“Paid link shorteners cost money every month for something that's really just a lookup table.”
Gordon McDonald, on news.ycombinator.com ↗
Bitly wants $10 a month to remember that one URL means another URL. Jinx is a text file on GitHub Pages and it remembers for free.
FlightConnections bills $39.99 a year to show you where the planes go. FSAtlas plots 170,000 real routes on your own server and bills nobody.
“It's designed for flight simmers, virtual airline pilots, and aviation hobbyists who want realistic route inspiration for their next flight with powerful filters for MSFS, X-Plane, or Prepar3D without needing a paid subscription like FlightConnections.”
Adobe wants $14.99 a month to merge two PDFs. S-PDF runs on your own box and merges them for the cost of electricity.
“A fast, self-hosted, open-source alternative to Adobe Acrobat / iLovePDF. Merge, split, convert, watermark, compress and visually edit PDFs from a clean, modern web UI - no subscriptions, no watermarked exports, no uploads to a third party.”
Slack bills you per head, per month, forever. Deft puts chat, tasks and notes on your own server and bills you nothing.
“This started with three things: wanting Slack to do more, a growing resentment of SaaS bills, and getting slightly too obsessed with self-hosting.”
Built something because a company wanted your credit card for a feature that fits in a single file? That's spiteware. Submit it and join the hall of fame.
