Replace: Suno AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Lovable, Manus, Opus Clip & more
Ten paid AI subscriptions, ten open-source repos that do the same job, and an honest accounting of what each one costs you in hardware instead of dollars.
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2 days ago
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Listicle
educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Almost every paid AI subscription now has a working open-source clone you can run locally, and the honest trade is not money for nothing but a monthly bill swapped for hardware, setup time, and a lower quality ceiling.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You are stacking four or more AI subscriptions and the combined monthly bill has started to feel like a real line item rather than a rounding error.
You already own a gaming PC or an Apple Silicon Mac and want to know which AI workloads that machine can actually absorb.
You run a high-iteration workflow, like voice retakes or image rerolls, where credit meters punish you for doing the work properly.
You care about where your prompts and personal context end up, and the memory a hosted assistant keeps about you bothers you.
You want a starting map of the open-source AI landscape with the current star counts and the licensing catches already flagged.
SKIP IF…
You need frontier-model quality for the hardest reasoning, because none of the free routing tricks here include the top-tier models.
You work on an older laptop with no dedicated graphics card, since most of these tools are slow or unusable without one.
You want to sell what you produce, because several defaults here are non-commercial licenses that you have to swap out first.
You are looking for installation walkthroughs, since this is a survey with links rather than a setup tutorial for any single tool.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Ten paid AI tools each get matched to a working open-source repo: VoiceStudio for ElevenLabs, Odysseus for ChatGPT, FreeLLMAPI for paid coding plans, Vane for Perplexity, InvokeAI for Midjourney, ACE-Step for Suno, OpenShorts for Opus Clip, Dyad for Lovable, OpenManus for Manus, and Upscayl for Topaz Gigapixel. The repeated pattern behind every pick is the same: hosted tools meter iteration, cap downloads, keep your data, and restrict what you can sell, while the open version removes the meter and hands you the bill as hardware and setup instead. The honest limits get stated too, including the frontier models that no free route covers and the graphics card most of these quietly require.
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The promise, the reframe from price to customization, and the sponsor read.
00:27 – 02:42
02 · VoiceStudio replaces ElevenLabs
A desktop voice cloning and dubbing app with no credit counter, built in ten days by a startup CTO in India, now past 54,000 stars. Default model is non-commercial.
02:42 – 05:51
03 · Odysseus replaces ChatGPT
PewDiePie's local assistant with chat, deep research, memory, agents and an email helper. Free to run, but capped by whatever model fits on your machine.
05:51 – 09:27
04 · FreeLLMAPI replaces paid coding plans
A Microsoft product designer in Dublin chained dozens of free daily provider tiers into one endpoint, so a coding agent hops to the next model when one runs out.
09:27 – 11:51
05 · Vane replaces Perplexity
Formerly Perplexica, started April 2024. Self-hosted cited search that runs on a local Ollama model or a free Gemini key, at 37,021 stars.
11:51 – 13:57
06 · InvokeAI replaces Midjourney
Began August 2022 as a cancer researcher's copy of Stable Diffusion. A layered canvas with inpainting, no monthly plan, no public gallery, and a gaming graphics card requirement.
13:57 – 19:30
07 · ACE-Step replaces Suno
Musicians plus an AI research lab built an open song generator. Live demo of a hip-hop track, an honest verdict that it trails Suno, and the hardware floor.
19:30 – 23:51
08 · OpenShorts replaces Opus Clip
From the Malaga team behind UploadPost. Picks 3 to 15 moments, reframes vertical, adds captions. Free with a watermark on their site, or self-hosted with Docker.
23:51 – 26:15
09 · Dyad replaces Lovable
An ex-Google engineer's local app builder. No credits, bring your own model, Supabase or Neon for data, deploy to a free host. 21,662 stars.
26:15 – 29:06
10 · OpenManus replaces Manus
Researchers cloned the invite-only agent in days. Plans its own steps, browses, writes code, saves files, and runs on whatever model key you supply.
29:06 – 32:30
11 · Upscayl replaces Topaz Gigapixel
Two open-source fans started it in summer 2022, Linux first. Batch upscaling at 4x or 16x on your own machine. Face repair stays behind the maker's paid cloud.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Credit meters do not just cost money, they change behavior: you stop iterating long before you run out of credits.
A local voice tool with no credit counter lets you redo one line fifty times for nothing, which is the actual unlock.
The reason people move chat local is rarely price, it is the personal profile a hosted assistant quietly accumulates about them.
A local chat app is free but its intelligence is capped by whatever model fits on your machine, so the app is never the bottleneck.
Dozens of model providers hand out small daily free tiers, and chaining them together produces something close to unlimited coding volume.
Free model routers deliberately exclude the frontier models, so they cover volume work and not the hardest reasoning you were paying for.
Cited AI search is a thin layer over a web search plus a summarizer, which is why open clones of it keep appearing.
Self-hosted search still needs a brain, so its answer quality is set by the key or local model you plug into it.
Hosted music tools cap downloads rather than generations, so 500 songs a month with 20 downloads is really a 20-song plan.
A generated song you are not allowed to sell is not really yours, which matters more than output quality for commercial work.
Automatic clipping is three jobs in a trench coat: pick the moments, reframe to vertical, add captions. All three are now open source.
