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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Startup Tapes #008 — Mårten Mickos of MySQL / HackerOne

Successful open-source companies don't open-source software

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Startup Tapes #008 — Mårten Mickos of MySQL / HackerOne launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1IO

    Hi HN, I'm Mohammed, a technical founder who loves shipping and giving back to the community. I'm open-sourcing the full-stack engine that powers my B2B product, apflow.co. What it is: A production B2B starter with a Go backend and Next.js frontend. Both are fully Dockerized with separate containers. No Vercel. No Supabase. Deploy the whole thing on a $6 VPS, or split frontend and backend across different providers. You own the infrastructure. The problem I was solving: Every SaaS starter I evaluated had the same issue: they locked me into someone else's platform. Vercel for hosting.…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2IA

    A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!

    2010 · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Open SaaS▲505

    Open-source & 100% free React & Node.js SaaS starter

    2024 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Free, open-source SaaS starter kit with superpowers

    Oct 2025 · opensaas.sh · its alternatives →

  5. 5OS

    Hey HN! I'm the developer of one of the most popular Android clients for HN, Harmonic for Hacker News. Over the years I have recieved many requests to open source the app which I am finally doing - sorry about taking so long :) Having been very busy working on my PhD during the last two years - Harmonic has not recieved the attention it deserves. I therefore hope that open sourcing it can give it a new lease on life. I also hope that by posting here many of the nice people who have reached out to me will notice that the app is finally open source. I'm also happy to answer questions about the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Search great, curated posts by investors and operators

    2016 · its alternatives →

  7. 7IV

    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 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    and building an international SaaS company

    2017 · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Fosshub▲79

    An open source for free and open source tools

    2015 · its alternatives →

  10. 10MW
  11. 11

    Deploy like Vercel but full-stack applications + databases.

    Jun 2026 · better-paas.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12OS

    We believe the best software is built when devs seriously use the thing they're building. We're a mobile dev tools company (emergetools.com), but we don't actually build & ship "apps"... until now. Excited to share our first open-source app: Hacker News for Android Any feedback/PRs very welcome on the repo. We also wrote about why we built and open-sourced this HN app here: https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/open-sourcing-emerge-...

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13CL

    Hey people! I have been compiling a database of opensource alternatives and I'm super proud of it so far. It serves as a searchable directory for high-quality opensource. After tons of hours I've managed to compile a database of 1000+ opensource software. I've seen other sites which have the same premise and all the GitHub Awesome Lists, but they lack in showing if the repo is active, abandoned, experimental, buggy/unstable, has a restrictive license or corporate influence like this does. Thanks for your time, if you have any recommendations for features/additions I'd love to hear.

    Feb 2026 · opensrc.me · its alternatives →

  14. 14WR

    Tl;DR Save 60% of development effort building your SaaS and enterprise apps using our open-source platform, demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gob4j072Isg Hi friends, It's a bit surreal writing a Show HN post, being a HN member since 2012, but I'm still excited to be here. We are Arek and Michal (hn: mgl), and we have published Openkoda - an open-source low-code platform for the rapid development of SaaS and enterprise applications. OUR STORY We met at the university and spent the next 10 years building high-performance applications for finance, eCommerce and travel…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15SL

    So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)

    2011 · its alternatives →

  16. 16IL

    Hey Guys, We created Leadmachine after a HUGE pivot on ignite100(UK incubator). We could see the pain of all the other startups wasting money and buying poor leads while struggling to find those early customers. Wouldn't it be cool to have contact details for all websites using Olark or Google analytics while turning over £100,000 in the UK? We can do that with Leadmachine. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have or listen to feedback!

    2012 · leadmachine.io · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Free replacements for Slack, Notion, Figma & 60+ paid tools

    May 2026 · osalfinder.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18HC
  19. 19AP

    I am an indie hacker and have been launching my products on Product Hunt. Like many of you here, my experience with PH sucked: Lots of bots. Hard to compete. There's also been many new launch platforms coming up, but all of them make you compete for upvotes. Ugh. So I have been working on something different: https://saascurate.com/ It's a community-driven platform where indie hackers and SaaS founders help each other grow their products. The idea is simple - list your product, engage with other founders, gain exposure and social proof. No upvote system. It's hard and…

    2025 · saascurate.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20HN

    I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.

    2011 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21OS

    I got tired of collecting open source projects in my chrome bookmarks so I decided to compile a curated list of: - Recently active projects on GitHub - Mostly dev tools (but also productivity, analytics) - Projects which are "Alternative to X software" My bookmarks are finally empty:D If you have a great open source tool you use, I'd be glad to hear your suggestions. Also, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

    2025 · alternativeoss.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22KS

    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?

    2025 · kill-saas.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23HN

    Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…

    2011 · its alternatives →

  24. 24LS

    We built this using investor tools. I really wanted to know which startups to work for. Are we on the right track? PS - there's a paywall but if you want to explore more, just DM me your email and I'll give you free access in our db!

    2023 · usemassive.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →