Demand first. Build second.

Most wanted replacements

What SaaS subscription do you hate paying for? Vote it up. The strongest demand becomes the next Subless Challenge — so the community decides what should exist before anyone writes a line of it.

117 subscriptions nominated · 0 votes cast

1

Heroku

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

Push a repo, get a running process and a database. The developer experience is what survives, not the infrastructure.

2

Netlify

$228/year

0 people want this replaced

Static hosting with build hooks, redirects and form handling.

3

Vercel

$240/year

0 people want this replaced

Git push to a live URL with preview deployments. Coolify and Dokploy already do this on your own server.

4

Framer

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Site building with real interactions and publishing. Same advice: take the publishing half.

5

Webflow

$168/year

0 people want this replaced

Visual site building that outputs clean markup, plus hosting and a CMS. Ambitious for a week — scope it to the CMS and hosting half.

6

Sanity

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Headless CMS with a configurable editing interface and real-time collaboration.

7

Contentful

$3,600/year

0 people want this replaced

Headless CMS: define content types, edit entries, read them over an API. The price is the reason this keeps getting rebuilt.

8

Ghost

$108/year

0 people want this replaced

Open source already; the subscription is managed hosting. Cataloguing it beats rebuilding it.

9

Buffer

$72/year

0 people want this replaced

Queue posts across networks on a schedule, with a calendar view. Each network's API is the tax.

10

Ko-fi

$72/year

0 people want this replaced

A tip jar with a page, one-off payments and memberships. Payments are Stripe; the rest is a weekend.

11

Gumroad

$0/year

0 people want this replaced

Free, then 10% of every sale forever. A product page, checkout via Stripe, file delivery and a licence key covers most sellers.

12

Clockify

$48/year

0 people want this replaced

Team time tracking with timesheets and per-project rates.

13

FreshBooks

$228/year

0 people want this replaced

Invoices, recurring billing, payment links and a reminder when a client is late.

14

Harvest

$132/year

0 people want this replaced

Time tracking that turns straight into an invoice, with expenses attached.

15

Toggl Track

$108/year

0 people want this replaced

Start and stop a timer against a project, then a report you can invoice from. Idle detection is what stops the data being fiction.

16

Copy.ai

$432/year

0 people want this replaced

Short-form copy generation with workflow chaining.

17

Jasper

$468/year

0 people want this replaced

Marketing copy from templates with a brand voice. Templates plus a stored style guide over any model.

18

QuillBot

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Paraphrasing, summarising and citation help in one pane.

19

Grammarly

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Inline grammar and tone suggestions as you type, everywhere you type. The editor integration is the product now that models are commodity.

20

Rev

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Transcription and captions with a decent editor and SRT export.

21

Descript

$288/year

0 people want this replaced

Edit video by editing its transcript: delete a sentence, the audio and video follow.

22

Fireflies.ai

$216/year

0 people want this replaced

Joins the call, transcribes, and produces action items. Joining the meeting reliably is the hard part, not the transcript.

23

Otter.ai

$204/year

0 people want this replaced

Recorded audio to a searchable transcript with speakers separated. Open speech models make this a week, not a year.

24

CloudConvert

$108/year

0 people want this replaced

Convert between a long tail of formats. Mostly a queue in front of ffmpeg, LibreOffice and ImageMagick.

25

TinyPNG

$48/year

0 people want this replaced

Drag images in, get them meaningfully smaller without visible loss. One job, done well.

26

Dropbox

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Sync is infrastructure, but shared links with expiry and password cover most of why people pay.

27

PandaDoc

$228/year

0 people want this replaced

Proposals from templates with pricing tables, then signature. The template and pricing table are the differentiator.

28

DocuSign

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Send a document, place signature fields, collect signatures in order, and produce an audit trail that stands up.

29

iLovePDF

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

The same toolbox, with OCR and batch processing.

