your own domain even if you stop paying for the software.
- Calendly's standard seat price of $12 a month adds up to more than $1,000 a month for a 10-person team.
- Autumn, a usage-based billing tool with only 2,692 GitHub stars, lets a self-hosted app charge per token, per request, or per minute instead of a flat monthly fee.
- ChargeBee Flow costs about $160 a month for a company billing $20,000 a month, which works out to roughly $1,920 a year.
- Typebot's paid alternative Typeform imposes a response cap on its cheaper plans; once a business hits it, its live forms go offline until it upgrades.
- Frappe CRM's paid comparison, Pipedrive, charges around $89 a seat and bills lead capture as a separate paid add-on on top of that.
- Mautic's paid alternative GoHighLevel's Agency Pro plan runs $497 a month, or $5,964 a year, paid month to month.
- Chatwoot has 37,292 GitHub stars and lets a team bring their own OpenAI key instead of paying the vendor per AI-answered ticket.
- Intercom's Expert plan runs about $139 a seat per month, roughly $16,680 a year for a 10-person team, on top of a per-resolution fee for its Fin AI agent.
- The same consulting move repeats across all nine tools: find companies already paying for the expensive alternative using tools like BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, or StoreLeads, then pitch a cheaper, self-hosted, more customizable swap you set up and maintain for them.
Nine SaaS bills you can replace for free
SELF-HOSTED STACK
Every major paid tool for analytics, SEO, invoicing, scheduling, billing, forms, CRM, email, and support has a free, open-source counterpart you can self-host and resell as a done-for-you service.
02PostHog
- PostHog gives you the same funnel, retention, and session-replay data as Mixpanel, but self-hosted and free for the large majority of its user base.
- Watching actual session replays, not just funnel numbers, shows exactly where a real visitor got confused or gave up before buying.
- Owning your own analytics data means you can hand it directly to an AI agent and ask what to fix, instead of exporting reports for a vendor.
03OpenSEO
- OpenSEO covers keyword research, rank tracking, and site audits, and can run for free on Cloudflare's free hosting tier.
- SEO tooling doubles as the foundation for Answer Engine Optimization, the practice of getting AI answer engines to cite your content.
- Letting an AI agent operate the SEO tool directly, rather than learning SEO yourself, is presented as a workable path to real results.
04Invoice Ninja
- Automated invoicing turns even informal or handshake payment agreements into a tracked, followed-up process instead of relying on memory or an awkward ask.
- Switching clients from one-off payments to auto-billed monthly retainers is a direct way to convert one-time work into recurring revenue.
- Removing the credit-card option above certain price points and steering to bank transfer cuts payment-processing fees.
06Cal.diy
- A self-hosted booking page keeps working on your own domain even if you stop paying for the software, unlike hosted tools that can cut off your calendar link on cancellation.
- Charging a fee or requiring a refundable deposit before a consultation filters for people who are actually serious about showing up.
- Selling paid, open-ended calls through a booking page is a concrete first way for a creator to convert an audience into revenue.
07Autumn
- Usage-based or per-token billing lets AI-powered software charge in proportion to what it actually costs to run, instead of a flat subscription that can lose money on heavy users.
- New pricing can be rolled out to new customers only, grandfathering existing customers on their old plan to avoid losing them.
- Billing infrastructure is itself a sellable consulting service: setting up metered pricing for a small software company is a specific, well-defined project.
08Typebot
- Branching form logic, sending different follow-up questions based on a prior answer, converts better than one generic question set for everyone.
- A hard cap on form responses that takes a paid form tool offline mid-month is a real business risk a self-hosted alternative removes entirely.
- Adding a few well-chosen qualifying questions after an email opt-in, not just more questions, is what actually lifts conversion.
09Frappe CRM
- Owning the CRM's code means every field, view, and automation can be rebuilt to match how a sales team already works, instead of adapting the team to rigid software.
- Paid CRMs often bill core features like lead capture as separate add-ons on top of the per-seat price, which a self-hosted tool avoids.
- Setting up and training a team on a CRM is a fixed-price consulting project that can convert into ongoing monthly maintenance revenue.
10Mautic
- A self-hosted email platform removes the lock-in risk of an all-in-one marketing suite, where canceling can otherwise leave a business unable to easily access its own list.
