many years ago, long before most of you were conceived, we lived in a utopia where if you wanted to use software, you would walk into a store, buy a box with a CD or floppy disc inside of it, insert it into your computer, and then it was yours to keep forever.

But then one day, the devil got a job as a product manager at a software company and had this clever idea called SaaS, or software as a service.

When you buy it, you don't actually own it and just rent it for a monthly fee until the day you die. This caused profits to go parabolic, and nowadays companies are looking to squeeze the lemon even harder, like Peloton is going to charge a $95 reactivation fee if you buy a used bike on Craigslist.

Logitech is looking to roll out a pay as you go mouse, which gives a new meaning to pay per click, and Adobe was recently sued by the FTC for its predatory hidden early termination fees.

The only world that doesn't have this problem is Temple OS, but the reality is that nobody is forcing you to buy these products in a free market, and the best way to escape subscription hell is to use free and open source software alternatives that these big companies don't want you to know about.

Before we get into it, make sure to draw and quarter that like button and put the subscription button's head on a pike.

It really helps out the channel. Aside from Windows itself, which can easily be replaced by Linux, the most profitable software of all time is likely Microsoft Office.

They get kids hooked on it in grade school so they can grow up to spin the hamster wheels that churn out Microsoft profits.

Luckily though, there's a free and open source version called LibreOffice, which can do almost everything that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint does, and is compatible with a crazy number of file formats, even dumpster fires like docx, but it is missing some features from Microsoft Office, like it doesn't require an internet connection to invade your privacy.

It doesn't automatically upload your documents to the cloud where they can someday be breached by hackers or feds, and it doesn't have a bunch of AI garbage built into it.

If you really want those features, you should continue to pay Microsoft, but if you're looking for Freedom, Libre is the tool.

Now, many teams have escaped Microsoft Office only to land in other paid tools like Airtable, which itself is a pretty awesome tool but extremely expensive at $45 per month per seat.

What's crazy though is you could likely support hundreds of users on your own VPS for just a few dollars per month by self-hosting NocoDB.

It stores data in your favorite SQL database but turns all the tables into rich spreadsheets, which is ideal for collaboration, but when your boss tells you to stop, collaborate, and listen, you'll likely need to use a note-taking app like Notion, which is another $10 per month.

Once again, there's an open source alternative called AppFlowy, which is written in Rust and Flutter.

Not only is the UI beautiful and can do things like note-taking, Kanban boards, and calendars, but NocoDB's most recent Innovation was to shoehorn AI into the platform.

Well, AppFlowy can do that too, and even let you choose your own LLM provider.

That's pretty awesome, but you might be wondering how I find out about all these amazing open source tools. One incredible resource is daily.

dev, the sponsor of today's video. It's a website and rapidly growing community that curates the best developer content on the internet, and the app itself is a free and open source project.

Not only will you find the hottest developer trends here, but you can also finetune your interest by joining squads where you'll find other experienced developers openly discussing the tech you care about the most, and it's not just a bunch of anonymous bots.

These are real people from the real world that you can network with to land a job in real life, whether you're learning to code or just interested in tech.

Daily. Dev is a website that every developer should visit on the daily, but now it's time to talk about another massive software juggernaut called Salesforce.

They provide customer relationship management software that allows salespeople to strategically annoy you until you buy something.

There's a bunch of good open-source CRMs, but one that stands out is ERPNext, which is not only a CRM, but also an enterprise resource planning tool, which can handle accounting, quality control, and a bunch of other stuff.

It's written in Python and also maintains its own custom web framework called Frappe, but most importantly, you can run it in two minutes with Docker and cancel your multi-million dollar Salesforce contracts.

Now, Salesforce also acquired the popular chat app Slack for $27 billion, yet another application that you really don't need to be paying for.

A better option is to use a tool like Mattermost, which is built with Go and TypeScript and can be deployed as a single binary with a Postgres database.

Not only is it packed with features for chat, but also has integrated voice and video chat. It has front-end clients for the web, iOS, Android, and desktop, but most importantly, it gives you total control over your data.

A company like Slack can't hold your data hostage and demand a ransom to get it back, but another thing you might be paying for that doesn't even need to store data is Zoom.

Back in the pandemic days, I once built my own video conferencing app from scratch with Web RTC and JavaScript, but an even easier approach is to use an open source tool like Jitsi.

It uses Web RTC under the hood to handle voice calling, but also provides a ton of other features like mobile applications, raised hands, polls, virtual backgrounds, and everything else you would expect from a Zoom alternative.

But if you're unfortunate enough to be a professional developer, your scrum master is likely torturing you with a device called Jira, which forces you to do sprints, epics, burn downs, and tickets.

Well, the good news is that there's a tool called Plane that makes this torture device free and open source.

It's a torture device for developers by developers, but if you're developing something, you might be using a tool like Firebase, a BaaS, which stands for big ass backend.

Now I like big backends and I cannot lie, but I also don't like paying for them and being locked into a closed-source platform.

Nowadays, there are many great open source alternatives like Convex, Appwrite, Supabase, Pocket Base, but there's a newcomer you likely haven't heard of called Instant.

It's not a full backend, but if you're looking to build a real-time chat or collaboration tool, it handles the client server sync challenges for you, which is a lot of work to do correctly on your own.

But one thing that's relatively easy to do on your own is host a website, yet many developers choose to pay companies like Vercel or Heroku a high premium to do this for them.

You can avoid these taxes with tools like Kifi, the Vercel alternative, or Daku, the Heroku alternative, you can use tools like this to self-host all of the amazing projects that we've looked at so far in this video on a single virtual private server.

You get the UI and APIs of a premium hosting platform, just without the massive bills and free tier roadblocks.

But now we need to talk about perhaps the most greedy software developer, Adobe. I speak to you as a hypocrite, though, as I edit this video in Adobe Premiere, for which I pay a $59 monthly tribute.

As a free human being, though, I could trade Adobe Suite for pirated Adobe Suite, or better yet, trade Premiere for DaVinci Resolve, and trade Illustrator for Krita, and trade After Effects for Blender.

Virtually every SaaS product has a free and open-source, self-hosted alternative.

Never paying for software again is going to be a challenge, but remember, as developers, we don't do things because they are easy, we do them because we thought they were going to be easy.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.

Paying for software is stupid… 10 free and open-source SaaS replacements

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