Self-hosting a clipper trades cash for latency, at roughly five to eight minutes per clip without a graphics card.
Credit-based app builders bill you while the AI fixes its own mistakes, so your spend peaks exactly when results are worst.
The lock-in in vibe-coding platforms is the model, not the editor: if you cannot bring cheaper tokens, you cannot leave.
Agent pricing punishes failure twice, because a task that fails still consumes every credit it burned on the way there.
Perpetual software licenses turning into rentals is the pattern to watch, because the tool you bought can become the tool you lease.
Open-core is the normal shape of these projects: the core is genuinely free and one high-value feature sits behind the maker's cloud.
The real entry fee across almost all of these is a graphics card, which converts a recurring bill into a one-time purchase.
Takeaway
Free software, paid hardware, and the license fine print
THE REAL TRADE
Every tool here removes a monthly bill and replaces it with three new costs you have to be honest about: a graphics card, your setup time, and a lower quality ceiling.
02VoiceStudio replaces ElevenLabs
Credit meters do not only cost money, they change how you work, because you stop iterating long before the credits actually run out.
Removing the counter is the real unlock: a local voice tool lets you redo one line fifty times for nothing.
Check the default model's license before any paid work, since several of these ship non-commercial models and expect you to swap them.
03Odysseus replaces ChatGPT
The strongest reason to move chat local is not price, it is the personal profile a hosted assistant builds about you over months.
A local assistant's ceiling is whatever model your machine can hold, so the app is free and the intelligence is the bottleneck.
Treat open clones as feature-partial rather than one for one: you get chat, research, memory and agents without frontier quality underneath.
04FreeLLMAPI replaces paid coding plans
Dozens of providers hand out small daily free tiers, and chaining them gives you something close to unlimited volume for routine work.
The same model is often available from several providers, so a handoff between free tiers does not have to change your output mid-task.
Free routing never covers the frontier models, so it is a volume solution, not a replacement for the hardest reasoning you pay for.
05Vane replaces Perplexity
Cited search is a thin layer over a web search plus a summarizer, which is why credible open clones of it keep appearing.
Self-hosted search still needs a brain, so its answer quality is set by the local model or free key you plug into it.
06InvokeAI replaces Midjourney
Local image generation removes the public gallery problem, because outputs stay on your disk instead of a shared feed you pay to leave.
The real workflow advantage is a layered canvas with inpainting: change one object or background instead of rerolling the entire image.
A gaming graphics card is the actual entry fee, which converts a recurring subscription into a one-time hardware purchase.
07ACE-Step replaces Suno
Hosted music tools cap downloads rather than generations, so 500 songs a month with 20 downloads is really a 20-song plan.
Licensing beats quality for commercial work, because a song you are not permitted to sell is not meaningfully yours.
Open song generators trail the paid leader by a version or two, so choose them for ownership and volume rather than best output.
08OpenShorts replaces Opus Clip
Automatic clipping is three jobs: pick the moments, reframe to vertical, add captions. All three now exist in open-source form.
Self-hosting a clipper trades money for latency, roughly five to eight minutes per clip on a machine without a graphics card.
Expect a hidden manual step, because auto-reframing regularly misses the speaker and you still open an editor to fix it.
09Dyad replaces Lovable
Credit-based app builders bill you while the AI debugs its own mistakes, so spend peaks exactly when the results are worst.
The lock-in in vibe-coding platforms is the model, not the editor: if you cannot bring cheaper tokens, you cannot leave.
Separating the interface from the brain is what makes a builder portable, since you keep the workflow and swap the model.
10OpenManus replaces Manus
Agent pricing punishes failure twice, because a task that fails still consumes every credit it burned on the way to failing.
Open agents run the same loop as paid ones: plan the steps, search the web, click through pages, write code, save files.
Running an open agent is free but its model is not, so the cost moves to an API key you still have to fund.
11Upscayl replaces Topaz Gigapixel
Perpetual licenses turning into rentals is the pattern worth tracking, because software you bought can become software you lease.
Batch processing a whole folder locally is what justifies the setup, especially for decades of low-resolution family photos.
Free is rarely total, since the highest-value feature often sits behind the maker's own paid cloud in a standard open-core split.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Repo
Short for repository, a project's complete source code and history hosted on a site like GitHub. Anyone can download it, run it, and modify it when the license allows.
GitHub stars
A public bookmark count on a repository. It is a rough popularity signal rather than a measure of quality, stability, or how many people actually run the software.
Local model
An AI model whose weights are downloaded and run on your own computer instead of a company's servers. Nothing you type leaves your machine, and the model's size is limited by your memory.
Ollama
A free tool that downloads and runs open-weight language models on a personal computer, and exposes them to other apps through a simple local connection.
API key
A private credential that lets one piece of software call another company's model and have the usage billed to your account. Most self-hosted AI apps need one unless you run a local model.
Bring your own key
A design where the app is free and you supply the model access yourself. The app author never touches your usage or your bill.
VRAM
The dedicated memory on a graphics card. AI models have to fit inside it to run fast, which is why tools list a minimum number of gigabytes rather than a card name.
Docker
Software that packages an application with everything it needs to run, so it behaves the same on any machine. It removes setup pain but adds its own install step and memory overhead.
Non-commercial license
Permission to use software or a model for personal projects only. Selling the output, or using it inside a paying business, requires a different license or a different model.
