I cancelled five subscriptions after one weekend of setting up open-source replacements

I don't need to tell you this, but subscriptions are expensive. And unfortunately, the trend keeps getting worse. More and more apps are locking their best features behind recurring payments, those payments are getting pricier with barely any notice, and I've reached the point where I'm paying monthly fees for tools I only use a handful of times. Now, to be fair, each subscription on its own usually doesn't seem that bad. Five dollars here, seven dollars there, ten dollars somewhere else. It's easy enough to justify them individually. However, once you stack a handful of those subscriptions together, the monthly total starts looking a lot less harmless. That’s what pushed me to spend a weekend seeing how many I could realistically replace with open-source alternatives instead, and five subscriptions ended up not surviving the experiment. Stirling PDF Bye bye, Adobe Acrobat Adobe tools have always been fairly expensive, and Acrobat is no exception. The annoying part is that I don't even need it for anything particularly advanced most of the time. I'm usually just merging a couple of PDFs, rearranging or deleting pages, compressing a file before uploading it somewhere, signing a document, or occasionally converting one into another format. Paying for Acrobat every month started feeling increasingly difficult to justify for that. Stirling PDF ended up being one of the easiest replacements I set up over the weekend. It has more than 50 PDF tools covering pretty much all the everyday tasks I relied on Acrobat for, including merging and splitting PDFs, compression, conversion, signatures, redaction, OCR, and editing. It also has tools for things I didn't necessarily need from Acrobat regularly, like comparing PDFs, removing metadata, adding or removing passwords, and building automated workflows for repetitive PDF tasks. As someone who hates fiddling with Docker and will always avoid it when I can, one of the reasons why Stirling PDF makes a great Acrobat replacement is the fact that I don't need to bother setting up a Docker container or keep a server running. Stirling PDF has a native macOS app that I can install like any other application, and the default setup runs its own local backend. There's no account required, it works offline, and files I process stay on my Mac instead of being sent to an external service. Cap The best open-source Loom alternative While I once exclusively relied on my Mac's built-in screen recording utility, I began paying for Loom once I started needing something a little more polished for work. Being able to quickly record my screen, share a link, and avoid exporting and uploading massive video files made the subscription easy enough to justify. However, a while ago, I came across an open-source tool that does more than Loom, and it doesn't cost a single cent to use. Cap is an open-source alternative to Loom, with desktop apps for both macOS and Windows. You can use it as a regular hosted app like I do, keep your recordings entirely local, connect your own storage, or even self-host the whole thing if you really want to. For quick recordings, Cap's Instant Mode gives me pretty much what I originally went to Loom for. It uploads the recording in the background as I'm making it, and once I'm done, I get a shareable link almost immediately. Anyone I send it to can watch the recording in their browser, leave timestamped comments, and Cap can even generate a transcript and AI summary. It's Studio Mode that ultimately made keeping Loom around difficult to justify, though. Instead of uploading the recording, it saves everything locally and opens it in Cap's built-in editor. I can split and rearrange clips, change the layout of my screen and camera, add backgrounds and transitions, generate captions, smooth out my cursor movements, and blur anything sensitive I accidentally captured. Automatic Zoom is probably the feature I use the most. Since Cap records cursor and click data alongside the video, it can automatically zoom into whatever I'm clicking on instead of making me manually keyframe every zoom afterward. Given how often I record product demonstrations for work, that's the kind of feature that actually saves me time rather than just looking nice. Rowboat Ultimate AI coworker Claude is one tool most people shell out hundreds of dollars on monthly, and that's largely because it offers far more than just a chatbot experience. You get access to multiple Anthropic products within the same subscription, including Claude Code, Claude Design, and Cowork. I've managed to find open-source alternatives for each of Claude's offerings. Pi is an incredible minimalist alternative to Claude Code, Open Design takes a similar prompt-to-design approach to Claude Design while keeping everything local and open source, and Rowboat is the most recent replacement I've found for Cowork. Rowboat takes the same general idea of an AI coworker, but approaches it very differently. You can connect it to your email and calendar, keep notes and meeting information inside it, and all of that feeds into what Rowboat calls its Brain. Over time, it builds