- The single biggest lever email software has to grow a business is following up with visitors who already gave an email address but never bought.
- Info-product businesses with a large list but little time to manage it are a specific, high-margin market for done-for-you marketing-platform setup.
11Chatwoot
- Per-seat support software pricing quietly limits who on a team is allowed to answer customer questions, since adding an occasional responder rarely justifies another seat.
- Bringing your own AI API key instead of paying a vendor's per-resolution AI fee keeps support-automation costs proportional to actual usage.
- A single shared inbox that blends AI-drafted replies with human handoff typically answers more support volume than a pure human queue or a pure bot.
Terms worth knowing.
- Self-hosted
- Software you install and run on your own server or account instead of renting access from a company, so you keep the code and the data even if you stop paying anyone.
- GitHub stars
- A public count of how many GitHub users have bookmarked a repository, used here as a rough proxy for how popular and trusted an open-source tool is.
- Session replay
- A recorded playback of exactly what one visitor did on a webpage, click by click, used to see where they got confused or dropped off before buying.
- A/B test
- Showing two versions of a page or feature to different visitors and comparing the results to see which one performs better.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing content so AI chat tools and answer engines cite or quote it directly, framed here as the next phase after traditional search-engine optimization.
- BuiltWith / Wappalyzer
- Browser tools that scan a website and report which software and services it runs on, used to find companies already paying for a specific paid tool worth switching away from.
- Usage-based (token) billing
- Charging customers based on how much they actually use, such as AI tokens or requests consumed, instead of a flat monthly subscription fee.
- Retainer
- A recurring fixed fee a client pays on an ongoing schedule, often monthly, for continued access to a service instead of paying once for a single project.
Things they pointed at.
01:34toolMixpanel
02:20toolStoreLeads
02:30toolBuiltWith
02:35toolWappalyzer
03:45toolSEMrush
07:00toolFreshBooks
12:05toolCalendly
15:00toolChargeBee
18:10toolTypeform
21:10toolPipedrive
23:10toolGoHighLevel
26:00toolIntercom
Lines you could clip.
00:02
“I'm going to show you nine repos that will make you money and cost nothing.”
01:40
“The bill jumps fast once you pass the free tier.”
10:10
“Why do you need an AI probabilistic guessing machine to go and check your calendar every five minutes? Let code do that.”
11:45
“Just say, I'm offering consulting services. There's a link below. Let them fill out the time on your calendar to talk to you.”
19:20
“You hit your response cap and suddenly your forms go offline.”
27:45
“If you found this helpful, I do these on a regular basis, these roundups of repos that I find to be really helpful and interesting.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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metaphorstory
I'm going to show you nine repos that will make you money and cost nothing. But this is about more than just free. It's about customization.
Every one of these tools you can get from GitHub and you can actually use your agent to customize it, make it useful for you. Let's get into it. presented by Zapier, the AI automation company.
The first one, oh, and by the way, timestamps and links below. The first one I want you to see is PostHog. It is incredibly popular.
I think it's something like 97 % of its users are on the free version, don't even pay the company for anything. And what it does is it gives you open source analytics that you can host yourself. And it's about charts and funnels and retention, but it's more than that.
You don't just see where a customer dropped off before they bought from you. You also get to watch how they... interacted with your site here it is watch a session replays and know exactly what the user did then you can start to roll out changes with a beat test and you can ask users questions you can start to try different things and improve your results Or, of course, you can ask your agent questions about the data so you can improve.
This is comparable to the paid alternative, which is Mixpanel. Mixpanel can get very expensive. It's not unusual to go into the tens of thousands a year on it.
And as you can see here, I pulled up some complaints that people have had for it online, like the bill jumps fast once you pass the free tier. Tracking anything usually means waiting on a developer, and support can take time to get back to you. So PostHog is free, but it's really, really good.
Look online, and you're going to see the love that people have for it. Here's how you can use it to grow your business. You can actually just install it right now and see where customers quit.
Watch not just the numbers, but watch their interaction with your site and see how useful it is and see where you can tweak, where you can test, and where you can grow. And then also, because you own your customer data and the full experience, you can start asking your agent. I've got Claude Code here as a placeholder for agent, but you can start asking your agent.
