9 open source tools replacing $2,135 of subscriptions a year
Penpot, Plane, Twenty, Voicebox, Chatwoot, Cap, Documenso, Listmonk, InvokeAI. Nine free tools against nine subscriptions, with every price pulled from the official pricing page, the licence, and the hosting cost nobody adds up.
September 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Your bank account loses around $178 a month to software subscriptions, and you have probably never added them up. A design tool, a project tracker, a CRM, a synthetic voice, a support chat, a screen recorder, an e-signature service, an emailing platform, an image generator. Each one costs the price of a lunch. Together they cost an office rent. The nine tools below do the same job under an open licence, and you can install one tonight.
The Claude AI Lab is my Skool community where I share my Claude systems and the more advanced modules. Access is $67/month.
Join the Lab →Every price below was pulled on 14 September 2026 from each vendor's official pricing page. Each amount matches the paid plan genuinely equivalent to the open source tool next to it, not the most expensive plan in the catalogue: comparing Plane to Jira Premium rather than Jira Standard would inflate the total without teaching you anything.
What each tool replaces
Penpot replaces Figma
A design and prototyping editor running in the browser, built so designers and developers work on the same file. Mockups export as standard SVG, so a developer reads the code without a proprietary plugin.
MPL 2.0 licence, 59,983 stars on GitHub. Use it hosted on design.penpot.app with nothing to install, or put it on your own server.
Plane replaces Jira
Project tracking with cycles, modules, roadmaps and multiple views. The feel sits closer to Linear than to Jira, which matters when the team actually has to open it every day.
AGPL 3.0 licence, 59,374 stars. The hosted version is free up to twelve users, beyond that you move to self-hosting.
Twenty replaces Pipedrive
A modern CRM built around customisable objects, with an interface closer to Notion than to a 2010s spreadsheet. Fields, views and pipelines are shaped without a developer.
56,735 stars. The repo carries no standard licence recognised by GitHub, so read the terms before billing a client for commercial use.
Voicebox replaces ElevenLabs
A macOS and Windows desktop app generating voice locally. Your text reaches no server, which settles the client data question before you even ask it.
MIT licence, 53,180 stars. MIT is the most permissive licence on this list: commercial use, modification and redistribution with no strings attached.
Chatwoot replaces Intercom
A multichannel customer support platform: site widget, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, all in one shared inbox with assignment and saved replies.
36,798 stars, repo updated daily. In absolute terms this is the most profitable swap on the list.
Cap replaces Loom
Screen recording with link sharing, camera overlay and local export. Videos live on your own storage, so no plan imposes a length limit.
22,222 stars. The free hosted tier caps recordings at five minutes, self-hosting removes the limit.
Documenso replaces DocuSign
E-signature with placeable fields, signer ordering and an audit trail. The code is open, so you see exactly what gets stored and where.
AGPL 3.0 licence, 15,010 stars. Hosted or self-hosted, your call.
Listmonk replaces Mailchimp
A newsletter and list manager written in Go, able to send millions of messages from a single binary. It plugs into your own sending provider, Amazon SES or Postmark for example.
AGPL 3.0 licence, 23,409 stars. This is the most technical swap on the list, and the one saving more as your list grows.
InvokeAI replaces Midjourney
A local image generation studio with an editing canvas, inpainting and model management. One command to install: pip install invokeai, then invokeai-web to open the interface.
Apache 2.0 licence, 28,213 stars. You need a decent graphics card, the price of running locally.
What the math leaves out
Replacing nine subscriptions with nine open source tools does not take the bill to zero, and selling you the opposite would cost you a weekend for nothing.
Real savings land around $130 to $150 a month once hosting is deducted, not $178. Still a plane ticket every quarter.
Where to start
Do not migrate all nine. Take the two costing you the most and replace those first.
Going further
All nine repos above were active on 14 September 2026, with commits from that week. That is the most important criterion when you pick open source software for a critical function: a repo with no commit in six months will cost you more than a subscription.
Before installing, open the repo page and check three things. The date of the last commit. The number of open issues with no reply. Whether the install documentation is current. Those three signals predict your experience better than the star count.
Want to go further?
In the Lab, I share the Claude resources I actually use and how I wire them into my systems.
A dedicated session or program, tailored to your tools and use cases.
And day-to-day, I post one reel a day on Instagram: @quentin_iamarketing