{
"count": 516,
"tools": [
{
"slug": "a0-dev",
"name": "a0.dev",
"url": "https://a0.dev",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-React-Native mobile builder",
"price": "Free (limited messages, 1 project) · Pro $20/mo (100 messages/day) · $50 / $100 / $200 and up",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates real React Native (Expo) projects — actual component files and navigation stacks, not a webview wrapper — with Convex or Supabase for data plus built-in AI inference and image-generation APIs. It runs the build, creates your App Store Connect listing, and uploads it for you.",
"why": "The shortest distance from prompt to an app sitting in review on both stores, because it owns the build and submission step that normally eats a week. Source export unlocks at Pro.",
"warn": "The free plan caps you at one project and cannot export code — you need Pro to get the source out. Message caps, not compute, are the binding constraint on real work.",
"install": "Apple Developer Program ($99/yr) and Google Play ($25 one-time) accounts are still required."
},
{
"slug": "anything",
"name": "Anything (formerly Create.xyz)",
"url": "https://www.anything.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-app builder with integrations",
"price": "Free tier · Pro $19/mo (20K credits) · Max $199/mo (220K credits)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Rebranded from Create.xyz. Generates React and Tailwind web apps deployable to Vercel or Netlify, with 40+ prebuilt integrations and code export on every plan. Max adds parallel agents, a 1M-token context window, and visual QA driven by a computer-use agent that clicks through your app.",
"why": "The integration catalogue is the draw — Stripe, auth and third-party APIs land pre-wired instead of as prompts you babysit. Max's automated visual QA is rare at any price on this list.",
"warn": "Rebranded from create.xyz to anything.com, so older tutorials and links are stale. Credits do not roll over month to month, and it targets React web only — no React Native or Expo export."
},
{
"slug": "base44",
"name": "Base44 (Wix)",
"url": "https://base44.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "All-in-one no-code AI app builder",
"price": "Free 25 message credits/mo (5 apps) · Starter $16/mo · Builder $40/mo · Pro $80/mo · Elite $160/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates a complete app with hosted database, auth, permissions, hosting and integrations already wired — no Supabase or Firebase setup at all. Two-way GitHub sync and ZIP export arrive on Builder and above. Wix acquired it in June 2025 for $80M and runs it as a distinct product.",
"why": "The fastest zero-config path from prompt to a working internal tool with login and a database, because you never touch infrastructure. Best for non-technical operators who want the app live, not the repo.",
"warn": "You own the source but not the runtime: exported code is full of base44-sdk calls that only resolve against Base44's hosted auth and database. Moving off-platform is a rewrite, not a redeploy.",
"install": "Enable GitHub sync from project settings on Builder plans and above."
},
{
"slug": "bolt-new",
"name": "Bolt.new (StackBlitz)",
"url": "https://bolt.new",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "In-browser full-stack app builder",
"price": "Free 300K tokens/day, 1M/mo · Pro $25/mo (10M tokens, rollover) · Teams $30/member/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Runs a real Node toolchain inside the browser via StackBlitz WebContainers, so npm install, dev server and terminal all work client-side. Generates Vite, React and Next projects, deploys to Netlify or Vercel, and exports to GitHub or ZIP. A May 2026 Microsoft partnership added Azure deploy and Microsoft 365 integration.",
"why": "The closest thing to a real dev environment in a browser tab — you watch and edit the file tree while the agent works. Pick it over Lovable when you want framework freedom and terminal access rather than a guided rail.",
"warn": "Token-metered, and failed builds or error loops still burn tokens. The free tier's 300K daily ceiling is consumed by one meaningful feature. WebContainers cannot run native binaries or Python, so some backends are simply off the table.",
"install": "Prefix any GitHub repo URL with bolt.new to import it directly."
},
{
"slug": "dyad",
"name": "Dyad",
"url": "https://www.dyad.sh",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Local open-source AI app builder",
"price": "Free and open source (bring your own keys) · Pro $20/mo (200 credits) · Max $79/mo (900 credits)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A desktop app for macOS and Windows that builds full-stack JavaScript apps locally using your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or local model keys. Supabase integration covers database, auth and functions; deploy to GitHub, Vercel or your own cloud. Apache 2.0 apart from src/pro, with 21K+ GitHub stars.",
"why": "The zero-lock-in answer: no signup, no per-token platform markup, and your source and prompts never leave the machine. The obvious pick for client work under NDA, or for anyone tired of credit meters.",
"warn": "You pay model providers directly, so a runaway agent loop hits your API bill with no platform-side cap. There is no hosted preview URL or built-in deploy target — you wire hosting yourself.",
"install": "Download the macOS or Windows build from dyad.sh; no account required."
},
{
"slug": "emergent",
"name": "Emergent",
"url": "https://emergent.sh",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Multi-agent autonomous app builder",
"price": "Free 10 credits/mo · Standard about $17-20/mo (100 credits) · Pro about $167-200/mo (750 credits) · Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Multi-agent system that plans, codes, tests and deploys, generating React or Next.js frontends on Node.js or FastAPI with MongoDB. It screenshots the running UI to verify its own work and asks clarifying questions. Every change pushes to your private GitHub repo, and Expo covers mobile.",
"why": "The most autonomous builder on this list — hand it a vague brief and it self-diagnoses and retries instead of stalling on the first error. Best for long unattended runs, not fast visual tweaks.",
"warn": "Live deployments cost roughly 50 credits a month on top of build credits, so the 10-credit free tier cannot host anything. Minor visual edits trigger 5-minute rebuilds, and browser previews expire after 30 minutes."
},
{
"slug": "figma-make",
"name": "Figma Make",
"url": "https://www.figma.com/make/",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-prototype inside Figma",
"price": "Starter free 500 credits/mo (150/day) · Pro $16/seat/mo (3,000) · Org $55/seat (3,500) · Enterprise $90/seat (4,250) · $0.03/credit overage",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates working React and Tailwind prototypes from prompts inside a Figma file, with Supabase for auth, storage and private API calls, and publishing through Figma Sites. Previews can be pasted back into Figma Design as editable layers so design and prototype stay aligned.",
"why": "Unbeatable when the design system already lives in Figma — Make kits pull your real components and tokens, so output matches the brand instead of shadcn defaults. Best for designer-led prototypes needing stakeholder sign-off.",
"warn": "Code export is the weak point: the download is a proprietary .make binary the Figma API rejects, and extracted React needs manual fixes to versioned imports, image paths and Tailwind config before it runs. Requires a Full seat — Dev, Collab and View seats cap at 500 credits."