What can I be doing with this? How can I be improving my site? And the connection between your AI and your data is unstoppable.
Now, if you don't have a business, you can do this as a consultant. You can go to stores and offer, look for people who have, let's say, $200 ,000 a year. and offer to help them grow their sales by finding leaks.
And you'd be the one implementing this, and you'd be the one working with Cloud Code to find the leaks and improve them. And you can use a tool like Store Leads for about $75 a month, which will help you filter Shopify stores for the right ones for you. You can also just set up tracking for software and other companies.
There are ways that you can see who's using alternatives. I like built with, but there are other tools like Wappalizer where you can see who's using alternatives. And you can say, I'll switch you over to post hog, which is an open source solution that has more features that I think you'll like better.
And you won't have to pay them, pay me a little bit of money and you'll save a lot in the long run. So that's how you can do it with post hog. Let's look at the second one.
Second one is open SEO. I've had the founder on here to talk about this. He's gotten out 21 ,000 stars.
He recently announced that it is part of Y Combinator. And what it is, is. Open source SEO that you can run yourself.
So that means you get to do keyword research, see what people are searching for and how hard it is for you to rank, track rankings for keywords. You know what? You can see all of these in.
I think a couple of things are really worth noticing. Number one, that you can really marry it to your agent, chat GPT, cloud code, et cetera, and have it do the work for you. And the second thing that I've seen people do is they will create custom dashboards.
They will integrate it into their CRM. When I say that this is open source and so you get to customize it, That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, and this is a perfect example of it.
That's why people love this. The alternative, of course, is SEMrush, and you know there are a few others, and they get pretty expensive. It's not unusual for SEMrush to be hundreds of dollars a month.
It grows into the thousands of dollars, or adds up, I should say, to the thousands of dollars a year. Am I talking too quickly? Probably.
I should slow down, but you tell me in the comments. I just get so raring to go on these things. And, of course, if you look at the complaints online, as I did, you can see that people say that canceling takes a long time, that there are no refunds, which I think think is a fairly okay thing to offer no refunds, but they're constant upsells that people get bothered by.
So you're not looking at an inferior product. You're looking at a more customizable product that will solve some of the problems you have if you're dealing with alternatives to this. Now, of course, how do you use it in your business?
You can just start using it right now and track it for free. It will help you. Oh, yeah, you know what?
I've been checking to see if you can run this on Cloudflare's free plan. As far as I can tell, Cloudflare's free plan, which I think I'm still on, which I think this page that you're looking on is still running on, is still capable of running open SEO. If you hate hosting it yourself and you still want to save money, You pay OpenSEO $10 a month, and they will host it for you.
So it goes from free if you host it yourself, $10 a month if you let them deal with the hosting, and you still save money either way. So if you're on a competitor, switch over to them. And the other way is if you haven't tried SEO and you're not into SEO, let your agent, let Claude or whatever agent you use, manage your SEO for you.
I just talked with this. Really nice older gentleman who is a therapist who has essentially done this, let Claude manage his SEO, and he is now growing sales and doing so well. And at the end of my pre -interview with him, he said, actually, Andrew, I don't want to tell the world how I do this.
I don't want to do an interview with you. But he's doing it well, and this is something that you can do with OpenSEO. Basically, let Claude, let your agent handle it.
On to the consultant play. Obviously, SEO is a consistent generator of revenue. I've seen multiple, I've interviewed multiple companies.
In fact, One of the first ones that I interviewed here was a guy named Chirag Kulkarni, who is I think now in the... I don't know.
It's definitely doing millions of dollars, essentially doing SEO for companies. And this tool, OpenSEO, could be the backbone of you getting started with a simple SEO company because you can build on it, because it's inexpensive to try, and because now in a world where AEO is getting bigger, people have a new interest in SEO as the foundation for AEO, Answer Engine Optimization.
And so you can just use Google Maps to find the type of firm that you want to go after. Solo practitioners seem like they're often open to new ideas for growing. businesses let's get on to the next one invoice ninja it's got 10 000 github stars and the basic thing here is if If you just need to send quotes to your clients, they approve them, then you create invoices, why go for a very expensive paid plan from someone else when you could just host this yourself?
