I replaced ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity with free open-source alternatives

While my bank already hated to see Apple Music, Spotify, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, iCloud+, Google One, Netflix, and about half a dozen other subscriptions coming every month, I know AI tools have made an already existing problem significantly worse. Now, practically every AI tool I use wants its own cut too. Claude Max, ChatGPT Plus, Google AI Pro, Perplexity Pro, Cursor Pro, and so on.

Unlike the subscriptions I listed at the very beginning, though, AI subscriptions overlap a lot more. Spotify and Canva are solving completely different problems. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Cursor, on the other hand, can all do many of the same things —they just tend to be better at different parts of the job.

That overlap is exactly what made me wonder how many of them I actually needed to be paying for. Instead of looking for one open-source app that could somehow replace everything, I decided to rebuild the different parts of my AI workflow with free, open-source alternatives and see how much I could get away with.

Jan

My local LLM finally feels (well, looks) like ChatGPT

After analyzing the kind of tasks I use AI for, I’ve realized