Alternatives
Products that do what Kill SaaS with Open Source does
KillSaaS is my answer to subscription software in the AI era. I'm building this because I believe small teams can use modern AI tools to create free alternatives to giants like Figma and DocuSign in weeks, not years. We're creating a platform where developers vote on which SaaS to replace, then build it together as open source. wdyt?
- 1MN
Hi guys, I've created an open source web builder framework (https://grapesjs.com) years ago, which I'm still maintaining, and now I'm excited to publish a side project based on it, Grapedrop (https://grapedrop.com). It's a simple web page builder which allows you to design and publish your web pages very quickly. The project is still in beta with a lot of stuff to improve but I'd really like to share it and hear what people think about it and maybe also get some constructive feedback.
2018
- 2IV
For the last several years I've been creating a ERP platform, Stockor. While I'm going to continue offering it as a SaaS, I've decided to also open-source it. I'm hopeful that by doing so it will: 1) Grow it into a Wordpress size juggernaut with a plugin for any business process under the sun. 2) Bring me interesting consulting gigs. The open-source site is at stockor.org. There's a demo up at stockor.com/demo as well. Looking forward to hearing HN's thoughts!
2014
- 3OB
2020 · opensource.builders
- 4IM
Hey HN, When I was learning to code I was always intrigued to see the guys on twitter making money with a SaaS. I always wondered how to make them and after a few months I developed my own. I wanted to share a Boilerplate for any new devs who are wondering how to start their own SaaS or wonder how things work. Boilerplate comes with Auth, Payments, UI and all the good stuff. Ali
2024 · github.com
- 5SC
I setup this up about two months ago and seeded it with a variety of questions about stuff SaaS related but it ultimately ran out of steam. I truly think there's a need for real honest to goodness web forum for SaaS enthusiasts as forums often turn into a gold mine of quality content as the user base grows and matures. So this is my attempt to get this thing some exposure and get some users for it. It's not meant as a replacement for Hacker News at all, as HN is a perfect platform for trends and current news. But I think it's lacking when it comes to fostering long term topic discussion…
2011
- 6SC
Hey Guys, I set this up a while ago and have tried a variety of things to get it really kicked into gear, and this is my newest attempt. The forum is meant as a community for anyone involved in startups and specifically SaaS based systems (Software as a Service). I know, why a forum when we have HN? My opinion is because HN is inherently temporal/trend based, whereas a forum can maintain conversations that last months (or even years sometimes). As participation grows in a forum, it only becomes more valuable to both newcomers and veterans alike. So I see SaaSaholics.com being in a symbiotic…
2011
- 7WM
We've recently made our product, ozma.io, open-source. It's a CRM/ERP platform for building enterprise systems. We believe that AI will soon handle implementing most of the boilerplate and UIs in the specialized business software. Just look at what lovable.dev does today! Soon products which make creating business software easier for developers will become obsolete, or transform into "libraries" to be used by AIs. We are losing this race, so we go the second route — publish everything and go on building other products on top of it. GitHub repo URL:…
2025 · github.com
- 8SA
Hi HN, I built SubTrack to help teams find unused SaaS tools and cloud resources before they silently eat into budgets. The motivation came from seeing how hard it is to answer simple questions: – Which SaaS tools are actually used? – Which cloud resources are idle? – What will our end-of-month spend look like? SubTrack connects to tools like AWS, GitHub, Vercel, and others to surface unused resources and cost signals from one place. Recently I added multi-account support, currency localization, and optional AI-based insights to help interpret usage patterns. This is an early-stage project…
Jan 2026 · subtrack.pulseguard.in
- 9WB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS, GCP, and Azure spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. I have been building Usage AI for almost 4 years now (4 year anniversary in 1 month from now!) with an incredible group of founding people. We started as a product just to help lower AWS EC2 costs, and now we do all major AWS services (such as RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift with more on the way) and other…
2024
- 10
It's called learnfrom.co, a platform for creating, hosting and selling online courses. I started building it because I wanted to solve a problem I had with existing course platforms. I kept running into things I wanted to change, so I started building them myself. The problem: I wasn't really a software engineer. Instead, I started using AI to build the product. I'd describe what I wanted, let it write the code, test it, fix things when they broke, and repeat. That somehow turned into a real product. LearnFrom is now used by 100+ creators and businesses, with real students and real payments…