Open core
A business model where the main product is free and open source while a few premium features, usually hosted ones, are sold separately by the original maker.
Inpainting
Editing one region of an image with AI while leaving the rest untouched, used to swap a background, a garment, or a single object instead of regenerating the whole picture.
Frontier model
The newest and most capable models from the largest labs. They are rarely available through free tiers, which is the ceiling every free routing trick runs into.
32:14channelEarlier roundup: 10 subscriptions you can eliminate with GitHub
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
00:05
“It is about more than just free. This is about customization. Everything I'm showing you is open source so you can work with it and build on it.”
states the whole thesis in one breath, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
02:00
“There is no credit counter, so you can redo a line 50 times and it's going to cost you nothing.”
the single most concrete benefit in the video, and instantly relatable to anyone who has watched credits drain→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
07:21
“He says, you know what, what if I just string together all these freebies? I bet you I could code endlessly with them. And he did that.”
a complete origin story in three sentences with a payoff→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
15:00
“You can make your song, but it's not really yours. It can't be sold.”
short, punchy, and names the licensing problem most people never check→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
24:12
“Credits burn while the AI fixes its own mistakes.”
the sharpest line about credit-based pricing in the entire video→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
26:40
“Failed tasks still burn through your paid credits.”
one sentence that reframes agent pricing as a risk rather than a cost→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
24:55
“Maybe even this is a tool whose days are numbered, because we're seeing more and more that Claude Code can do this stuff on its own.”
the host undercutting his own recommendation is the most credible moment in the video→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphoranalogystory
You're going to save so much money and you're going to have more privacy and more control over the software tools you use because I'm going to show you how to replace your 10 subscriptions with 10 free repos that you can use and edit on your computer and it is about more than just free. This is about customization. Everything I'm showing you is open source so you can work with it and build on it.
Timestamps and links below. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. Let's get to the first one in It Is Voice Studio.
It's there to replace 11 Labs. It's got over 54 ,000 stars on GitHub. And we know 11 Labs, right?
It's the hugely popular AI voice generator. It turns type text into lifelike speech. I've used it forever, right?
You create these voices that sound like you or like real people. But here's the thing. It costs money.
And every retry and every small tweak burns through credits that you paid for. If you cancel, you downgrade. Your unused credits are gone.
There are all these issues that people have brought up. And I've got sources here.
And of course, the price. It gets expensive, especially depending on what type of business use you have. So, Voice Studio was started this April by a startup CTO in India.
It took him 10 days to get this thing off the ground. It hit within six months, 3 ,800. You don't care how many code updates, right?
Let me show you how great this thing is. Where's the link to it? Here it is.
This thing is so beautiful. You can install it on your Mac right now. You can, of course, like I said, use your computer, start editing it, but listen to the voices.
The valley had been quiet for 100 years. That's a librarian. Here's a documentarian.
The valley had been quiet for 100 years. Okay, you get the picture, right? So it's a free desktop app.
It copies a voice from a short clip, which makes me a little nervous, but it's incredibly effective. It reads any script in that voice. It dubs your videos into other languages.
There is no credit counter, so you can redo a line 50 times, and it's going to cost you nothing. That's why I'm so excited about this. All right, here's what it ships with, this ability to copy.
a voice from a clip. You can design a brand new voice just by describing what you're looking for. You can dub videos with it.
You can create audio books with it. There's so much more that you can do, but let's be clear that the default voice model OmniVoice is for non -commercial use only. So if you've got paid work, you're going to need to switch to a model like one of these.
And they do have a... paid pro version, which is $99 a month. That's going to add the business license for the app.
For most people who are watching, this is not what you need. The paid version, I mean, the free is going to do it for you. Go try it on their website, install it, or go to GitHub.
And I've got links to the repo so you can go and mess with it. Let's go on to number two, Odysseus by PewDiePie. This replaces your chat GPT.
It's got over 91 ,000 GitHub stars. You know, chat GPT, right? It's probably the tool that got you into it.
in the first place when it started with their AI chat assistant. But people are starting to get a little irritated about the price, $20 a month, and then once you hit your limit, the next option jumps to $100. Then when there's an issue with the billing, you have to deal with the chatbot, all these issues you might be familiar with, and it gets expensive.
Honestly, for me, this is not that expensive. $240 a year, I'm paying, what, $200 a month, I think, to them. But it does start to add up, and it gets irritating when there are limits on these things.
The other issue that really irritated PewDiePie that made him want to do this is he was starting to tell the AI so many personal things about himself. Which makes me wonder, really, what was he asking? But we're all asking personal things, right?
And then it was building up its own memory in the chat GPT memories. And he said, ooh, I feel a little weird about it. And so PewDiePie, I can't say it like that.
I got to say it the way he used to say it. PewDiePie, he's a YouTuber with over 100 million subscribers. He started playing with AI models on his home computer.
And he realized it's actually getting a lot easier than it used to be. And it's much more approachable. So this goofy guy who's actually super smart started saying, okay, if this is so good, why does it have to?
look so ugly? Why can't we make it more user -friendly? And that's what led him to create Odysseus.
It's got ChatGPT's features, not all of them, on your own computer. So that means you're going to get chat. You're going to get deep research.
You're going to get memory. And this, I think, is the thing that made him want to go and create this. You're going to get agents.