},
{
"slug": "google-ai-studio",
"name": "Google AI Studio (Build mode)",
"url": "https://aistudio.google.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Gemini prompt-to-app playground",
"price": "Free with Gemini API quota · paid Gemini API usage · Google AI Pro/Ultra raise limits",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Build mode turns a prompt into a full-stack app: a React frontend with a Node.js backend runtime for secure API calls and npm packages, or a Kotlin and Jetpack Compose Android project. Export as ZIP, sync to GitHub, or deploy straight to Cloud Run. Your Gemini key is injected server-side.",
"why": "Google's designated Firebase Studio replacement and the cheapest serious builder here — there is no credit meter, only Gemini API quota. Best when the app is itself Gemini-powered, since model access is native rather than bolted on.",
"warn": "Prototype-grade polish next to Lovable or v0, and shared apps bill Gemini calls against your own quota. Free API tiers are rate-limited, and Google may use free-tier data to improve its products."
},
{
"slug": "google-firebase-studio",
"name": "Google Firebase Studio",
"url": "https://firebase.studio",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Cloud IDE with Gemini prototyping agent",
"price": "Free · 3 workspaces (10 with Google Developer Program, 30 Premium) · Blaze billing for App Hosting",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browser IDE built on Code OSS with an App Prototyping agent that turns a prompt into a Next.js or React app wired to Firebase. Supports Flutter and React Native workspaces plus full Git access to the generated code. Google announced its sunset on 19 March 2026.",
"why": "Was the cheapest way to get a Gemini-built app sitting directly on Firestore and Firebase Auth with no credit meter anywhere. Only relevant now for finishing and migrating workspaces you already have.",
"warn": "Shutting down. New workspaces and signups were disabled 22 June 2026, and the service shuts off 22 March 2027 with remaining data deleted. Google directs users to AI Studio or Antigravity; Firestore and Auth are unaffected."
},
{
"slug": "hostinger-horizons",
"name": "Hostinger Horizons",
"url": "https://www.hostinger.com/horizons",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-web-app with hosting bundled",
"price": "Free 5 credits, 1 site · Explorer $6.99/mo (30) · Starter $13.99/mo (70) · Hobbyist $39.99/mo (200)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Builds web apps and stores from prose with an integrated backend, database, user accounts, Stripe payments and an AI chatbot. Paid plans bundle a free domain, hosting and email for one year. Source code can be downloaded at any time to run on a VPS.",
"why": "By far the cheapest paid entry, and the only one where hosting, domain and email arrive on the same bill. Voice and image prompting plus built-in e-commerce make it a strong fit for small-business sites.",
"warn": "Exported code is converted to a static site and cannot be imported back into Horizons for further prompting — export is a one-way exit. No GitHub import, and no SSH or FTP access."
},
{
"slug": "lovable",
"name": "Lovable",
"url": "https://lovable.dev",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-fullstack web app builder",
"price": "Free 5 credits/day (30/mo cap) · Pro from $25/mo · Business from $50/mo · top-ups $15 per 50 credits",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Chat-driven builder that emits real React + Vite + TypeScript + Tailwind + shadcn/ui, backed by Supabase or the managed Lovable Cloud. Two-way GitHub sync and ZIP export mean you keep the code. The free tier grants 5 build credits a day, hard-capped at 30 a month.",
"why": "The most polished prompt-to-app loop for non-Next.js React work, and the one non-developers actually finish projects in. Visual edit mode plus GitHub sync lets a designer ship and a developer take over later.",
"warn": "No native Next.js and no Python backend, and it cannot start from an existing GitHub repo — you rebuild. Daily credits never roll over, and leaving Lovable Cloud means migrating your database to your own Supabase.",
"install": "Connect GitHub in project settings for two-way sync, or download a ZIP."
},
{
"slug": "mocha",
"name": "Mocha",
"url": "https://getmocha.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Vertically integrated app builder",
"price": "Free 20 one-time credits, 1 app · Bronze $20/mo (1,500) · Silver $50/mo (4,500) · Gold $200/mo (20,000)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates React and TypeScript apps with database, auth and hosting all built in and deployed to Cloudflare. You can download the project source from the app menu, but there is no GitHub sync yet, and no way to bring your own database or host it elsewhere.",
"why": "The fewest decisions of any builder here — no Supabase key, no Vercel account, no deploy step. Good for a solo founder who wants a live URL in ten minutes and does not care where it runs.",
"warn": "Cloudflare-only deployment, no GitHub sync and no bring-your-own database — portability is the price of the simplicity. The free tier's 20 credits are one-time rather than monthly, and free apps carry Mocha branding."
},
{
"slug": "replit-agent",
"name": "Replit Agent",
"url": "https://replit.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Cloud IDE with autonomous build agent",
"price": "Starter free (daily agent credits, 1 published app) · Core $25/mo ($25 credits) · Pro $100/mo ($100 credits) · effort-based usage",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A full cloud IDE where Agent 3 plans, writes, tests and deploys in any language — Node, Python, Go — with built-in Postgres, object storage and hosting. You get a real filesystem and shell, and can export or push to GitHub at any time.",
"why": "The only entry here that is a genuine development environment rather than a code generator with a preview pane. Reach for it when the app needs a background worker, a cron job, or a language other than TypeScript.",
"warn": "Effort-based pricing means you do not learn a task's cost until after it runs, and you are billed for failed attempts too. After Agent 3 shipped, users reported weekly bills near $1,000 against a prior $200/month. Set a spend cap first.",
"install": "Set a hard usage limit under Account then Usage before running long agent tasks."
},
{
"slug": "riff",
"name": "Riff (formerly Databutton)",
"url": "https://riff.ai",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Business/internal app builder",
"price": "Free start · $20/mo agent + community · $700/mo with human support · $4,000+/mo with an advisor",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates React frontends on a Python FastAPI backend, aimed at data-heavy internal tools with native connections to HubSpot, Google Sheets, Stripe, Notion and Mixpanel. The agent shows a task plan before it spends anything. Renamed from Databutton after a $16M Series A led by Northzone.",
"why": "The only mainstream builder with a real Python backend, so pandas work, scripts and data pipelines live inside the app rather than an external service. Aimed at analysts building operational tools, not consumer products.",
"warn": "Renamed from Databutton in late 2025 and databutton.com now redirects, so older docs and links are unreliable. Support tiers jump from $20 to $700 a month with nothing in between."
},
{
"slug": "rork",
"name": "Rork",
"url": "https://rork.com",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-mobile-app builder (Expo)",
"price": "Free (limited, public only) · Junior $25/mo 100 msgs · Middle $50/mo 250 · Senior $100/mo 500 · Max $200/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Builds cross-platform React Native + Expo apps for iOS, Android and web, previewable instantly by QR code in Expo Go. Paid plans unlock private projects, source export and App Store or Google Play publishing. Rork Max is a separate $200/mo product that builds native Swift apps.",
"why": "The mobile-first rival to a0.dev with a faster preview loop — scan a QR code and the app is running on your phone in seconds, no simulator. Max is the only tool here emitting native Swift.",
"warn": "Free-plan projects are public and cannot be exported or published, so the free tier is a demo only. One message equals one prompt regardless of size, so a button-color tweak costs the same as an auth system.",
"install": "Budget Apple Developer ($99/yr) and Play Console ($25) fees on top of the subscription."
