By Oluwaniyi Raji
Publication Date: 2026-08-30 15:15:00
I was paying for four AI tools at once, and each one covered a job the others handled rather poorly.
ChatGPT answered my daily questions and is excellent for images and infographics. Claude handled research, brainstorming, and my occasional coding endeavors.
NotebookLM indexed and summarized my own documents, and Perplexity handled anything that needed live sources because I don’t trust any of the others for proper fact-checking.
As you can imagine, managing these subscriptions can become complicated. That’s not including the one-off token purchases for when I exceed my usage limits.
After a few months, the total stopped making sense. So I went looking for open source replacements, one for each job, running on hardware I own.
