Somewhere between your productivity apps and your cloud storage, you’re probably paying hundreds—maybe thousands—of dollars a year in subscriptions. But at the same time, you can’t really help it because these tools genuinely save you time and help you get more done. Fortunately, I’ve found five powerful free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives that can do the same job without emptying your pocket.
Super Productivity
The FOSS app that killed three of my subscriptions at once
Super Productivity is probably the most feature-packed FOSS app I’ve come across. At its core, it’s a task manager, but it also bundles in time tracking, habit tracking, and a bunch of tools specifically aimed at keeping you focused and avoiding procrastination.
The basics work like you’d expect—you can create tasks, organize them into projects, add tags, attachments, subtasks, and set time estimates. But there are a few things—power user features—that make it stand out. There’s a planner view to see what’s due and when, a Kanban board to track progress, and even an Eisenhower matrix if you want to get serious about prioritization. Global shortcuts let you capture a task or note the moment it pops into your head, which is genuinely useful when a distracting thought comes up mid-work—you just log it and move on instead of going down a rabbit hole.
Being a FOSS app, everything lives locally on your PC by default. However, you can sync the data file using Syncthing or Dropbox to get your tasks on your phone as well.
For me, Super Productivity replaced Todoist, Trello, and Toggl—which together were costing me over $100 a year. But honestly, the bigger win is harder to put a number on. It’s pulled me out of what I can only describe as procrastination purgatory—that miserable state where you’re delaying working, but can’t relax either, because you know you have work to finish.
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Upscayl
Stopped me from paying the 4K tax
Upscayl is an AI-powered image upscaler that runs completely locally on your hardware, which means your files never leave your machine. It’s great for upscaling your private family photos—stuff you don’t want ending up on someone’s servers. That said, I personally use it for upscaling wallpapers and other visual assets.
As a content creator, I constantly need high-resolution images—for thumbnails, social shares, you name it. But most screenshots you take or images you find online are nowhere near that quality. Upscayl lets me take those and upscale them up to 4x the original resolution. It ships with several AI models optimized for different types of images, so you’re not getting a one-size-fits-all result with weird graphical artifacts. You can also batch process potentially hundreds of images by pointing Upscayl to a specific folder.
The most obvious way Upscayl helps you save money is by killing subscriptions to premium AI upscaling tools like Topaz Gigapixel. But the savings go beyond just that. A lot of stock photo sites offer FHD images for free and lock the 4K versions behind a paywall. With Upscayl, I just grab the free version and upscale it myself. Same thing with AI image generation. If you’re using something like Midjourney, generating at 4K eats into your credits fast. But with Upscayl, I can simply generate the image at FHD quality and upscale it afterward.
One thing worth knowing is that the speed depends heavily on your GPU. With a decent one, a 4x upscale can take just a few seconds—faster than most online tools with overloaded servers, and without the hassle of uploading and downloading a massive file. But if you’re running it on CPU only, it’s going to take significantly longer, albeit with same picture quality.
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OpenWhispr
The dictation upgrade that saved my wrists and my wallet
This is probably my favorite app on this list right now, and it’s genuinely changed how I work day to day. OpenWhispr is a voice-to-text dictation app that lives on your system and types out what you say directly into whatever app your cursor is in. You hold a button, talk, let go, and the transcribed text appears.
Now, you might be surprised to hear this, but I’ve always hated typing. I’m not particularly fast, at around 60–70 WPM and I get wrist pain when I type for long hours. As such, I’ve always relied on dictation tools. The old-school option was Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was both expensive and, by modern standards, not accurate enough.
Newer AI-powered tools are much better, but they’re still asking for $10+ a month—things like Whisper Flow or Super Whisper. However, the thing is, all of these tools are running OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, which is itself free and open-source. So technically, you could just install Whisper yourself and use it for free. I have been doing that for a while, but it’s a bit technically cumbersome and unintuitive.
Thanks to OpenWhispr, I now have a polished, user-friendly experience like those premium tools, just without the subscription. And because it’s also running Whisper under the hood, the accuracy is exactly the same.
However, I would like to mention that Whisper is very GPU-hungry. You’ll want around 6GB of VRAM for fast real-time transcription. That said, OpenWhispr also supports NVIDIA Parakeet, which is generally faster and lighter on resources—and it’s actually preferable if you’re only working in English. For anyone without a GPU, there’s also an option to connect your OpenAI API key and offload the transcription to their servers. You still pay, but it’s a tiny fraction of what those premium subscriptions cost.
Now, beyond live dictation, OpenWhispr can also transcribe audio files, capture transcriptions during meetings, clean them up with an LLM, and even reformat them into structured text.
OpenWhispr is open-source but follows a freemium model. If you lack the dedicated hardware for fast on-device transcription, you can subscribe to their paid plans for cloud-based transcription at a reasonable rate.
Ollama
Run LLMs locally and save on API costs
Ollama is probably the most technical app on this list, in the sense that you’ll need to interface with the terminal to set it up. That said, it’s just entering a couple of very intuitive commands, so it’s not necessarily complicated.
Basically, it lets you download and run large language models directly on your local machine, and then allows other AI-powered apps to interact with it through a local API. Because Ollama mimics OpenAI’s API structure, it slots into almost any AI tool that supports an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
As such, instead of paying for API access to a cloud model, you just point the tool at your local Ollama instance and it works. For example, you can connect it to tools like OpenClaw, Claude Code, and OpenAI’s Codex, and use your local AI for all the text and code generation—keeping all your prompts and data private.
Personally, I use it to power my n8n workflows—a self-hosted, free alternative to tools like Make.com or Zapier for building complex automations. I use Ollama to run Qwen3.5 9B at 4-bit quantization—works great on my RTX 3060—and connect it via the local API to n8n. The setup handles all my automation-focused tasks without breaking a sweat—things like extracting content from messages, assigning tags, renaming screenshots, and moving files to the right folders.
Beyond keeping my data off corporate servers, it’s also saved me a significant chunk in API costs that I’d otherwise be spending to run these same automations through a paid service.
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Handbrake
Cloud storage providers hope you never learn about this one
Handbrake is probably the most well-known app on this list, so there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of it. It’s a video transcoding tool, and if you have a decent GPU, it can compress your videos down to a fraction of their original size—typically around 60–75 percent smaller—without any noticeable quality loss.
I travel a lot, and I’m more of a video person than a photo person. After a single trip, I’ll usually come back with 200-300GB of raw footage. Multiply that across four or five trips a year, and you’re looking at close to 1TB of video every year. Without Handbrake, that would mean either constantly buying new hard drives or paying for cloud storage to keep up. Handbrake helps me cut that expense by 75 percent.
The workflow is simple too—you can point it at an entire folder and queue everything up for overnight encoding while you sleep. The quality stays the same regardless of whether you’re using a GPU or not. The only difference is speed. On my RTX 3060, Handbrake compressed a 14-minute, 2.2GB video down to around 450MB in just under four minutes. On CPU alone, that same job can take closer to 30 minutes—provided it’s a reasonably modern processor. So if you have a GPU, use it. If you don’t, just set it running before bed and it’ll be done by morning.
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Five apps. Zero subscriptions. Full productivity.
FOSS has come a long way, and these five apps are proof that you don’t have to choose between saving money and staying productive. I don’t miss any of the apps or workflows they’ve replaced, and I’m saving hundreds of dollars a month because of them.