},
{
"slug": "softgen",
"name": "Softgen",
"url": "https://softgen.ai",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Next.js + Firebase app builder",
"price": "$33/year membership + at-cost AI tokens via wallet top-up · 3-day trial for $3 in tokens",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Builds full-stack Next.js + React + Tailwind + shadcn apps on Firebase Auth and Firestore, across a dozen frontier models. Paying members get collaborator access to the project's real GitHub repo and keep it permanently. Production hosting is not bundled; you deploy to Vercel and Firebase yourself.",
"why": "The cheapest genuine ownership model here: a $33 annual membership plus AI tokens billed near wholesale, instead of a marked-up credit meter. Good if you build a lot and do not mind wiring your own hosting.",
"warn": "No free tier and no monthly plan — the wallet must stay funded and unused tokens do not roll over. Hosting is your problem, which surprises people expecting a one-click live URL."
},
{
"slug": "tempo",
"name": "Tempo",
"url": "https://www.tempo.new",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "React app builder turned PR factory",
"price": "Free 30 credits/mo (5/day) · Pro $30/mo (150 credits) · Agent+ $4,500/mo human-assisted",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Started as a visual prompt-to-app builder generating React and Next.js only, with a drag-and-drop editor that mutated real source rather than a mockup, plus GitHub export. It has since repositioned as an AI software factory that turns customer feedback and issues into reviewed pull requests.",
"why": "Its plan-first multi-agent flow drafts user flows and architecture before writing code, which cuts the rework that burns credits elsewhere. Flat one-credit-per-message pricing with free error fixes is unusually predictable.",
"warn": "The product has pivoted toward team pull-request workflows and away from solo prompt-to-app building, so the vibe-coding surface may keep shrinking. React and Next.js only — no Vue, Svelte or Angular."
},
{
"slug": "v0",
"name": "v0 (Vercel)",
"url": "https://v0.app",
"cat": "build",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Prompt-to-Next.js app builder",
"price": "Free $5 credits/mo, 7 messages/day · Plus $30/user/mo · Business $100/user/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vercel's agentic builder producing Next.js + React + TypeScript + Tailwind + shadcn/ui, with backend logic via Server Actions and API routes. Every chat gets its own GitHub branch with auto-commits merged by pull request, plus one-click Vercel deploy. Design Mode adds visual control over spacing, type and color.",
"why": "The best fit if your team already lives on Next.js and Vercel — output is idiomatic shadcn code a senior developer will accept in review. It also imports existing repos, which Lovable cannot.",
"warn": "Credits are dollar-denominated and drain fast on long agent runs; the free tier's 7 messages a day is a demo, not a workflow. Output assumes Vercel hosting conventions throughout.",
"install": "Push to GitHub from the chat menu, or deploy to Vercel in one click."
},
{
"slug": "aider",
"name": "Aider",
"url": "https://aider.chat",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Terminal pair programmer (OSS)",
"price": "Free and open source (Apache 2.0) · BYO API key",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The original terminal AI pair programmer, Apache-2.0 with roughly 48k stars and still actively developed. It builds a repo map of your codebase, edits files in place, runs linters and tests, and auto-commits every change with a written message. Works with almost any LLM, including local models.",
"why": "Git-native discipline: every AI edit lands as its own commit, so git diff and git revert are your undo button. It is the cheapest serious option because you pay only raw API tokens, and it scripts cleanly into CI.",
"warn": "No GUI and no MCP-style tool ecosystem; the interaction model is chat plus file mentions, which feels dated next to fully autonomous agents.",
"install": "python -m pip install aider-install && aider-install"
},
{
"slug": "antigravity-cli",
"name": "Antigravity CLI (ex-Gemini CLI)",
"url": "https://antigravity.google",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Terminal coding agent (Google)",
"price": "Free tier · Google AI Pro ~$20/mo · Ultra ~$100/mo · Ultra Max ~$200/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google retired Gemini CLI on 18 June 2026 and replaced it with Antigravity CLI, whose binary is agy. It keeps the terminal-first workflow and adds background subagents. One Google plan covers eight models from three labs: Gemini 3.5 Flash and 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6, and GPT-OSS 120B.",
"why": "The most generous free terminal agent, and the only one that bills Anthropic, OpenAI and Google tokens to a single subscription with no second API key. Gemini's long context still wins on whole-repo questions.",
"warn": "Gemini CLI stopped serving free, Pro and Ultra users on 18 June 2026; only paid Gemini Code Assist licences keep it alive. Google has cut the Antigravity free limits repeatedly since launch.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://antigravity.google/cli/install.sh | bash"
},
{
"slug": "augment-code",
"name": "Augment Code",
"url": "https://www.augmentcode.com",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Team agent platform (Cosmos)",
"price": "$100/mo Business (up to 50 seats, $100 usage included) · Enterprise custom",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Built on a Context Engine that parses a repo structurally rather than treating code as flat text, which made it unusually strong on very large legacy codebases. During 2026 the company retired completions and moved off IDE extensions to Cosmos, a standalone SDLC platform wired into GitHub, Jira, Slack and CI.",
"why": "Still the strongest option for million-line monorepos where retrieval quality decides whether the agent is useful at all. A flat $100 a month for up to 50 seats is rare value, since you pay for usage rather than headcount.",
"warn": "No free tier and no individual plan any more; new customers must adopt Cosmos, and the legacy IDE extension survives only for existing enterprise contracts. Poor fit below roughly five developers."
},
{
"slug": "cline",
"name": "Cline",
"url": "https://cline.bot",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Open-source agent (VS Code/CLI)",
"price": "Free and open source (Apache 2.0) · BYO key or pay-as-you-go credits",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An Apache-2.0 autonomous coding agent with roughly 64k GitHub stars, shipping as a VS Code and JetBrains extension, a CLI, an SDK and a web kanban board. Its Plan/Act split makes the agent draft an approach before touching files, and every diff and terminal command needs approval by default.",
"why": "The transparency pick: you see every diff and every command before it runs, and you pay providers directly with no markup. Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama and 200+ models via OpenRouter, so nothing is locked in.",
"warn": "BYO-key means costs are unbounded and easy to underestimate — one long agent session on a frontier model can run to several dollars.",
"install": "Install 'Cline' from the VS Code marketplace"
},
{
"slug": "continue-dev",
"name": "Continue.dev",
"url": "https://github.com/continuedev/continue",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Archived OSS assistant + CLI",
"price": "Free (Apache 2.0, archived) · hosted platform shut down",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "For years the leading open-source, fully configurable IDE assistant, with VS Code and JetBrains extensions plus the cn CLI and a Mission Control agent platform. Cursor acquired the team on 18 June 2026; the hosted service shut down on 15 July, and the repo shipped a final 2.0.0 release and went read-only.",
"why": "Still worth knowing because the Apache-2.0 code is a clean reference for building your own assistant, and the final release stripped telemetry and login requirements, so a pinned 2.0.0 build runs fully offline against local models.",
"warn": "Abandonware as of mid-2026. Pinned builds keep working, but provider APIs will drift and nobody upstream is fixing it. Migrate to Cline, Kilo Code or OpenCode."
},
{
"slug": "cursor",
"name": "Cursor",
"url": "https://cursor.com",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "AI-native IDE (VS Code fork)",
"price": "Free Hobby · $20/mo Pro · $60/mo Pro+ · $200/mo Ultra · $40/user/mo Teams",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The market-leading AI-first code editor, a VS Code fork from Anysphere. It combines fast Tab autocomplete, inline edits and an agent that plans and executes multi-file changes, plus cloud agents and the Bugbot reviewer. Runs its own Composer 2.5 model alongside Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Grok 4.6.",
"why": "The default pick when you want one polished tool that does everything well. Tab completion is still the best in the business, and the autonomy slider takes you from single-line edits to hours-long cloud agents without ever switching apps.",
"warn": "Usage is credit-metered, not unlimited — heavy agent work on Pro burns the included $20 of model spend fast, then bills overage. Anysphere acquired Continue.dev in June 2026, and xAI holds an option to buy Cursor for $60B.",
"install": "Download from cursor.com or brew install --cask cursor"
},
{
"slug": "devin",
"name": "Devin",
"url": "https://devin.ai",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Autonomous cloud SWE agent",
"price": "Free tier · $20/mo Pro · $200/mo Max · $80 + $40/user/mo Teams",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Cognition's autonomous software engineer, delegated to through Slack, Linear or the API rather than driven keystroke by keystroke. It works in its own cloud VM with browser and desktop access, and now spans Devin Review for pull requests, DeepWiki for generated docs, Automations for scheduled work and Security Swarm.",
"why": "The tool for parallel unattended work you hand off and check later: mass migrations, dependency bumps, issue triage and visual QA across many repos at once. Pricing collapsed from the original $500/mo to $20, which changed who can afford it.",
"warn": "Autonomy still needs supervision on unfamiliar code; it is strongest on well-scoped repetitive tasks with good test coverage. Cognition also owns Devin Desktop, the former Windsurf, and the two share one subscription."
},
{
"slug": "devin-desktop",
"name": "Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)",
"url": "https://devin.ai/desktop",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Agentic IDE (VS Code fork)",
"price": "Free (25 credits/mo) · $20/mo Pro · $200/mo Max · $80 + $40/user/mo Teams",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Windsurf, the Cascade-powered AI IDE, was bought by Cognition and renamed Devin Desktop on 2 June 2026. It keeps the editor foundation and Supercomplete predictions but is repositioned as a command center for fleets of local and cloud agents, with Spaces, git worktrees and a kanban review board.",
"why": "Reach for it when you want to supervise several agents at once from a real IDE rather than a terminal. Cognition's in-house SWE-1.7 is very fast and free on Pro, and the Agent Client Protocol lets you swap in Claude or GPT agents.",
"warn": "The windsurf.com domain now redirects to devin.ai — older bookmarks, docs and tutorials that say 'Windsurf' are describing this product. The free tier is only 25 credits a month.",
"install": "Download from devin.ai/desktop"
},
{
"slug": "factory",
"name": "Factory",
"url": "https://factory.ai",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Agent platform (CLI + cloud)",
"price": "$20/mo Pro · $100/mo Plus · $200/mo Max · Business and Enterprise custom",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "An enterprise-oriented agent platform built around Droids, specialised agents for coding, review, migration and knowledge work. It runs as a terminal CLI, desktop app and SDK, with optional Factory-managed cloud machines called Droid Computers, and connects to Jira, Linear, Slack, Sentry and Notion for organisational context.",
"why": "Chosen when the work spans tickets, docs and incidents rather than a single repo, because Droids pull context from the systems around the code. Model-agnostic across GPT-5, Claude Opus and Sonnet, Gemini and open-weight models.",
"warn": "No free tier, so evaluation costs money from day one, and the platform is built for teams — solo developers pay for integrations they may never touch.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://app.factory.ai/cli | sh"
},
{
"slug": "github-copilot",
"name": "GitHub Copilot",
"url": "https://github.com/features/copilot",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Assistant + CLI (all major IDEs)",
"price": "Free (2,000 completions) · $10/mo Pro · $39/mo Pro+ · $100/mo Max · Business and Enterprise",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The incumbent, embedded in VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Xcode, Neovim and github.com, plus a terminal agent called Copilot CLI and a cloud coding agent that opens pull requests. Model choice spans Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, GPT-5 mini and Gemini, selectable per request.",
"why": "The safe institutional choice: your employer probably already pays for it, it works in the IDE you already use, and the free tier with 2,000 completions a month is the lowest-friction on-ramp in the whole category.",
"warn": "Premium requests are the real currency — each agent prompt eats quota, and Pro's $15 of monthly credits goes quickly on Opus-class models. Copilot CLI needs an active subscription and can be disabled by org admins.",
"install": "npm install -g @github/copilot"
},
{
"slug": "kilo-code",
"name": "Kilo Code",
"url": "https://kilo.ai",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Open-source agent (MIT)",
"price": "Free · Kilo Pass from $19/mo · $15/user/mo Teams · BYO key",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An MIT-licensed agent for VS Code, JetBrains, CLI and cloud that merged the best ideas from Cline and Roo Code. It offers 500+ models through its own gateway at provider rates with zero markup, an Auto Model router that picks by task and budget, and a free model tier that needs no card.",
"why": "The pragmatic superset: Roo Code's modes plus Cline's approval discipline, still actively maintained, with genuinely zero-markup inference. The free routing tier is the easiest way to try agentic coding without entering payment details.",
"warn": "Cloud compute is billed separately by the hour (roughly $0.33 to $1.20), so cloud agents and automated code review add cost on top of inference.",
"install": "Install 'Kilo Code' from the VS Code marketplace"
},
{
"slug": "openai-codex-cli",
"name": "OpenAI Codex CLI",
"url": "https://developers.openai.com/codex/cli/",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Terminal coding agent (OpenAI)",
"price": "Bundled with ChatGPT Go $8 · Plus $20 · Pro $100-$200 · Business $25/user · or API key",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "OpenAI's open-source terminal agent, rewritten in Rust, that reads, edits and runs code inside a sandboxed working directory. It is bundled with ChatGPT subscriptions rather than sold separately, and defaults to gpt-5.6-sol at medium reasoning, with Terra and Luna covering cheaper everyday work.",
"why": "If you already pay for ChatGPT this is effectively free extra capacity with no second bill. The Codex models are tuned for long autonomous runs, and the sandbox defaults are stricter than most rivals ship with.",
"warn": "OpenAI models only — no Claude or Gemini. Usage moved to token-based credits in April 2026, and GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 retire on 31 August 2026.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | sh"
},
{
"slug": "opencode",
"name": "OpenCode",
"url": "https://opencode.ai",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Open-source terminal agent (MIT)",
"price": "Free and open source · BYO key · optional Zen credits",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An MIT-licensed terminal agent from Anomaly, and the breakout open-source success of the era with well over 150k GitHub stars. It runs in the terminal, a desktop app or an IDE extension, drives 75+ providers through Models.dev, uses LSP for real language awareness, and runs several sessions in parallel.",
