“basically every IELTS prep tool out there is SaaS. You get two free mock tests, then a paywall, and your essays and progress data live on someone else's server.”
Luis Miguel Báez, on reddit.com ↗
IELTS prep sites give you two mock tests and then a paywall. IELTS Mastery Hub gives you all of them and keeps your essays on your own laptop.
CapCut lets you edit the whole video, then wants a subscription at the Export button. Concat exports for free and never learned the word watermark.
“I was really excited to complete and upload my first video ever, and everything seemed perfect until I clicked Export and it showed a popup saying that I had to pay a monthly subscription fee to use the most trivial features like voice changers.”
Speechify charges $29 a month to read text out loud. Earful reads your PDFs, books and photos of pages aloud on your own device, for nothing.
“The popular reading apps lock the basics behind a subscription of around $139 a year.”
GEOlayers 3 charges $329.99 to put a map in After Effects. LazyMapLayers does the globe-to-street flight for nothing, forever, no key.
“Paid map plugins for After Effects work, but they are expensive, depend on paid data partners, and still show their seams: blurry zoom steps, labels that pop, moves that stop halfway.”
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