You're going to get an email assistant. And you're also weirdly going to get this. this drawing app that he put in there.
I don't know why. And if you use what's called Cookbook, I think, in the tool, you're going to be able to have Odysseus find the right model that will work on your computer for free. So if you want local model, you can do it.
And if you want to bring in your own API key, and in a moment with the number three option for today, you can. then you can just do it, and I'll show you how you can do it. And also, of course, if you want to just mess around with Cloud Code or any other coding agent, you can mess with it and make it right for you.
So here's what it ships with. Chat with any AI -free model. You've got free ones on your computer.
You can plug in paid ones if that's what you choose to do. It will do deep research, and I've seen people come up with these really impressive research reports from it that cites its sources and does a great job there. You get an email assistant for some reason on there, notes, tasks, calendars with reminders.
And like I said, it also has a drawing app. I'm not sure why. Maybe someone can tell me in the comments why.
A few things worth noticing on this. One is it is free, but the AI brain is up to you. It's whatever fits on your computer.
It's not like an infinite thing that is as good as ChatGPT. While I'm at it, I'm also going to tell you it's really not as good as ChatGPT. If you're looking for a one -to -one replacement where you get the dots thing that they launched, you're not getting it here.
But if you're looking for something that's private on your computer, won't cost money, and will chug and do the things you need it to do, it is here. And if you want... more than just what you can run on your computer.
Let's talk about number three. The third thing is called free LLM API. This is what's going to replace Cloud Code for many of you as the programming tool.
See, Cloud Pro, it's a hugely popular AI coding assistant.
But you're seeing that because of the decisions that the company made early on, they are constantly running into their own limitations on how much usage you could have, and then they pass those use limits on to you. And then when you complain, there is a bot that you're going to have to deal with. I literally have three different chat GPT accounts.
I can't tell where or why, so I can cancel two out of the three of them, but all I have is just an agent that I can talk with, and the agent doesn't have the answer. People are getting irritated about stuff like that. $240 a year, nothing to sneeze at.
Again, you keep increasing it. I'm at the $200 a month plan, and they still will cap me, and it's irritating. So in walks this dude that I interviewed on this channel.
He's a product designer at Microsoft. In fact, he had to for the interview with me on how free LLM works. He had to leave his job for the day.
I think he did it from home in Ireland. And what he did at this place is he built free LLM API. And what he realized is this.
He said, you know what? There are a lot of these other models that are really good, like DeepSeek, that are giving people free access so they could try them. There are providers of these models, like Kimmy, like DeepSeek, that want others to start using them, and then they're giving free access to these LLMs.
He says, you know what? What if I just string together all these freebies? I bet you I could code endlessly with them.
And he did that. And so he created an app that will work on your Mac, on your just about anything, including Android, that will basically allow your coding agent to route from one model provider to another, giving you endless coding. So here's what you get.
Dozens of AI companies that are giving away a little free usage every day. You're going to stack them all together and make it work for you. And we're talking about companies like Google, I think is in there.
Grok, I think, is still in there. It changes, which is why you need the Mac, Windows, and it's not on here, but there's also an Android app for some reason. I don't know why he did that.
I do have a full interview with him if you want to see this whole walkthrough. But honestly, if you just get the link and just go and install it, you're going to see this is the easiest install probably on the list. And what it comes with is you're going to have hundreds of free AI models to work with.
You're going to be able to immediately jump to the next free model once one hits its limit. And by the way, I asked him, I said, hey, if I'm using... one model and suddenly i've run out of free credits there and i'm jumping to another doesn't my whole coding experience change he goes no you can actually get all these models from different providers And often it's the same model from multiple providers, so you could just string the same model together and not have a problem.
And he said, but more than that, sometimes you'll find that one model is better for images, another is better for writing, and another is better for coding, and another is better for this thing. And he goes, you just don't string them along like they're all the same. Pick the one you want, and I'm going to give you a bunch of them for free.
All right. Worst noticing is this does not give you Claude. The really strong frontier models are not included here.
You're getting others. You're getting the ones that are trying to compete and get your business. And then he also is making money from a $19 a year add -on.
It's a one -time fee, $19 a year. And that gets you a head start on these free models. Sometimes these free models are available for a limited time, and he doesn't update the public repository with them.
And so if you give him $19 a month, he'll update your software with those. All right, that's how it works. Great tool.
I'm taking too long here. I've got to move to the next one. Number four.
By the way, tell me in the comments, am I going too quickly? Am I going too slowly? I really am feeding off of your feedback on these things.
Okay, number four. Vane is there to replace perplexity, and it's got 37 ,000 stars on GitHub right now. Perplexity, of course, is that hugely popular AI search engine.
I know it's developed beyond this research assistant that answers your questions with sources, but that's essentially what it is. problem with it is the pro limits were starting to be hit that people said you know what why am i paying for perplexity and i'm paying for all these other agents i'd like something else but i also want the question and answer and research that perplexity has and the cost does send to go up and so this developer in 2024 came up with a copy of perplexity which he had the nerve to call perplexica He's renamed it to vain just a few months ago, but perplexica.
It's essentially what he's trying to do is give you an open source version of perplexity that you can bring your own model into. So here's what it does. It cites its answers on your computer.
If you listen to a lot of podcasters, everyone except for me, it seems like, but Joe Rogan and the others, you know that they've been promoting perplexity as a place to go and ask a question and get the facts. And so this is a free version of it. Free search engine.
You run it yourself. You type a question. It searches the web.
It writes the. answer it gives you numbered sources it gets you details that you're looking for and it uses free local model that you can get from olama or a free google gemini key here's what it chips with answers questions clickable sources pick your speed balance and quality search the web you get forums academics papers upload pdfs and other files you get to ask questions about them it works with claude with opening i keys with gemini with grok with all this stuff All right, worth noticing, of course, it means that you can do anything with it because it's MIT, but I don't think it's nearly as strong as perplexity for many people.
And the free paths are through certain places. You go to Ulama, and you need a fairly strong computer. The good news is most people who are watching this will have a computer like that, though I do know there's some windows people are going to have some issues here.
Okay, let's go on. Oh, and as always... you might need a paid key from OpenAI.
I don't think you will, but I want to give you the notice that you can find alternatives, but if you bring your key, obviously you have to pay for it. All right, number five, Invoke is going to replace Midjourney. It's got 28 ,000 stars on GitHub.
It's basically an image studio on your own computer. You know Midjourney. It's that hugely popular AI maker that many of us discovered on Discord where we can ask it questions and get all kinds of funky images created for us.
It is created by a research lab that only has about 60 people, and it's super impressive what they've been able to do. But it often ignores your prompt even after a few tries. It then gives you no refund if you've used 20 minutes of it to generate.
images, and you don't get what you're looking for, and support happens on a public Discord. The whole idea of Discord is great, but boy, did they just... I've never seen a company go this big on Discord, and it's kind of frustrating, to be honest with you.
And it gets expensive to use Midjourney. I'm surprised. Is anyone actually still using Midjourney now that there's so many other places to get images?
Let me know in the comments if you are. So, in walks... Back, actually, what I should say is Invoke began in August 2022 as a cancer researcher's own copy of stable diffusion code.
The startup grew around Invoke AI, then its founders left to join Adobe in 2025, and then volunteers kept this freaking thing going. And Invoke AI is now open source. It's the AI image studio that you can run yourself.
You make images on your computer. You download them for free. There is no monthly plan.
There are no limitations. Your pictures stay private. No public gallery to pay your way out of.
It is yours, and because it is yours, you can use cloud code, and you understand I'm using cloud code as a placeholder here for whatever agent you want to change the code and make it into your own. It ships with everything you need. Layered canvas so you can paint, erase, generate any part of an image, drop a photo, and change just the background, the outfit, one object.
You can get saved step -by -step recipes that you can rerun for every product or post, short video clips from a sentence or a still image. This thing is phenomenal. And, of course, it needs gaming graphic card.
What I'm noticing with a lot of these is the latest Macs are going to be great for it, but a regular laptop is going to be slow. I'm noticing that more and more people are going to get. more horsepower just because they're going to want to do more on their own computers next a step this replaces suno it makes full songs with vocals from a prompt it's got 13 000 stars on github this is your suno ai replacement you know suno it's the hugely popular ai song generator if you haven't used it you've got to go over it is so great if you're like i was going to somebody's house i needed to remember their kids names i knew i wouldn't want to remember their kids names just by reading it over and over and i wanted to also know their kids personality and I wanted to know a few other things about them.
I stuffed it into Suno. I said, make me a song. I was listening to the song that day.
By the time I got home, I knew all their kids' names and what their kids were about, which one was a troublemaker, which one was the one I need to be aware of because he was going to be shy, all that stuff. Suno is great because it makes these custom songs for you and you can use them for anything. That was a little bit long.
Let's go on. You know you could make, though, with it, 500 songs a month, but then they start to... to cap how many you can download.
You pay for a year, and then because they got so much flack for being so big, they change their rules and you get no refunds. And then you can make your song, but it's not really yours. It can't be sold.
All these issues that people are having. And I find that the bigger they are, the more they're catering to companies like Spotify with the restrictions that Spotify and I think maybe YouTube are asking for. And when you're really making an AI song, you want it to be your own.
I'll give you another example. I know I'm filling you with a lot of examples. for these I come back from vacation I create I take all the little videos that I shoot on my home camera and I add a song that I make using Suno or now there are multiple AI tools that you can use to do it I'm about to introduce you to one and you want like a song that becomes the background for these videos for your vacation and you want to and you want to reference the fun little things that you did well you go to suno the free version is going to charge you and then it's not really your song if you can't do whatever you want with it all right and then of course the price does get to be expensive 360 bucks a year just to what mess around with some free videos for yourself so a company of musicians who make ai singing software teamed up with an ai research lab and they said you know what what happens when closed music apps start us to change their model when your music making changes overnight because it's in someone else's hand and they said
What if we just build our own alternative? And that's what Ace Step is. It's the open source song generator that you can host yourself.
You're going to get unlimited songs on your own computer. Do I have a link here to the site so I can show it to you? I think let's go into GitHub here for a second.
Because they do also have a hosted version of it that a lot of these do and I'm gonna link you to all the github repos Here you go. You can just come right here. You can see I logged in and For free I was creating songs here.