You can take your online payments by card, and I think more and more if you are sending out invoices, you should maybe even hide the credit card option or get rid of it and go to the bank option because then you don't have as many fees. In fact, as soon as I get into the $500 and definitely to the $1 ,000 price point, I just get rid of the credit card option.
I don't make it available. If someone asks I bring it back. so this allows you to do that more importantly you get to do auto billing on retainers and subscriptions and you get all the things that you're used to from paid software like freshbooks i like freshbooks but now it's 70 bucks a month if you pay month to month plus there's an extra 11 a month for every extra team member it adds up into the hundreds of dollars a month and people are complaining online about prices going up without anything really dramatically new coming i know that they were competing with quickbooks i don't know how far they've gotten along with it but if you're not looking for a quickbooks alternative and just want a good invoicing software that your agent can manage, Invoice Ninja will be the one for you.
So how do you use it to grow your business? Number one, stop chasing unpaid bills. You know what?
I had someone say, I'm going to, Andrew, have you come out to a conference and you'll speak and I'm going to pay for it. And he was a friend. And I said, sure.
Kind of friendish, never met before, but an online friend. How do I go to him and say, now you have to pay me? When's the payment?
I don't need to deal with that. I just put it into invoicing and let the invoice. be the follow -up process.
So even if it's not like an official thing that you're selling, put it into an invoice and have the invoice software follow up and make sure that you get payment. The other thing is, if you are selling any kind of service, I'm telling you right now, switch to the auto bill. Tell them this is a month -to -month plan.
Even if you don't need them to sign up for six -month minimum or annual plan, tell them. Even if you just think that they're going to be one month, say it's a month -to -month plan you can cancel any time, even a day before the month comes up. And so this allows you to turn simple retainers into subscriptions.
All right, the consultant play. One of the things that I've discovered as somebody now who owns a property in Texas is a lot of service companies. are not good at sending invoices.
They're not good at collecting. It actually is a real problem. For me, the person who wants to pay, like Alan, who just did hundreds of dollars of work just basically mulching some trees, I gotta know, how much do I pay you for that, Alan?
You've never mulched for me before? Never sent me an invoice? There are a lot of companies like that.
You can handle their payments. Or what you could do is you could go and you can say to them, you know what? how about if i sell give me your customer list or work together and i turn your existing customers into monthly retainers and imagine if alan were actually alan does do this he's on a subscription my plumber did this for me i said how about if you pay us a subscription every six months we'll charge you a little bit of money you become a high priority customer so if you have a leak we are going to jump on your leak before anyone else's leak which in the freeze of austin is a major issue and We'll also do a couple of things for you, like drain your, what's the thing, the water boiler, and do this and do that.
Sure, I signed up for their subscription. So this is another opportunity for you to go to these businesses and say you will be the one who helps them get consistent revenue, and Invoice Ninja could be a way for you to do that. All right, these are all ideas.
I want you to think about them and to use my suggestions here to just spur something in you. All right, let me tell you about my sponsor, Zapier. I know you think you know about Zapier, but let me tell you the problem that Zapier is solving for you right now if you are like me.
me using AI. I use AI all the time, and I just complained recently that my bill just went up, up, up. Like really, my GrokBot bill should have been 140 bucks a month.
The two -day overage for going over my bill was $265. I asked my bot, why? It's all these automations.
I said, what do you mean? Well, automations for AI are real intense processes. They have to think through, they have to rationalize, they have to make decisions, and often they make mistakes because they're probabilistic engines.
What Zapier says is, Why do you need an AI probabilistic guessing machine to go and check your calendar every five minutes or every hour or to check your email? What you're doing is you're racking up your expenses with these automations and you're allowing mistakes.
. And so Zapier has these automations where you let the code do things that are mundane, repetitive, and don't need the intelligence of AI. And then you offload the...
the stuff that's important for ai to be there to ai and so that's how you're paying list little for the code and you're only using ai when you need it and that's what their next gen zaps do you just connect zapier to claude or your whatever agent you tell it i want you now to start using this for automations let's talk through how to do it and it will set you up with it okay i've got a link in the description you can't even google this this just came out it's really hard for me to find the link but i got it from the company it'll be in the description let's move on to the next one number four cal DIY.
