By Mahnoor Faisal
Publication Date: 2026-04-15 12:30:00
Up until a few years ago, an average person’s subscription stack consisted of a music streaming app like Spotify or Apple Music, an entertainment app like Netflix or Amazon Prime, and some sort of cloud storage. Those were the basics, and then came in additional subscriptions like your fitness app, reading app, meditation app, maybe a second streaming service because that one show wasn’t on the first one. And then OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly, and before we know it, a new AI lab is popping up every other day and every single one of them wants around $20 a month from you. ChatGPT Plus. Claude Pro. Perplexity Pro. Gemini AI Pro. Cursor. Notion AI. The list goes on and on and on.
As always, the open-source community has been working day and night to build alternatives to a lot of these tools. They’re completely free to use, come with no rate limits, no usage caps, no sudden price hikes, your data lives on your own device, and did I mention: they’re completely free to use. Here are a couple of open-source apps that I’ve been using to replace just about every AI subscription I pay for.
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