Where's my songs here under the create tab. I made a little song Where is it like free repos? I don't think it's anything to write home about Okay, and this will bring up a problem where's where the words okay what he was trying to say there was repos are better than paid subscriptions i thought that'd be a little cute video that or a little cute thing that i created and so i did it just to give you a sense of what it what it's like it's not as good as suno to be honest maybe as you're messing with it you'll get better i think if you're really looking for a free alternative to this gemini now does music for free but then you end up with another issue which is now your music is in their hands and so that's why this came out It's the alternative that gives you unlimited songs on your computer.
You type what you want. It writes the songs. I was using the web version of it.
You can host it on your computer and make it go on your own. And then since the code is open, you can use your agent to make whatever you want to it. Just describe a song.
All I did was, where is it? Can you see it here? All I did was I said in here, give me a hip hop song that says that repos are better than paid subscriptions.
and that's what it did all right you write your own lyrics in 50 languages you want to redo one section make a cover add a few things you get to do all that in here again not as finely You get more editing, actually, than you would with Gemini, but not nearly as much as you get with Suno. But it's free, it's hosted by you, and that's the big benefit here.
Unlimited songs hosted by you for free. You do need, if you're doing it on your own computer, Apple Silicon Mac, which is one of the latest ones with about 10 gigabytes of free disk space. If you are on Windows, you're going to need NVIDIA graphics card with at least 4 gigabits of its own memory.
All right. You can actually run it without a graphic card, but it's going to be much slower. And like I said, I think I said it, I don't think their music is as good as Suno.
You are going to need to futz around with it a little bit more. They say that it's like Suno version 4 .5 or 5. I would say that it's not even at that level.
Meanwhile, Suno right now is at version six. So for certain needs, absolutely. For others, you're going to want to pay for the upgrade, but go make your free songs or have your AI make your free songs.
Oh, by the way, one other thing on this. One of the things that I've heard is people who are looking for customers. will make songs up about the prospects that they're pitching and so they're sending them a song in email about why they want to work with them or about how great the company is and it creates a conversation and once you're starting to get to those levels where you're making a bunch of these things or you're starting to go to the small level we just need one or two songs for the family it doesn't make sense to pay so much for Suno.
And so that's where an alternative like this that you can code with works. On to the next one. Seven, open shorts.
It's going to replace your open clip for turning long videos into captioned vertical clips. It's got 6 ,000 stars on GitHub. You know Opus Clip.
It's the hugely popular AI tool that takes a long -form video interview like the kind that I do on my channel. I hope you're subscribed. And it turns it into short clips.
They say that more than 20 million creators and businesses use it. My hunch is that most of those people are using the sample -free plan. It doesn't matter.
It's popular. It does the thing okay enough. I still actually...
I mean, it does the thing okay. Not great. I have two editors who do video editing for me.
I think their quality is way better than Opus Clip, which is why I don't use it. But I understand now, having talked to people this week, like my guitar instructor, who... shooting a lot of videos they don't want to be in the video production game like the guitar instructor I work with Michael Wagner he just wants to work with he just wants to work with with students and teach him guitar but he takes his videos he uses opus clip and he turns them into into shorts The problem with it is that it's hard to cancel.
Paying customers say that support is not very good. I find that their quality is not great at Opus. And, of course, there is a price.
If you're just getting started, if you're not thinking about doing this professionally, then the fact that you're going to have to pay $348 a year starts to really eat into it, and you don't have control over what you're doing. There's a small company in Spain that decided they were going to create something called OpenShorts, and this is their take on it.
It's the same team that runs UploadPost, a service that posts one video to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube at once. They put the first version on GitHub last December, and it's just taken off. This is another one that if you go into the repo, and I've got links to all of them.
Did I say that? Yeah, I did say that. If you go in here, you can actually see their website.
Oh, here, this is a really nice video to show you a sense of how it works.
And if you come here, you can see their table where they talk about how it works. And now if you click here, you can go to their website, which I've been playing with. Let's keep the watermark.
And as long as you're keeping the watermark, they'll let you play with it for free. And let me see if I can hit play on this. Okay.
I'm going to pause it right there. This is the video that I posted just yesterday, and you can see it's clipping it. Now, the fact that it's now not framed properly, I have to go into edit framing, and then I go and I reframe it.
I don't want to make this into a whole video just on this. If you want that, let me know, and I'll bring the creator of OpenShorts on. But you get the picture.
This is a free. clip maker that you can host yourself or you can go to their website and use for free you drop in your podcast a webinar a live stream these days if you use grain .com to record your meetings you got video you can do the same thing with that it's going to pick 3 to 15 of what it considers best moments I don't think it always does the best and it turns them into vertical where When someone's talking, it focuses on them and it even adds captions on it.
You can run it yourself without watermark, without minimum, or you can try it for free on their websites, 20 minutes a month. You saw the example that I used and it lets you play with it. It'll even run on the free Google Gemini key or your AI model on your own computer.
All right, here's what it comes with. You just paste a YouTube link, which is what I did, even though I have the actual file, or you upload the file yourself. And then you end up with these vertical clips.
Two people can get on camera at the same time. And then if like I'm sitting here and the other person sitting here, it gets stacked word by word captions. I would say I want so far people do still like them.
I wonder how long that's going to happen. And then you can schedule your post to go on Instagram, on TikTok and YouTube all in one click. And you can use your Claude agent or whatever agent you like.