It's got 48 ,000 stars. This is the thing that you use to send people your calendar so they could book a time with you. That means that you're going to get to own your booking page on your own domain.
And if you stop paying a bill, you don't lose the connection to your calendar. It checks Google, Outlook, Apple calendars. Anyone still using Apple calendars?
If you're one of these nerds, I want to know you if you're using Apple calendar. Tell me why you prefer it. And you won't get double booked.
It's going to add to Zoom link, the Google Meet, the Teams link. Are you using Teams? Let me know that in the chat too.
Why? Not to put you down. I really want to know.
Okay, and it's going to charge people through Stripe and PayPal before they book with you if you want. It's really well done. It comes from a company that sells this as a service, but they also put it on GitHub for free for you to use.
The paid alternative, as you probably know, is Calendly. Their standard seat price is $12 a seat per month. It adds up for a 10 -person operation to over $1 ,000.
And people are complaining. They say free gets you just one meeting type. Everything else starts to cost you per seat.
Users say that it's hard to cancel and charges. keep coming. The powered by Calendly badge stays unless you pay.
I think with Calendly, it doesn't bother me so much, but clearly it is bothering people and they're complaining about it online. So how do you use Calendly to grow your business? Obviously, if you're already using an alternative, even if it's like if it's a paid one, switch over, you save money instantly.
If it's one of the free ones that Google offers and Google in their calendar now offers a free one. and you want to look a little more professional, use this and put it on your site. And the other thing you can do is if you're a consultant and you're tired of people not showing up, just start charging for your first consultation or ask them to put a refundable deposit for the first consultation.
And that's going to make your calendar, which Google doesn't offer this as far as I know, make your calendar into something that ensures that people are ready to do business with you, not just ready to show up when the time is available on your calendar. All right, so how do you make money with this? Listen, as a creator for now two decades, is a podcaster who's written a great book on it.
You should go check out my book on how to do interviews based on my many years of podcasting. Other podcasters come to me and say, how do you make a living at this? Where do I start?
How do I make money? And the thing that I always tell them is, go to your audience and tell them that you're offering consulting services. And they say, what kind of consulting services?
I say, it. Don't tell them. You shouldn't tell them.
Just say, I'm offering consulting services. There's a link below. Let them fill out the time on your calendar to talk to you.
Let them then pay whatever amount is. It doesn't really matter to me, but it should be significant. And then ask them, and Calendly will allow you to ask questions like that.
What's the problem you want me to solve? What does the solution look like? Why are you coming to me?
That will help understand, help explain. what they see you as being able to help, and then you can go beyond consultation to create maybe software that solves a problem or a real consulting company that solves it. So that's how I help other creators earn their first money and figure out where their big revenue is coming from.
That is a service that you can build. Calendly is a tool that will allow you to do that. All right, next, Autumn.
This is going to allow you to charge your users. How many people are now vibe coding, but they're not charging for Jack? The nice thing about Autumn is it is not just per month.
You can also charge per token. And if you're in the AI space where you're creating a software that needs AI to operate well, it's costing you every time people use it. Why don't you start charging per token?
If that's what you want to do, Autumn is going to let you do it. And if what you want to do is just do standard charging, it will allow you to do that too. It's got 2 ,692 stars at this moment on GitHub.
So it's not one of the biggest projects out there, but it will allow you to do things like per request charges, per minute charges, whatever your app wants to meter, they're going to allow you to do that. And that's the beauty of this project. You can also offer free trials without a credit card up front, usage limits every month, et cetera, et cetera.
It is something that's there to compete with charge. ChargeBee Flow is about $160 a month for a company that's billing $20 ,000 a month. That's $1 ,920 a year.
Meanwhile, people who have it are complaining the prices can double at renewal. Once you're locked in, it becomes harder. The fees rise every time your revenue rises, and the support can take a long time to get back to you.
I've interviewed the founders of ChargeBee at the time. I didn't know how big they were. I'm now seeing how deeply embedded they are into companies and how it becomes expensive to use.
hard to switch away. So how can you use this? Obviously, if you're building software, why not?
You're experimenting with building. Why not experiment with just adding something that they could pay for, adding a fee? And the beauty of this is that it's going to allow you to play around with how to add a fee, and it is free software that you can go get right now from GitHub.