30

Smallpdf

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Merge, split, compress, convert and sign a PDF in the browser. Doing it client-side means files never leave the machine.

31

Superhuman

$360/year

0 people want this replaced

$30 a month for speed and a keyboard shortcut for everything. Both are reproducible in a week on top of IMAP.

32

Unroll.me

$0/year

0 people want this replaced

Free because it sells your inbox data. Finding subscriptions and unsubscribing in bulk is a small, honest tool.

33

SaneBox

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

Sorts an inbox into important and later using your own reply history. Works over IMAP, no client to replace.

34

Beehiiv

$468/year

0 people want this replaced

Newsletter publishing with growth tooling and a referral programme.

35

Substack

$0/year

0 people want this replaced

Free until it takes 10% of your paid subscriptions. Publishing, an archive page, and paid tiers are the pieces to replace.

36

ConvertKit

$348/year

0 people want this replaced

Newsletters with tag-based segmentation and automation sequences for creators.

37

Mailchimp

$240/year

0 people want this replaced

Subscriber lists, a campaign composer, scheduled sends and open rates. Sending is a provider's job; the list and the composer are yours.

38

Maze

$1,188/year

0 people want this replaced

Unmoderated usability tests on a prototype with task success and time metrics.

39

Frill

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

Feedback board, roadmap and changelog widget in one.

40

Productboard

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

Collect feedback, group it into features, score and put them on a roadmap. The grouping is the work.

41

Canny

$948/year

0 people want this replaced

A public board where users post and vote on requests, with statuses and a changelog. Small product, striking price.

42

Close

$348/year

0 people want this replaced

CRM built around calling and emailing from inside the record, with sequences.

43

Pipedrive

$168/year

0 people want this replaced

A pipeline you drag deals across, with activities that nag you. Deliberately narrow and very cloneable.

44

HubSpot CRM

$240/year

0 people want this replaced

Contacts, companies, deals in stages, and a log of what was said. The logging habit matters more than the features.

45

Front

$228/year

0 people want this replaced

Shared inbox with assignment and comment threads on messages, for teams answering from one address.

46

Help Scout

$264/year

0 people want this replaced

Shared inbox that looks like normal email to the customer, with internal notes and saved replies.

47

Zendesk

$660/year

0 people want this replaced

Tickets from email, assignment, statuses and macros. Email threading that does not fragment is the hard requirement.

48

Crisp

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

Site chat with a shared inbox and a knowledge base. Smaller surface than Intercom, so a closer target.

49

Intercom

$468/year

0 people want this replaced

A chat widget, a shared inbox behind it, conversation history per visitor, and saved replies. The widget is easy; the inbox is the product.

50

Auth0

$420/year

0 people want this replaced

Hosted login with social providers and sessions. Security-critical, so scope it to a thin wrapper over proven libraries rather than inventing anything.

51

Pusher

$588/year

0 people want this replaced

Hosted websockets with channels and presence. A week gets you the channel model on your own server.

52

OneSignal

$108/year

0 people want this replaced

Web and mobile push with segments and scheduling. Token handling across browsers is the real work.

53

Cloudinary

$1,188/year

0 people want this replaced

Upload an image, get resized and reformatted variants from a URL, cached at the edge.

54

Algolia

$600/year

0 people want this replaced

Typo-tolerant instant search with faceting. Meilisearch and Typesense already do this — worth cataloguing rather than rebuilding.

55

PagerDuty

$252/year

0 people want this replaced

On-call schedules, escalation when nobody acknowledges, and a way to silence a storm of alerts at 3am.

56

Statuspage

$348/year

0 people want this replaced

A public page of component states, incident timeline and email subscribers. Must be hosted somewhere separate from the thing it reports on.

57

Pingdom

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Uptime and page-speed checks from several regions with alerting.

58

Better Stack

$348/year

0 people want this replaced

Uptime checks, on-call rotation and a status page in one. The rotation logic is the only fiddly piece.