These days I've been enjoying Grok. No, but Claude is still number one for me. And re -edit this software to make it do what you need to do.
Worth noticing, of course, that running it yourself takes a computer with 8 gigabytes of memory and Docker and it's slow without graphics card, about 5 to 8 minutes to a clip. And I wonder, all you people who are watching me... What type of computer do you have?
I'm wondering if maybe some of these are going to be out of reach for you, or maybe you're sitting back and you're going, ha, this is nothing. I've got multiple computers like this. Let me know in the comments who you are.
Okay. All right. You see all these restrictions there.
I don't think for most of it's going to be an issue. So let's move on to the next one. This is Dyad.
It's going to replace Lovable or a lot of other tools like Lovable. I don't mean to pick on Lovable. They're just the number one web app maker that takes your English and turns it into code.
As popular as it is and it is beautiful and it is very easy to use and it's the thing that got me into vibe coding. You burn credits really fast. I started with that free plan and then I burned through that.
Then I went into a paid plan. Then I burned through that. Then I went to the next plan.
And it just keeps taking up credits because you're kind of like locked into their ecosystem. And when someone else is offering cheaper tokens that can do the same thing, you can't really switch. You're in lovable's ecosystem and you're just kind of paying them and trusting them.
And the price can get up there. $4 ,800 a year is not unusual even if you're paying for the monthly fees for it. So an engineer who left Google tried one of the popular cloud apps, app builders, and he said, you know what?
I think I could do a better thing myself and make it for free. And that's what he ended up doing. He built an app builder that runs fully on your computer.
That is what this is. It's the open source builder. And you know what?
I wonder even if this is an easy way for you to build and vibe code websites, but maybe even this is a tool whose days are numbered because we're seeing more and more that cloud code can do this stuff on its own. But this will allow you to do it without renting a builder. It'll allow you to bring in whatever brain you want, cloud code, whatever new thing has come out of China, or whatever thing you happen to have on your computer.
It just will work on it. And of course, you can use the free Gemini key here. It charges you no credits.
It doesn't cost you anything. It just makes it work, and you could host it on Vercel's free plan. That's what I was able to fact check.
I use Cloudflare mostly. I think they work on Cloudflare also, but I use both. Okay, you just describe what you want to play in English, and you get it.
going to use for the database your super base which i think is what lovable will do too or neon in one click you pick the ai that you want and you connect it you run it securely security scan i do like how lovable catches security issues i don't like that they won't let me publish something unless i clear up the security issues sometimes just a quick little tool for myself and i don't care if the world just crashes into it and they still give me a hard time with it and this will just allow you to decide how you want to run things it's free and of course the ai that writes the code is not always free but if you listen to this you know that this second thing I gave you today?
No, maybe it was the third. We'll actually get that away. What is it?
It's the free LLM API. Next, open Manus. 58 ,000 GitHub stars.
It's the AI agent that does whole tasks and kind of steals its name from Manus, I think. Manus. hugely popular AI agent that actually does tasks for you.
The fact that it was like one of the first ones to not just answer your question, but to go do the thing for you was what made it amazing. The team over at Facebook, the meta team, bought it for $2 billion last December. Then China decided, no, no deal.
They unwound the whole thing. They started getting in the way. And still people are having some issues with it.
I know there are a lot of Manus lovers. If you are, let me know because I haven't done a single video on it. Maybe I need to.
But I will say this, that with Manus, a lot of people are complaining that failed tasks still burn through your credits, that you have unused monthly credits, that they disappear when your billing resets, that support, again, is an AI bot that refuses refunds. that won't escalate to a human being, and you're just kind of stuck in their world.
If it's good, you're happy, but you're still paying a lot. If it's not good, you're really miserable, and you don't have anything you can do about it. Meanwhile, you're paying up to, what, $2 ,400 a year for this, and heavy users are even into the tens of thousands.
So when Manus launched in 2025, you were told that you needed a private invite, and people were reselling it online, and these researchers said, actually, I don't think we want that. And they created a project that just basically lets you use it for free. They did it very quickly, and that's how OpenManus was born.
Anyone know why they're allowed to actually... I keep meaning to look this up. How can they keep using the Manus name when they're competing with Manus?
Okay, here's what you get. You get... You get AI workers with credit.
Here's the thing. You type what you want, the goal in English, and it plans the steps itself. It searches the web.
It clicks through websites. It writes codes. It saves files.
All the things that we're now loving in agents, these guys were first to do. You pick the AI that you want to come out with it. Not literally first.
I don't know who literally was first, but you know it. Manus was one of the first ones to really popularize this. And so if you use OpenManus, you get that power, and you get to bring in your OpenAI connection, your Claude, your Gemini, et cetera.
And you can edit the code yourself because it's open source. Here's what it chips with. Type the goal.
Get what you want. Browse real websites. It starts pulling information for you.
You can start to use search on Google DuckDuckGo or Baidu. It's people. Anyone using Baidu?
All right. Worth noticing, you need to pay for the AI model. It usually means an API key.
I think that now OpenAI is getting better and better about letting users subscription. I don't know if they are allowed to use it here, but the API keys do get expensive, which is why free LLM API is one of the first things I did. And the paths through Gemini are capped at the free tier or smaller models on your computer.
All right. Number 10. Oh, I need a link to this.
Did I get a link to this? I think I added here. Okay, here's what it is.