I have this whole report, by the way. I know I'm ripping through this. If you just click here, you can go directly to the repo of every one of these, and you can see it and get it directly.
The other thing you can do is if you haven't done it yet, start raising prices without losing customers. Put new customers on the higher plan and grandfather the older customers so that they get the lower plan. All right.
How do you do this as a consultant? Here's a consultant play. Set up billing for small software companies.
Set up billing for small companies. You can use built with to see who is using competitors to autumn and then reach out to them. Don't make it a mass message all at once.
I would start off easily by saying, hey, you know what? I'm starting a consulting company that is helping businesses switch to less expensive but more powerful token -based fees. Find a couple of words that you think will work and then say, can I just talk to you to understand why you're using what you're using and to show you this thing that I built?
Get on a call with them to understand first, then close sales. Or experiment. Maybe you're more of like a...
Boom, boom, boom. ABC always be closing and you want to close sales fast. You can find people who are using competitors and give them a lower fee by using Autumn.
All right. And take a part of that. All right.
Type bot. I don't love how closely their name is to the name type form, but maybe that's meant to let you know exactly what it is and just get on the right side of the trademark issue. Here's what it is.
It's chat style forms and chat bots that you host yourself. So you're going to be able to build these forms using drag and drop, using dozens of blocks like the text block. image block, the video blocks.
The thing about these things is I can read these, but you already know what blocks are out there because this is a solid problem that has existed for a long time. You can also allow branching off answers. So if you ask someone, have you ever bought from me before?
If they say no, take them down one set of questions. If they say yes, take them down a different set of questions. Don't treat them the same.
This allows you to do it. It allows you to use Zapier to connect it to thousands of apps or just Google Sheets and save the data where you want it. It will also Allow you to put it anywhere, including, and I love this part, on WhatsApp.
I only love it because the rest of the world is pulling me, kicking and screaming into WhatsApp. And I'm learning to like it. Actually, I'll tell you, the thing I like about WhatsApp is I can have my agent run it for me in the browser, unlike iMessage, which needs to happen on my computer.
So I can say to my agent, hey, you manage my WhatsApp now. Kind of nice. Kind of nice.
Let's go to the next one. The alternative on this one is... Typeform, you know it.
The reason Typeform charges so much is because they are now the enterprise play. This is the company that now enterprise trusts, so they could charge a lot. We're looking at hundreds of bucks a month.
And I know they have, what, a $13 a month plan that then will cut out too quickly because they suddenly consider you enterprise when you hit a certain, what was it, 100 forms? Nothing significant. Really, they're not giving you enough.
And so these guys came out and they said, you know, we're actually going to make it free, make it available. And the thing about Typeform is... It's Sunset's renewals and refunds that are hard to get.
Excuse me, it has surprise, Sunset, surprise renewals and refunds that are hard to get. Hit your response cap and this one pisses me off. Oh, shoot.
Do I have to now check the box on YouTube for that? This is the one that irritates me. You hit your response cap and suddenly your forms go offline.
And then removing the Typeform logo means paying for an even bigger plan. I don't want these software vendors to use me to promote their software, especially if I'm paying. So here's how Typebot can actually grow a business.
If you're using one of the alternatives, you now have a free option where you never get a response cap again. You can just keep using it. And the second thing is there's so many clever ways to use forms.
like this like a product finder you have someone on your site you want to make it easy for them to find what they need use this form to ask them questions so that they could then be directed to where they want to go And if you want to do this as a consultant, you're going to help info product people who are now doing nothing but collecting email addresses and then running the same campaign to them.
Start to ask questions on the form. So you can use Built With again to see who's using tools like ConvertKit's landing pages and similar landing pages who could then use a leveling up. I hired a consultant to help grow our sales.
And the first thing he did was he started asking more questions after the email address was put into our site. But they weren't just more annoying questions. They were useful questions that then increased our conversion because of the quality of the questions.
And he didn't even then show a different offer based on what people said. Interesting. That's the play with type bot.
Let's go to the next one. FrapCRM. Track leads and deals with drag and drop board stages.
If you need a CRM that works like you'd expect it to, this is the one. And if you don't like the way it works, you can actually really edit this one well. Give every deal its own page.