59

UptimeRobot

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

Ping a URL every minute, alert when it fails twice in a row, keep an uptime history. Genuinely a weekend's work.

60

Sentry

$312/year

0 people want this replaced

Catch an exception, group it by fingerprint, show a stack trace with release and user context, alert once rather than a thousand times.

61

LaunchDarkly

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Feature flags with targeting rules and instant rollback. A week gets you flags, rules and an SDK.

62

Statsig

$1,800/year

0 people want this replaced

Feature flags plus experiment analysis in one place. Flags are trivial; the statistics are what you are buying.

63

Fathom Analytics

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Privacy-first analytics with a single dashboard and no cookie banner. Deliberately small.

64

Hotjar

$384/year

0 people want this replaced

Heatmaps and session replay. Replay is a lot of plumbing; heatmaps alone already answer most questions.

65

Amplitude

$588/year

0 people want this replaced

Product analytics with cohorts and user paths. Cohort definition is the hard part, not the charts.

66

Google Analytics

$0/year

0 people want this replaced

Free in money, expensive in privacy and consent banners. Pageviews, referrers and a funnel cover what most sites actually read.

67

Glide

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

Turns a sheet into a mobile-shaped app. The row-level permission model is the interesting part.

68

Softr

$288/year

0 people want this replaced

Client portals and directories on top of Airtable or a database, with per-user row filtering.

69

Budibase

$60/year

0 people want this replaced

Internal apps over a database with a built-in table store. Also open source.

70

Appsmith

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Open source already. Worth cataloguing so teams stop paying for the same thing.

71

Retool

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Internal admin panels from tables, forms and buttons over your own database, with a SQL query per component.

72

IFTTT

$42/year

0 people want this replaced

One trigger, one action, for consumer services. Simplicity is the product.

73

Make

$132/year

0 people want this replaced

Visual scenario builder with branching and iterators. The canvas is the differentiator over Zapier's list.

74

Zapier

$360/year

0 people want this replaced

Trigger on a webhook or a poll, run a few steps, handle failures visibly. Retry and error visibility are what people pay for.

75

Things

$36/year

0 people want this replaced

Personal task manager with a genuinely good today/upcoming split. Paid once per platform; listed for the cloud sync.

76

Todoist

$48/year

0 people want this replaced

Natural-language task entry, projects, recurring rules that actually work, and a today view.

77

Shortcut

$102/year

0 people want this replaced

Stories, epics and iterations for engineering teams, without Jira's configuration surface.

78

Height

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

Task tracking with a chat thread attached to every task, so decisions live with the work.

79

Basecamp

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Per-project message board, to-dos, docs and a check-in question. Opinionated, small, very cloneable.

80

Trello

$72/year

0 people want this replaced

Boards, lists, cards, drag and drop. The original weekend-project-shaped product.

81

ClickUp

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Tasks with a dozen view types. Pick two views and most of the value survives.

82

Monday.com

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Colourful boards with custom columns and automations. The automations are what justify the price.

83

Asana

$132/year

0 people want this replaced

Tasks with assignees and due dates, projects as lists or boards, and a per-person 'my tasks' view that is the actual daily surface.

84

Jira

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Issues, sprints and a board. The minimum most teams need is a fraction of what they are billed for.

85

Linear

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Issue tracking that stays out of the way: keyboard navigation for everything, cycles, and git branch linking. Speed is the feature.

86

Smartsheet

$108/year

0 people want this replaced

Sheet-shaped project tracking with Gantt, dependencies and approval flows.

87

Baserow

$60/year

0 people want this replaced

Open source already. Listed so people find it before paying for something equivalent.

88

Rows

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

A spreadsheet that can call APIs in a cell and publish itself as a small app.

89

Slite

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Team docs with a question-answering search over the wiki, so people stop asking in chat.