Upscale, it's replacing Topaz Gigapixel. I don't imagine that a lot of you have this on your computer, but I do imagine that a lot of you are using a subscription to this, but I do imagine a lot of you are in need of this.
Topaz Gigapixel. It's the AI photo upscaler. You know, you take photos with these little tiny cameras.
You don't end up with a really great shot. You want to upscale it. Their website is really good.
Can I just go to Topaz? I thought I put a link on it. Anyway, I'll have a link on it.
You can see that her hair here on the left is kind of fuzzy because it's just a low res photo. But as you on their website start to move this little window around, you can see what it would look like if you scaled it up. And immediately you see this is the kind of problem that a lot of us have.
If we go to most agents, they could these days do it, but it's going to start to cost you money. Even if you're not using the Topaz Gigapixel, it's going to start costing you money. Here you can do it.
In bulk, good quality, on your computer, within your control. Topaz, of course, stopped selling this outright. Now you have to rent it.
Some users say the upscale photos look... painted they don't look natural customers are asking for refunds that never came and it's expensive at over 300 bucks a year so two open source fans started this thing that i just told you about it's called upscale in the summer of 2022 they built it for linux first don't worry it's still it's now available for mac and windows i think they even have a little snail on windows because they're kind of making fun of windows which irritates me even though i'm a mac person let's take a look here at their repo Do they still have the snail?
I'm going to do a search for... Oh, here, look. There.
I do like personality. I wish they wouldn't put down the Windows people because those are my people. But I do like that they have a personality and they put the snail on there to show that it's slow there.
Fair enough. Okay, but here's what you get. No meter, no monthly fee.
You just drag one photo or a whole folder. If you have those old folders from like 10, 20 years ago of photos you took on the first smartphones that came out or on the stuff that came out before those, or maybe you have something from 50 years ago from your family and you need a little bit of clarifying on those. This is the tool for you.
You just upload the whole folder. Look at how easy this is. This is a pretty straightforward thing.
It runs on your computer so your photos never leave, which means if you have some kind of those photos that you're not supposed to share with the world. What have photos are those? Never mind.
All right. What it comes with. It will make your photos four times bigger and sharper with AI or 16 times by running it twice.
Upscale the whole folder or images on the go. You pick the built -in model for photos, digital art, or extra sharp detail. You add more free models that are made by the community.
You select the exact output width and keep the photos, camera, details. All right, you do need a graphic card that supports Vulkan, Apple, Silicon, Mac, and most gaming PCs are fine. Many cheap laptops, of course, are not, but why would you expect it for something like this?
The free face repair is only available on their cloud, which is the maker's paid version for $25 a month. All right. There it is.
Top 10. If you like this, I've got the first thing that really went viral for me, which is a collection of 10 subscriptions that everyone has that you can like that eliminate using GitHub. And I've got a link for you right there.
I'll see you in that video next.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The promise lands in the first twenty seconds and then immediately gets upgraded: this is not only about saving money, it is about owning software you can open and change. Ten paid tools, ten repos, and one honest accounting of what you give up.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:27list
The seven-slide replacement audit
Intro: name the paid tool and its star-count challenger
The problem: real user complaints, quoted and sourced
Price: the annual number, not the monthly one
The repo: who built it, when, and why
Why it matters: what the free version actually changes
What it ships: the concrete feature list
Worth noticing: hardware floor, license catch, quality gap
Every one of the ten tools is evaluated against the identical seven-section structure, which is what makes a 32-minute listicle scannable rather than exhausting.
Steal forany comparison page, buyer's guide, or alternatives roundup where readers jump between entries
00:05concept
Three reasons to self-host
Money: no meter and no expiring credits
Privacy: your prompts and files never leave the machine
Customization: the code is open, so an agent can change it
Stated in the first twenty seconds and returned to at the end of every tool section. Price is deliberately framed as the weakest of the three reasons.
Steal forpositioning any owned tool against a rented one
25:00model
Bring your own brain
The app is free and local
The model is yours to choose
A local model costs nothing but caps quality
An API key costs money but raises the ceiling
The recurring architecture across nearly every pick: the interface is open source and the intelligence is a swappable input you supply, which is what prevents lock-in.
Steal forevaluating whether any AI product can actually be left
03:17concept
The annual-number reframe
Every paid tool's cost is shown as a yearly figure on a full slide, $240, $360, $348, $2,400, $4,800, which makes a $20 monthly charge feel like a purchase decision instead of a rounding error.
Steal forany pricing comparison where the incumbent's fee looks small monthly
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
32:14next-video
“If you like this, I've got the first thing that really went viral for me, which is a collection of 10 subscriptions that everyone has that you can eliminate using GitHub. And I've got a link for you right there.”
A single pointer at the end to the earlier, better-performing version of the same format. No subscribe ask, no product pitch, no email capture. The only commercial beat in the video is the sponsor read at 20 seconds, and the resource link sits in the description rather than being read aloud.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Nine free, self-hosted GitHub tools that replace pricey SaaS subscriptions, plus the exact consulting pitch to sell each swap to someone still paying for the alternative.
Corey Ganim and Andrew Warner speed-run a week of AI launches, an AI QVC host, an endless AI livestream, and a phone number for your agent, and call out OpenClaw 2.0's rough demo along the way.
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