"why": "The vendor-neutral default when you want Claude Code ergonomics without the vendor. Shareable session links make debugging an agent run collaborative, and it has become the harness other products build on, including Roomote.",
"warn": "Optional OpenCode Zen credits start at a $20 top-up; the agent itself is free but you are always paying some model provider.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash"
},
{
"slug": "roo-code",
"name": "Roo Code (now ZooCode)",
"url": "https://github.com/RooCodeInc/Roo-Code",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Archived agent · community fork",
"price": "Free and open source (Apache 2.0) · BYO key",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Cline fork that added named modes (Architect, Code, Debug, Ask and custom personas) plus an Orchestrator that dispatched subtasks between them. Roo Code Inc archived the extension on 15 May 2026 and pivoted to Roomote, a hosted cloud agent. ZooCode is the community fork carrying the Apache-2.0 codebase forward.",
"why": "Its mode system is still the cleanest way to force an agent to plan as an architect before it writes code, with every prompt editable. If you want that workflow maintained use ZooCode; if you want the biggest ecosystem, go back to Cline.",
"warn": "The original extension is dead — the repo is read-only and the marketplace listing is an archive. Do not start new work on it; upstream ships no security or model updates.",
"install": "Install 'ZooCode' from the VS Code marketplace"
},
{
"slug": "sourcegraph-amp",
"name": "Sourcegraph Amp",
"url": "https://ampcode.com",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Agent (terminal, web, mobile)",
"price": "Free ~$10/day · $20/mo Megawatt · $200/mo Gigawatt · PAYG and BYOK",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Sourcegraph's agent, running in the terminal, an editor extension, the browser and on a phone. Long-lived remote machines called orbs keep working after you close the laptop. Amp deliberately tracks the frontier, deleting old workflows rather than accumulating settings, and exposes low, medium, high and ultra effort modes.",
"why": "Best for delegating long unattended jobs: start an orb, close the lid, review from your phone later. The free tier grants around $10 of usage a day, unusually generous for an agent that needs no BYO key.",
"warn": "Amp removes features aggressively and pins you to its chosen frontier models, so workflows shift under you. Free daily allowances are being tightened for older clients and inactive users.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://ampcode.com/install.sh | bash"
},
{
"slug": "trae",
"name": "Trae",
"url": "https://trae.ai",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "AI IDE (ByteDance)",
"price": "Free · $3/mo Lite · $10/mo Pro · $30/mo Pro+ · $100/mo Ultra",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "ByteDance's AI IDE, a VS Code fork that undercuts Western rivals on price while still offering frontier models such as Claude Sonnet, GPT, Gemini and DeepSeek. SOLO, launched 31 March 2026, is a standalone app with a Code mode for the agentic loop and an MTC mode for broader product work.",
"why": "The cheapest route to frontier models in a Cursor-style editor: a real free tier with 5,000 completions a month, and Lite at $3. Good for side projects and for developers priced out of $20 subscriptions.",
"warn": "Privacy is the trade-off: no privacy mode, no telemetry opt-out, no local-only option, and personal data retained for five years after account closure. Many employers ban ByteDance tooling outright."
},
{
"slug": "zed",
"name": "Zed",
"url": "https://zed.dev",
"cat": "ide",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Open-source native editor (Rust)",
"price": "Free Personal · $10/mo Pro · $30/seat/mo Business · BYO key free",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A GPU-accelerated editor written from scratch in Rust by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, released under GPL and Apache licences. Multiplayer editing, an agent panel and edit prediction are built in, and it is a reference implementation of the Agent Client Protocol, so external agents like OpenCode plug straight into the UI.",
"why": "Pick Zed when editor latency matters more than AI feature count — it stays instant on huge files where Electron-based forks stutter. Personal is free forever with your own API keys, and ACP means you are not married to one vendor's agent.",
"warn": "AI features are thinner than Cursor's and extension coverage is far smaller than the VS Code marketplace. Pro bundles only $5 of tokens, then bills API list price plus 10 percent.",
"install": "curl -f https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh"
},
{
"slug": "astro-starlight-nextra",
"name": "Astro Starlight + Nextra",
"url": "https://starlight.astro.build",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Framework docs themes",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two batteries-included docs themes. Nextra (v4) turns a Next.js app into a docs or blog site from Markdown files with almost no config. Astro Starlight builds fully static docs with near-zero client JavaScript, plus built-in i18n, search and dark mode.",
"why": "Starlight is the fastest way to ship docs when you have no Next.js app — one command, drop in Markdown, done. Nextra fits when docs live inside an existing Next.js codebase.",
"warn": "Nextra is more theme than framework, so deep customisation means fighting it, and Fumadocs has taken much of its mindshare. Starlight is still pre-1.0 and needs an Astro project.",
"install": "npm create astro@latest -- --template starlight"
},
{
"slug": "biome",
"name": "Biome",
"url": "https://biomejs.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Linter + formatter (Rust)",
"price": "Free · MIT/Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A single Rust binary that replaces both ESLint and Prettier, at v2.5 with over 500 lint rules, GritQL plugins and a watch mode. It formats and lints JS, TS, JSX, JSON and CSS in one pass, typically many times faster than the tools it replaces.",
"why": "One dependency and one config file instead of a dozen ESLint plugins that fight Prettier over semicolons. For a solo builder it removes the single most annoying setup step in a new repo.",
"warn": "Rule coverage still trails the full ESLint plugin ecosystem — notably some React and accessibility rules — so heavily-linted teams sometimes keep ESLint alongside it.",
"install": "npm install --save-dev --save-exact @biomejs/biome"
},
{
"slug": "bun",
"name": "Bun",
"url": "https://bun.sh",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "JS runtime + package manager",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Zig-based JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner and package manager in one binary, currently at 1.3.x. Most React teams adopt it just as bun install, which is dramatically faster than npm, while still building with Vite.",
"why": "Install times drop from minutes to seconds, and bun x replaces slow npx. You can adopt only the installer and change nothing else about your stack.",
"warn": "Still 1.x, not 2.0. Runtime Node-compat gaps remain for some native modules, so using Bun as installer only is the low-risk path.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash"
},
{
"slug": "chromatic",
"name": "Chromatic",
"url": "https://www.chromatic.com",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Visual regression testing",
"price": "Free tier · Starter $179/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A cloud service from the Storybook team that screenshots every story on each commit and flags pixel differences for review. It adds cross-browser testing, hosted Storybook publishing and PR review workflows. The free tier covers 5,000 snapshots per month.",
"why": "Unit tests do not catch a CSS change that shifts every button four pixels. Chromatic turns 'did this refactor break the UI' into a diff you approve, which matters most when an agent edits shared styles.",
"warn": "Requires Storybook first. Snapshot counts climb fast with many stories and browsers, so the jump from free to the $179/mo Starter plan arrives sooner than expected.",
"install": "npm install --save-dev chromatic"
},
{
"slug": "clsx-tailwind-merge",
"name": "clsx + tailwind-merge",