90

Confluence

$72/year

0 people want this replaced

Team wiki with spaces, page trees, comments and permissions. Search that actually finds old decisions is the bar.

91

Obsidian Sync

$48/year

0 people want this replaced

The editor is free; the subscription is encrypted sync and version history across devices. Sync is the replaceable half.

92

Bear

$36/year

0 people want this replaced

Markdown notes with tags, fast search and sync. Deliberately small, which makes it the honest one to clone.

93

Evernote

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Notes with attachments, tags, and search that finds text inside images. Web clipping is what people actually stay for.

94

Coda

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Documents where tables are real data and buttons run actions. The formula layer is the product.

95

Notion

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Block editor, nested pages, and databases with table and board views. Most teams use a tenth of it — that tenth is a week's work.

96

Excalidraw Plus

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

The editor is open source; the subscription is hosting, sharing and workspaces. That is the part worth replacing.

97

Lucidchart

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Diagramming with shape libraries, connectors that stay attached, and export that survives being pasted into a doc.

98

Whimsical

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Flowcharts, wireframes and mind maps with opinionated defaults so diagrams look tidy without fiddling.

99

FigJam

$60/year

0 people want this replaced

Collaborative sticky-note canvas with cursors, timers and voting dots. The workshop rituals matter more than the drawing tools.

100

Miro

$192/year

0 people want this replaced

Infinite canvas, sticky notes, two people editing at once, and an invite link that works without signup. Everything else in Miro is optional.

101

Snagit

$60/year

0 people want this replaced

Capture with a real annotation editor: arrows, step numbers, blur for sensitive data, and templates.

102

Droplr

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Screenshots, screen recording and file drops behind one hotkey and one link.

103

Loom

$180/year

0 people want this replaced

Screen plus webcam, shareable the moment you stop recording, with a transcript. Instant availability beats video quality every time.

104

CleanShot X

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Capture with annotation, scrolling capture, and a cloud link. One-time licence in reality, listed because the cloud tier is a subscription.

105

Carrd

$24/year

0 people want this replaced

One-page sites from a template with a form and custom domain. Cheap enough that the point is proving how little is needed.

106

WeTransfer

$144/year

0 people want this replaced

Send a large file by link, with expiry and a download notification. No account for the recipient, ever.

107

Beacons

$120/year

0 people want this replaced

Link-in-bio with a store, email capture and a media kit. The store is the only non-trivial part.

108

Linktree

$60/year

0 people want this replaced

One page of links behind a handle, with click counts and a theme. A weekend project that somehow charges monthly.

109

Dub.co

$288/year

0 people want this replaced

Link shortening with per-link analytics, custom domains and team workspaces. Already open source — worth pointing at rather than rebuilding.

110

Formstack

$600/year

0 people want this replaced

Forms with approval routing and document generation. The routing workflow is the product; the form builder is commodity.

111

Paperform

$288/year

0 people want this replaced

Forms embedded in prose rather than stacked in boxes, with calculations and payment collection.

112

Tally

$348/year

0 people want this replaced

Forms that feel like writing a document. Notion-style block editor, hidden fields, and a free tier generous enough that the paid one is about branding.

113

Jotform

$408/year

0 people want this replaced

Form builder with file uploads, conditional fields, payment fields and a submissions inbox. Uploads and spam resistance are the hard bits.

114

SurveyMonkey

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

Multi-page surveys, question types beyond text, response filtering and CSV export. Aggregate charts per question matter more than the builder.

115

Typeform

$300/year

0 people want this replaced

One question per screen, branching logic, and results you can actually read. The conversational feel is mostly transitions and keyboard handling.

116

Reclaim.ai

$96/year

0 people want this replaced

Turns recurring tasks and habits into calendar blocks that reschedule themselves when meetings land on top of them.

117

Clockwise

$84/year

0 people want this replaced

Finds and defends focus blocks by shuffling movable meetings. The scheduling maths is small; the value is doing it automatically every day.