12d ago · learnfrom.co
- 11IB
My best friend and I developed a SaaS last month while working full-time: Chyrid (chyrid.com). It’s a tool for creating digital manuals without design or coding skills. Users build structured, polished documents with a drag-and-drop editor, and Chyrid handles the formatting—without using AI. We built it because most documentation tools are either too complex or too unstructured. A company is already using it for onboarding and process docs, but we’re still figuring out how to position it and who finds it most useful. Would love any thoughts on potential use cases or feedback on the concept.…
2025 · chyrid.com
- 12IB
Hey HN, I kept seeing the same question asked over and over in startup communities: "What tech stack should I use for my SaaS?" The answers were always scattered, opinionated, and never accounted for budget or team size. So I built appstackbuilder.com — you tell it your monthly budget, app type, team size, and skill level, and it recommends a full stack (auth, database, hosting, payments, analytics, etc.) with actual pricing for each tool. A few things that make it different from generic advice: - It accounts for team size when calculating costs (e.g. Clerk charges per user, Linear charges…
Feb 2026 · appstackbuilder.com
- 13SN
Hey HN I’m Daniel, a fullstack developer from Sydney Australia and founder at Saas Ninja (https://saasninja.io/). Saas Ninja provides a suite of simple tools/APIs on a monthly subscription basis that help Product Teams sell, monitor and develop their Saas Products. The idea for Saas Ninja came during my last employment contract working for a startup. We needed a number of monitoring tools for our product and each provider I researched was often over-complicated for what we wanted and was priced more towards a monitoring connoisseur than a startup developer. With looming…
2018
- 14WB
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 15IB
Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 16OH
I'm Fenil, co-founder/CEO of OpenFunnel (YC F24), building this with my co-founder/CTO Aditya. We're launching OpenBenchmarks (https://openbenchmarks.com), open-source, reproducible benchmarks for SaaS APIs, starting with the category we know best: GTM APIs. ## Why we built this More and more B2B software evaluation will/already runs through reasoning models inside agentic workflows rather than through people. And buyers increasingly pick vendors that are API-first and ship MCPs, so they can wire them into internal workflows. Strong reasoning models are skeptical of…
Jul 2026 · openbenchmarks.com
- 17AB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…
2022
- 18AR
Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh
- 19OS
2021 · github.com
- 20IB
Disclaimer it is a heavily AI assisted project. The goal was not to be the most performative but the kind that's easier to learn from. I wanted to share this in case there are people who had the same idea or wanted to see something like this.
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 21EO
Like many of you, we've spent the last two years dealing with requests to sprinkle LLM-powered features everywhere. One recurring problem we faced in almost every project was related to data governance. In most cases, it was extremely hard to implement the needed granular control over the retrieved data. We developed custom solutions each time, but when we realized most of the solutions could be reused in subsequent projects, we started thinking about creating a modular framework. Today we're releasing that framework! We've already built some modules using open-source solutions such as…
2024 · github.com
- 22SS
Hi HN! I’ve been building startfa.st, a curated directory of AI, developer, and product tools. Link: https://startfa.st Like many people building in AI/dev, I found myself drowning in new tools every day, everything from agents, deployment frameworks, auth platforms, workflow engines, model APIs, automation tools, design tools, security stacks, etc. There’s constant novelty, but it’s very hard to find signal. Most lists on the internet recycle the same names. So I built startfa.st to solve my own discovery problem. What startfa.st is A fast, searchable, hand-curated index of…
Nov 2025 · startfa.st
- 23ES
Hi HN, I got tired of rebuilding the same boilerplate for every side project — auth, billing, dashboards, waitlists, email flows, SEO metadata, launch pages… you know the drill. Most “SaaS starters” still require stitching together a bunch of external tools — Zapier, Intercom, Mailchimp, analytics, Stripe, etc. That ends up being fragile and expensive. So I built EliteSaaS to solve that. What’s included: • Auth, user management, password reset • Stripe subscriptions (recurring billing + coupons) • Admin dashboard, user table, impersonation • Built-in email flows and campaign manager (uses…
2025 · elitesaas.dev
- 24
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