You've got email, call notes, tasks. Have it make calls using Twilio. Get WhatsApp messages put in there.
pull your leads from Facebook and Instagram, and you can build your own fields, your own views. In fact, this is just open source, so you can actually take it and build whatever you want with it. The alternative to this is, and I know we could say it's Salesforce, but it's not really competitor Salesforce, probably not a competitor HubSpot.
It's more like a pipe drive. People who are paying $89 a seat to use software that helps them close more sales, they find it valuable, but pipe drive right now has key features like lead capture that cost extra as add -ons. Reviewers are saying the canceling is confusing.
It takes too many steps. Support emails can go unanswered. And I've got sources to all this, so you can go and see where I got this.
I didn't want to just go with my gut. I wanted to say, is this really what people are saying? And that's where I got those links.
All right, so how do you make money from it? If you've got a business right now, add salespeople to it without having to pay $20 a month. You know what?
I had a free plan from an alternative company, and I thought, great, it's free. And by the time we get charged, I'm going to be raking in the cash. We were making good money but not raking in the cash, and this was a big expense.
It's a few thousand dollars, and I wasn't getting much from the bloated alternative. This is a free option that you can use, and this will allow you also, if you're someone using Facebook, Instagram to capture leads or any other tool, capture them properly in a CRM that's designed to help you close sales. The consulting play is pretty straight up.
There are people right now who are asking to hire people to set up CRMs for them. Offer this as a CRM that you set up, and you don't just get the fixed price that you charge to install it. You also can get ongoing maintenance or ongoing software charges.
Frap CRM is from this family in India that was... irritated about paying for CRM, and they said, this has got to be an easier way. Okay, Matic, open source email marketing and automation that you self -host.
I'm going to jump for a second here forward. This is the competitor to GoHighLevel. I was on GoHighLevel.
I was paying them $4 .97 a month. When it was time for me to cancel, it was too difficult to get into them. When it was time for me to make changes, it was difficult because I had set it up using a consultant.
Remember the consultant I told you earlier, the one who grew our sales? He happened to sign us up for GoHighLevel, and we were just kind of stuck. So what does Matic give you in its place?
You get to build emails with drag -and -drop builder, A -B tests. You get to send your email out using your third -party provider of choice. Like you like Amazon?
Use Amazon. And you get to design visual campaigns. You get to grow your list with landing pages, forms, pop -ups.
You get to score leads to say who's actually probably going to buy from us and who's not. Send SMS, web notifications. It basically has a lot of features.
I don't think it matches go -high -level feature for feature. But what it does is it gives you... an open source alternative that you have more control over.
So if you're a business owner, you now get to own the whole email experience for yourself. And the other way that you can use this to grow your business is turn subscribers into customers. I do feel like I'm machine gunning you on this one.
This is why I like to have a co -host because a second voice slows it down. But there's so much that I want to tell you and I'm so freaking excited about this stuff. Okay.
The one complaint that nobody's given me is that I'm a cheerleader for everything that I talk about. And it's true. I really do.
All right. Turn subscribers into customers. If all you have is a landing page, it collects email addresses.
Now you can turn Matic to do follow up emails. You're going to let Claude code set them up for you. And you're going to start to be more intelligent with the way that you follow up with people.
And of course, if you are somebody who wants to do this as a consultant, there's so many different ways to do this. One is to help info marketers and these info product makers are the ones who are just collecting email address. They have a lot of margin, but they don't have a lot of time because they're selling their own education.
This is a way for you to go to them and say, I can help you grow your sales. by switching to a more intelligent marketing platform that you can own, and then you can set it up for them. $2 ,500 is actually on the cheap side, $300 a month, and you're going to have such a long relationship with them as you do this as a service and keep adding the features that they want because you got your agent supporting you.
Finally, we got Chatwoot. It's an open -source customer support inbox that you self -host. You know what?
I want to say this is... that Y Combinator backed this company, but I can't 100 % say it. It does have 37 ,000 plus stars, and here's what it'll do.
It will actually help your whole team answer customer support email without paying the monthly fee. If you do customer support, one of the things that you know about it is when email comes in to the boss, You say, well, should we get an account for the boss and pay a monthly fee?
The boss is hardly ever in the box. Ah, let's not do it. We'll forward it to them.