"url": "https://github.com/dcastil/tailwind-merge",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Tailwind class utilities",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The two halves of shadcn's cn() helper. clsx joins class names conditionally; tailwind-merge (v3) then resolves Tailwind conflicts so a later px-4 actually overrides an earlier px-2 instead of both landing in the class list.",
"why": "Already in every shadcn project as lib/utils.ts. Without tailwind-merge, passing a className prop to override a component's padding silently does nothing — the most common Tailwind bug in AI-written components.",
"warn": "tailwind-merge ships its own copy of Tailwind's class groups, so heavy custom theme values may need extendTailwindMerge to teach it your classes.",
"install": "npm install clsx tailwind-merge"
},
{
"slug": "cmdk",
"name": "cmdk",
"url": "https://cmdk.paco.me",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Command menu",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An unstyled command-palette primitive, v1, from Paco Coursey — the Cmd+K search box pattern. It handles filtering, fuzzy scoring, keyboard navigation, groups and nested pages, and is what shadcn's Command and Combobox components wrap.",
"why": "Already in your project if you used shadcn's Combobox or Command. Building a searchable, keyboard-accessible dropdown by hand is where most homegrown accessibility bugs live.",
"warn": "Its built-in filtering can be slow past a few thousand items — switch to controlled filtering and virtualization. Default scoring sometimes surprises, but you can override filter.",
"install": "npm install cmdk"
},
{
"slug": "conform",
"name": "Conform",
"url": "https://conform.guide",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Progressive form validation",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A form library, v1, built on the native HTML form and FormData rather than controlled React state. It validates the same schema on client and server, so forms keep working without JavaScript. Designed for React Router and Next.js server actions.",
"why": "The right pick when forms submit to a server action and you refuse to duplicate validation rules in two places. For a pure client-side SPA, React Hook Form is the simpler default.",
"warn": "Much smaller ecosystem than RHF and tied to server-first frameworks. It is not what shadcn's Form component expects.",
"install": "npm install @conform-to/react @conform-to/zod"
},
{
"slug": "date-fns-day-js",
"name": "date-fns + Day.js",
"url": "https://date-fns.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Date formatting",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The two live replacements for the deprecated Moment.js. date-fns (v4) is a tree-shakeable set of pure functions with first-class time-zone support. Day.js is a 2KB immutable wrapper with a Moment-compatible API and optional plugins.",
"why": "Relative timestamps, date maths and time zones are where hand-written code quietly breaks across DST and locales. Pick date-fns for tree-shaking, Day.js for the smallest bundle or a Moment port.",
"warn": "Never install Moment.js — it is in maintenance mode and ships huge locale files. The native Temporal API is arriving but is not yet safe to rely on everywhere.",
"install": "npm install date-fns"
},
{
"slug": "embla-carousel",
"name": "Embla Carousel",
"url": "https://www.embla-carousel.com",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Carousel / slider",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A dependency-free carousel engine, v8, with a React wrapper. It handles touch, momentum, looping, autoplay and variable slide widths while leaving markup and styling to you. It is the engine behind shadcn's Carousel component.",
"why": "Carousels look trivial and are not: touch momentum, loop seams and accessibility all bite. Embla is small and unopinionated where older sliders drag in jQuery-era baggage.",
"warn": "Features like autoplay and fade are separate plugin packages. Being headless, you write all the CSS — expect layout work for the slide track.",
"install": "npm install embla-carousel-react"
},
{
"slug": "esbuild-swc",
"name": "esbuild + SWC",
"url": "https://esbuild.github.io",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Fast JS/TS transpilers",
"price": "Free · MIT / Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two native-speed transpilers that made fast JS tooling possible: esbuild (Go) and SWC (Rust). You rarely install either directly — they sit inside test runners, Next.js and older Vite versions. Vite 8 moved to Oxc, so esbuild is no longer in a fresh Vite pipeline.",
"why": "Worth recognising in error messages and lockfiles rather than choosing. When a stack trace blames esbuild or @swc/core, the bug is in your transpile config, not your React code.",
"warn": "esbuild is still pre-1.0 and makes breaking changes at minor versions. Neither tool type-checks — they strip types, so you still need tsc in CI."
},
{
"slug": "eslint-prettier",
"name": "ESLint + Prettier",
"url": "https://eslint.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Linter + formatter (classic)",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The long-standing pair: ESLint (v10) catches bugs and bad patterns via a huge plugin ecosystem, Prettier (v3) reformats code deterministically. ESLint 10 uses flat eslint.config.js config; the old .eslintrc format is gone.",
"why": "Still the default in most scaffolds and the only option if you need niche rules like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y. Without a formatter, AI-generated code arrives in five different styles and every diff is noise.",
"warn": "Flat config broke most older tutorials and many plugins. If you are starting fresh and need no exotic rules, Biome is far less setup.",
"install": "npm install --save-dev eslint prettier"
},
{
"slug": "fumadocs",
"name": "Fumadocs",
"url": "https://fumadocs.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Docs framework for Next.js",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A documentation framework built on the Next.js App Router, v16, shipping as composable React components rather than a closed theme. It includes an MDX content pipeline, typed frontmatter, full-text search, OpenAPI page generation and Shiki highlighting, all styled with Tailwind.",
"why": "The self-hosted answer to Mintlify: similar polish, no monthly bill, and you can drop arbitrary React into any docs page. Being Tailwind-based, it matches a shadcn app's look for free.",
"warn": "Requires Next.js — it will not bolt onto a plain Vite SPA. It ships frequent majors, so pin versions and expect occasional config churn.",
"install": "npm create fumadocs-app"
},
{
"slug": "jotai-valtio",
"name": "Jotai + Valtio",
"url": "https://jotai.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Atomic + proxy state",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two smaller state libraries from the same authors as Zustand. Jotai (v2) builds state from tiny composable atoms with derived values, Recoil-style. Valtio (v2) wraps an object in a proxy so you mutate it directly and components re-render automatically.",
"why": "Reach for Jotai when state is a graph of interdependent values — a form builder or editor — where Zustand selectors get unwieldy. Valtio suits ports of mutable, class-like logic.",
"warn": "Both have smaller communities than Zustand, so AI models generate less reliable code for them. Valtio proxies can surprise you when objects escape into non-React code.",
"install": "npm install jotai"
},
{
"slug": "mintlify",
"name": "Mintlify",
"url": "https://mintlify.com",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Hosted docs platform",
"price": "Free tier · Pro $450/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A hosted documentation platform: write MDX and get a polished docs site with search, an API playground generated from an OpenAPI spec, and analytics. The CLI is source-available under Elastic-2.0 rather than a true open-source licence. The free Starter tier includes five editor seats.",
"why": "The fastest path from zero to docs that look like Stripe's, with no build config to maintain. Worth it when docs are a product surface, unnecessary if a README will do.",
"warn": "The only genuinely commercial tool in this list, and Pro is a steep $450/mo jump from free. You are renting hosting and lock-in — Fumadocs or Starlight are the self-hosted answers.",
"install": "npm install -g mintlify"
},
{
"slug": "nanoid",
"name": "nanoid",