a persistent knowledge graph containing the people, projects, conversations, and other information that come up in my work. That's probably the biggest difference I've noticed compared to Cowork. With Cowork, I usually give Claude the files and context it needs, let it complete a task, and then move on. Rowboat keeps that context around. When I used it to organize an upcoming work trip, for example, it pulled information from emails and my calendar, worked out which commitments were confirmed, spotted gaps in my schedule, and remembered all of that when I asked follow-up questions later. It's also model-agnostic, which makes the whole replacement much more appealing. Rowboat supports models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, and others, along with local models through Ollama. The above does mean replacing Claude this way isn't quite as simple as installing one app and calling it a day. I'm effectively replacing its individual products with different open-source tools instead. But once I realized I could recreate the parts of the Claude subscription I actually use without being locked into Anthropic's ecosystem, continuing to pay for the bundle became much harder to justify. Open Notebook NotebookLM, I won't miss you If you've read my work before, you know by now that I'm a massive NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) fan. The reason why I've always advocated for it is because it doesn't do what every other AI chatbot does, and is designed to work with your own sources. Instead of relying on its internal training day or scouting the web, you give it the material you actually want it to work with, and its responses stay grounded in those sources. However, NotebookLM's free tier is barely usable with its tight limits. This is why I'm subscribed to Google AI Pro, which retails for $20/month. Open Notebook is the open-source alternative that made me realize I don't necessarily need to be. The tool follows largely the same philosophy as NotebookLM. You can feed it PDFs, links, text files, YouTube videos, and PowerPoint presentations, then summarize, ask questions about, and generate insights from those sources. It can even create podcast-style episodes from them, which was one of the features that initially made NotebookLM so compelling to me. Where Open Notebook actually goes further is the amount of control it gives you. NotebookLM decides which Gemini models sit underneath the experience, whereas Open Notebook lets you choose the language model, embedding model, and even text-to-speech model yourself. You can plug in models from providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or xAI, or keep the entire setup local if you have the hardware for it. The trade-off is that Open Notebook takes considerably more effort to get running. I had to set it up through Docker, configure the models I wanted to use, and add API keys before I could really get started. And if you use paid APIs, Open Notebook itself being free doesn't mean your usage will be. The fully free route is to pair it with local models instead. Still, that's a setup cost I'm much happier dealing with once than another subscription hitting my card every month. Actual Budget No more hurting my budget to manage my budget Budgeting apps are another category where I've somehow ended up paying a subscription for something that feels like it shouldn't really require one. YNAB was the one I used, and while it worked well enough, paying continuously just to keep track of where my money was going (ironic, right) eventually started bothering me. Actual Budget turned out to be a surprisingly easy replacement. It's a free, open-source budgeting app built around the same general envelope-style approach as YNAB. You create categories for things like bills, eating out, shopping, or travel, assign money to each one, and can immediately see how much you have left to spend in each category. The part I appreciated most was that switching didn't mean rebuilding my entire budget from scratch. Actual Budget can import an existing YNAB budget, so I could bring my previous data across instead. It also supports importing transactions from CSV files, which means I don't necessarily need to connect my bank account to another service just to keep everything updated. Once the data is there, Actual gives you detailed reports showing where your money is going and how your spending changes over time. There's also a custom report builder, so if I want to see something more specific, like how much I've budgeted for travel compared to what I've actually spent over several months, I can build a report around exactly that. It's also local-first, so I can keep my financial data on my own machine rather than automatically handing it over to another company's cloud. You can take things further and set up syncing or bank connections if you want to, but for the way I use a budgeting app, the local setup already covers most of what I need! Free never hurt anyone While I'm no fan of spending time setting up tools from scratch and giving up on my existing systems, I'd rather save money in the longer run than keep paying for subscriptions simply because they're convenient!