So now the boss has to have it forwarded over. Should we get this guy Steve in? Because maybe sometimes we want him to check email and sometimes we don't.
Nah, let's not. And you start to get really chintzy about who gets a seat here because you don't want to pay per month for people who just dabble in it. And as a result, you cut back on who can answer customer support.
The other thing is... that you tend not to add AI into it because you're going to get charged for AI. And sometimes for every one of these seats that you attach, you're now charged for the AI edition because they all get to benefit from AI.
The nice thing about Chatwoot is you don't have to pay per seat. You can bring your own open AI key, and you can start to create your own AI support tickets replies. All right.
You could even plug your own AI bot to answer customers, and then you can hand some things off to a human being. This is what we're talking about. The alternative, of course, to this is Intercom.
Wasn't Intercom just acquired? They were. They were acquired by Salesforce, I want to say, but I can't say 100 % for sure.
And basically, I think they've been renamed Finn because this new product, their new AI product has taken on so much, but it is expensive. They're no longer looking for you as a customer. They're looking to go upmarket.
By the way, if I got that wrong, let me know in the comments, and I'm going to look afterwards, and I'm going to feel bad. but at least I'll pin somebody's comment if I got wrong who that is. But people are saying, look, the bill just keeps going higher and higher and higher from them, that they can charge you 99 cents even when your staff starts to answer customer support instead of Finn, their agent.
And their own support can be a little bit difficult to work with. So how do you use this to grow your business? First of all, now you have a way to answer all your customer support in one place.
If you've been using Gmail and you didn't want to switch over to one of the alternatives, now you have an option that's free. And you can start building your own order support bot. We're talking about something where if someone says, where's my order?
They get an answer quickly, right away. And this is going to allow you to do it because Cloud Code can build it with Chatwoots free version with no per answer fees. So if you're a business owner, that's how you can make money with it.
And if you're a consultant, the consultant play is to go and see who's using the competition and say, I've got a cheaper alternative that will let more of your people answer customer support tickets or be engaged with customers and will allow you to bring AI in to make it. intelligent without having to pay per cost and i can customize it to you because it is all open source and you've got the github link right there the whole thing that i showed you here and every one of these is linked to below if you found this helpful i do these on a regular basis these roundups of repos that i find to be really helpful and interesting and that you can build with follow for more and if you like this one i've got another one that i think you're gonna freaking love challenge me come at me see you on that one
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Nine free GitHub repos, one after another, each one swapped in for a paid tool you already recognize: analytics, SEO, invoicing, scheduling, billing, forms, CRM, email, and support. The pitch every time is the same. You get the paid tool's core features for free, you get to customize the code with an AI agent, and you get a ready-made consulting offer to sell the same swap to somebody else.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:00list
The Nine-Repo Swap List
- PostHog (vs. Mixpanel) — analytics
- OpenSEO (vs. SEMrush) — SEO
- Invoice Ninja (vs. FreshBooks) — invoicing
- Cal.diy (vs. Calendly) — scheduling
- Autumn (vs. ChargeBee) — usage-based billing
- Typebot (vs. Typeform) — forms/chatbots
- Frappe CRM (vs. Pipedrive) — CRM
- Mautic (vs. GoHighLevel) — email marketing
- Chatwoot (vs. Intercom) — customer support
The full lineup of free, self-hosted GitHub repos matched against the paid SaaS tool each one is positioned to replace.
Steal fora comparison chart or pitch deck for a self-hosted-tools consulting offer
03:30model
The Consultant Play
- Install the free tool yourself
- Find businesses already paying for the expensive alternative (BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, StoreLeads, Google Maps)
- Pitch the cheaper, more customizable swap
- Charge for setup plus ongoing maintenance or a monthly fee
The same four-step move repeats for every one of the nine tools: install it, find who's paying for the paid competitor, pitch the switch, and get paid for setup plus upkeep.
Steal forstructuring a done-for-you SaaS-replacement consulting offer around any open-source tool
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
27:40subscribe
“If you found this helpful, I do these on a regular basis, these roundups of repos... follow for more, and if you like this one I've got another one that I think you're gonna freaking love.”
Soft native outro tying to a follow-up video and a recurring series, no hard sell, delivered in under 10 seconds.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