"url": "https://github.com/ai/nanoid",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Unique ID generator",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A tiny URL-safe unique ID generator, v6, around 130 bytes gzipped. It uses the platform crypto RNG and produces shorter IDs than UUID v4 at comparable collision safety, with configurable length and alphabet.",
"why": "You need client-side IDs the moment you do optimistic updates or need React list keys before the server responds. Math.random() collides and Date.now() collides inside loops.",
"warn": "Modern browsers have built-in crypto.randomUUID() — if you do not need short IDs or a custom alphabet, you may not need the dependency at all.",
"install": "npm install nanoid"
},
{
"slug": "nx",
"name": "Nx",
"url": "https://nx.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Monorepo build system",
"price": "Free core · Nx Cloud paid",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A monorepo build system at v23 with the same caching and affected-graph ideas as Turborepo, plus code generators, per-framework plugins and module-boundary rules. The core CLI and local cache are MIT; remote caching and self-healing CI live in the paid Nx Cloud.",
"why": "Pick Nx over Turborepo when you want scaffolding and enforced architecture rules, not just caching. It generates whole libraries wired correctly, which stops an AI agent from inventing a fifth folder convention.",
"warn": "Much more opinionated than Turborepo and harder to remove later. The most valuable features push you toward paid Nx Cloud.",
"install": "npx nx@latest init"
},
{
"slug": "pnpm",
"name": "pnpm",
"url": "https://pnpm.io",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Package manager",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A package manager that hard-links a single global content-addressed store instead of copying packages into every node_modules. Now at v11. Its strict, non-flat layout means a package you never declared cannot be imported by accident.",
"why": "Saves gigabytes across projects and catches phantom dependencies that work locally but break in production. It is the default for most monorepos and the safest npm replacement if Bun feels too new.",
"warn": "The strict layout breaks packages with undeclared peer deps — you may need node-linker=hoisted in .npmrc for stubborn tools.",
"install": "npm install -g pnpm"
},
{
"slug": "react-markdown",
"name": "react-markdown",
"url": "https://github.com/remarkjs/react-markdown",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Markdown renderer",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Renders Markdown to React elements, v10, without dangerouslySetInnerHTML. Built on the unified/remark pipeline, so plugins add GitHub-flavoured tables, math or raw HTML, and you can map any element to your own component.",
"why": "Anything with an LLM in it renders Markdown, and models emit it by default. Because it builds React nodes rather than injecting HTML, you get XSS safety without sanitising strings yourself.",
"warn": "Tables, strikethrough and autolinks need remark-gfm — the frequent 'why is my table plain text' bug. Re-parsing on every token makes streaming chat slow unless you memoize.",
"install": "npm install react-markdown remark-gfm"
},
{
"slug": "redux-toolkit",
"name": "Redux Toolkit",
"url": "https://redux-toolkit.js.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Structured state + RTK Query",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The official, modern way to write Redux, v2. It removes most classic boilerplate with createSlice and Immer-backed mutable-looking updates, and bundles RTK Query for server-state caching. Comes with the Redux DevTools time-travel debugger.",
"why": "Worth it when state changes are complex enough that you need to replay them — checkout flows, editors with undo. The enforced structure also keeps a large AI-written codebase from turning into arbitrary setters.",
"warn": "Still the heaviest option here and overkill for most apps. If a tutorial shows connect or hand-written action-type constants, it predates RTK — ignore it.",
"install": "npm install @reduxjs/toolkit react-redux"
},
{
"slug": "shiki",
"name": "Shiki",
"url": "https://shiki.style",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Syntax highlighting",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A syntax highlighter, v4, that uses real TextMate grammars and VS Code themes, so code looks exactly as it does in the editor. Highlighting can run at build time and output plain styled HTML, shipping zero highlighting JavaScript to the browser.",
"why": "Accuracy beats Prism and highlight.js by a wide margin, and it is now the default in Astro, Fumadocs and VitePress. Any docs page, blog or AI chat that shows code needs it.",
"warn": "Loading every language and theme at runtime is a multi-megabyte WASM plus grammar payload — import only the languages you use, or precompute highlighting at build time.",
"install": "npm install shiki"
},
{
"slug": "sonner",
"name": "Sonner",
"url": "https://sonner.emilkowal.ski",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Toast notifications",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An opinionated React toast component, v2, from Emil Kowalski. Stacked, swipeable, animated toasts with promise-aware variants that show loading then success or error automatically. Now the toast component shadcn/ui recommends, replacing its older one.",
"why": "One import and toast.success('Saved') works anywhere, with no provider plumbing. Without it, silent failures are invisible — users click save, nothing happens, and they click again.",
"warn": "Styling is deliberately opinionated, so deep visual customisation means fighting its CSS variables. shadcn's deprecated toast component is a different API — do not mix tutorials.",
"install": "npm install sonner"
},
{
"slug": "storybook",
"name": "Storybook",
"url": "https://storybook.js.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Component workshop",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A sandbox that renders components in isolation with controls for their props, plus docs, accessibility checks and interaction tests. Storybook 10 is ESM-only, roughly 29% lighter, and adds module automocking and first-class Vitest integration.",
"why": "Lets you build and test a component without clicking through the app to reach it, including error and empty states that are hard to reproduce. Also gives an AI agent a place to verify a component actually renders.",
"warn": "The heaviest tool here: many dev dependencies, its own build, and stories that rot if nobody maintains them. Major upgrades have been painful, and 10 being ESM-only breaks some older addons.",
"install": "npx storybook@latest init"
},
{
"slug": "swr",
"name": "SWR",
"url": "https://swr.vercel.app",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Data-fetching hooks",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vercel's data-fetching hook library, v2, built on stale-while-revalidate: show cached data instantly, refetch in the background. Much smaller and simpler than TanStack Query, with revalidation on focus and reconnect plus pagination and mutation helpers.",
"why": "A lighter alternative when you want caching and revalidation but not TanStack Query's full surface. Common in Next.js codebases, so you will meet it in inherited or AI-generated Vercel-flavoured code.",
"warn": "Thinner feature set: weaker devtools, less capable mutation and invalidation. Most greenfield projects pick TanStack Query instead.",
"install": "npm install swr"
},
{
"slug": "tanstack-query",
"name": "TanStack Query",
"url": "https://tanstack.com/query",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Server-state cache",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A cache for data that lives on a server, currently v5. It handles fetching, caching, deduplication, background refetching, retries, pagination and optimistic updates behind a useQuery hook, and tracks loading and error states for you.",
"why": "The single highest-leverage library in this list. Without it you rewrite the same useEffect plus loading plus error plus stale-data bug in every component, and AI-generated fetch code is exactly where those bugs hide.",
"warn": "It is not a client-state store — do not put form input or UI toggles in it. v5 renamed several options from v4, so older tutorials misfire.",
