We pick an open-source SaaS tool, read its pricing page, run the math, and tell you what's actually worth paying for. New teardown most weeks.
Re-verified weekly via an automated Firecrawl check on each tool's pricing page — see Last verified on each post.
Appsmith dropped hourly billing in 2025. It's now $15/user/month, Apache 2.0, and the free tier caps at 5 users. Here's what changed and what it means.
Cal.com has a real free tier for individuals, $12/seat Teams, $28/seat Organizations — and an MIT license that makes self-hosting genuinely frictionless.
Chatwoot is MIT-licensed for almost everything — except the enterprise directory, which ships under a separate commercial license and requires a paid subscription to run in production.
ClickHouse Cloud starts at $66/month for Basic and $499/month for Scale — with a free trial but no permanent free tier.
We tore down 20 open-source tools in 2026 and compared them to 2023: usage rates fell, AI credits arrived, and the SSO tax moved up a tier.
Metabase pricing: Starter at $100/mo, Pro at $575/mo, Enterprise from $20k/year — and the open-source edition still runs free under AGPL with almost everything except embedded analytics.
PostHog meters 13 products separately, with 1M free events a month and identified-event overages from $0.000198 down to $0.0000010 at scale.
ToolJet went from one flat seat price to five cloud tiers, added AI credits to every plan, and kept AGPL — while Appsmith, the closest comparable, ships under Apache 2.0. That difference matters more than the per-seat number.
Dify has 139k GitHub stars and a modified Apache 2.0 license that quietly bans multi-tenant use. Here's how the cloud pricing actually works — and why the licensing is the real story.
Documenso has 12.7k GitHub stars, AGPL-3.0 licensing, and a $250/month Platform tier that quietly bets on DocuSign's per-envelope pricing being the competitor's biggest weakness. Here's how it actually works.
Langfuse open sourced almost everything under MIT. The cloud pricing is usage-based with a $170 cliff between Core and Pro — here's what you're actually paying for.
Coolify flips the PaaS model: you pay $5/month but your apps run on your own servers. Here's why the 'bring your own infra' play works.
Grafana has five active billing meters and a $25k/year enterprise cliff with nothing in between.
Infisical uses MIT for the core and a proprietary license for enterprise features. The clever part is what counts as an 'identity.'
Novu's free tier has 24-hour log retention, making it a dev environment, not a production one.
Temporal starts at $100/month with no free tier -- a deliberate signal that this is serious infrastructure.
Twenty CRM at $9/user/month exposes how much of Salesforce and HubSpot pricing is brand tax.
Windmill splits users into developers and operators at half the price -- a smart model for internal tools.
n8n charges per workflow execution, not per step. Here's why that matters for complex automations with AI chains and conditional branching.
Plane is an open-source Jira/Linear alternative you can self-host. Integrations are positioned as a deliberate growth lever — here's how the pricing works.
Firecrawl has one of the smartest GTM setups in open source. The trick isn't in the pricing page — it's in the licensing.
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