"install": "npm install @tanstack/react-query"
},
{
"slug": "tanstack-router",
"name": "TanStack Router",
"url": "https://tanstack.com/router",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Type-safe React router",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A React router where routes, params and search params are fully typed. Links autocomplete paths, loaders return typed data, and search params get schema validation. TanStack Start layers server functions and SSR onto the same route tree.",
"why": "A mistyped route string in React Router fails silently at runtime; here it fails in the editor. That matters most when an AI is generating navigation code it cannot test.",
"warn": "Heavier concepts than React Router (now v8) and a smaller community. TanStack Start, the full-stack layer, is newer than Router itself — check its stability before shipping on it.",
"install": "npm install @tanstack/react-router"
},
{
"slug": "tanstack-table",
"name": "TanStack Table",
"url": "https://tanstack.com/table",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Headless data table",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A headless table engine, now v9, that computes sorting, filtering, pagination, grouping, row selection, column resizing and virtualization but renders nothing. You supply the markup, so it drops straight into shadcn table components.",
"why": "The shadcn data-table component is TanStack Table underneath, so you likely already have it. Hand-rolling multi-column sort plus filter plus pagination is a week of subtle bugs.",
"warn": "v9 is a major rewrite over the widely-tutorialised v8, so snippets copied from 2024 will not compile. Headless means you still write all the styling.",
"install": "npm install @tanstack/react-table"
},
{
"slug": "turborepo",
"name": "Turborepo",
"url": "https://turborepo.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Monorepo task runner",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Rust task orchestrator for monorepos from Vercel, at v2.x. It builds a task graph from your package scripts, runs them in parallel, and caches outputs so unchanged packages are never rebuilt. Remote Cache shares that cache across CI and teammates.",
"why": "Once you split a project into web plus API plus a shared UI package, plain npm scripts rebuild everything on every change. Turborepo makes CI skip work it has already done.",
"warn": "Overkill for a single-app repo — it adds config for no gain until you have two or more packages. Hosted Remote Cache is easiest on Vercel, though the API is open and self-hostable.",
"install": "npm install turbo --save-dev"
},
{
"slug": "typescript",
"name": "TypeScript",
"url": "https://www.typescriptlang.org",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Typed JavaScript",
"price": "Free · Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "JavaScript with static types. TypeScript 7.0, released July 2026, is a complete rewrite of the compiler in Go — roughly 10x faster type-checking and editor responsiveness than the JavaScript-based 6.0, which was the final release of the old codebase.",
"why": "Types are the guardrail that makes AI-generated code reviewable: rename a field and the compiler lists every call site instead of leaving a runtime crash. Every shadcn and Lovable scaffold is TypeScript already.",
"warn": "The Go rewrite drops some legacy compiler APIs, so older type-checking plugins and custom transformers may need updates before you move off 6.x.",
"install": "npm install --save-dev typescript"
},
{
"slug": "valibot-arktype",
"name": "Valibot + ArkType",
"url": "https://valibot.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Zod alternatives",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two Zod alternatives that implement the same Standard Schema interface, so they plug into React Hook Form and TanStack the same way. Valibot (v1) is modular and tree-shakes to under 2KB. ArkType (v2) lets you write schemas as TypeScript-like syntax strings.",
"why": "Valibot when every kilobyte counts — edge functions, embeddable widgets. ArkType when you want schemas that read like the types they produce. Standard Schema means switching later is cheap.",
"warn": "Both have far less training data than Zod, so AI-generated code for them is more often wrong. Valibot's per-function import style is verbose.",
"install": "npm install valibot"
},
{
"slug": "vaul",
"name": "Vaul",
"url": "https://vaul.emilkowal.ski",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Drawer / bottom sheet",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A drawer component for React, v1, also by Emil Kowalski, built on Radix Dialog. It gives the iOS-style bottom sheet with drag-to-dismiss, snap points, background scaling and correct focus trapping. shadcn's Drawer component is Vaul.",
"why": "Modals feel wrong on phones and a bottom sheet is the native-feeling answer. Drag physics, snap points and mobile scroll-locking are genuinely hard to get right by hand.",
"warn": "Mobile-first by design — on desktop a normal Dialog is usually better. Nested drawers and inner scroll areas still need care.",
"install": "npm install vaul"
},
{
"slug": "vite",
"name": "Vite",
"url": "https://vite.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Frontend build tool + dev server",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default build tool for React apps outside Next.js. Vite 8 replaced the old esbuild-plus-Rollup pair with Rolldown, a single Rust bundler, plus the Oxc compiler — Vite reports 10-30x faster production builds. Ships a dev server with instant HMR and a new Vite DevTools panel.",
"why": "Every shadcn, Lovable and Bolt React scaffold is a Vite project — you already have it. Knowing vite.config.ts is how you add path aliases, proxies and env vars instead of fighting mystery build errors.",
"warn": "Vite 8 needs Node 20.19+ or 22.12+. The Rolldown swap is mostly transparent, but custom Rollup plugins and esbuild-specific options may need the migration guide.",
"install": "npm create vite@latest"
},
{
"slug": "zod",
"name": "Zod",
"url": "https://zod.dev",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Schema validation",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default TypeScript schema validator, v4 stable. You declare a schema once and get both runtime validation and a static type via z.infer. Around 2KB gzipped for the core, with a smaller zod/mini build for size-critical bundles.",
"why": "The seam where untrusted data — API responses, form input, env vars — becomes typed. TypeScript vanishes at runtime, so without a validator a malformed response becomes an undefined crash three components later.",
"warn": "Zod 4 changed error-handling APIs and some method names from v3, so a v3 tutorial will not paste in cleanly. Very large schemas can slow TypeScript inference.",
"install": "npm install zod"
},
{
"slug": "zustand",
"name": "Zustand",
"url": "https://zustand.docs.pmnd.rs",
"cat": "dx",
"group": "build",
"tagline": "Client-state store",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A minimal global state store, v5, in roughly 1KB. You create a store with a plain function, then read it with a hook that re-renders only the components using the slice that changed. No providers, no reducers, no boilerplate.",
"why": "The default answer once prop-drilling gets painful and Context re-renders everything. Ten lines replace a whole Redux setup, and it pairs cleanly with TanStack Query handling the server half.",
"warn": "No built-in structure, so large stores drift into a junk drawer. Selectors matter: subscribing to the whole store re-renders on every change.",
"install": "npm install zustand"
},
{
"slug": "21st-dev",
"name": "21st.dev",
"url": "https://21st.dev/",
"cat": "core",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Component marketplace + MCP + themes",
"price": "Free (2 copies/day) · $6/mo · $15/mo +AI",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "12,000+ React/Tailwind components in native shadcn registry format, plus ~50 community themes, 29,000 searchable icons, shaders and gradients. Every item exposes an AI-ready prompt written specifically for Lovable, Cursor and Claude Code.",
"why": "The themes page is the fastest visual win you have. A theme here is a shadcn token set — colors, type, radius. Copy the :root/.dark blocks into index.css and the whole app re-skins with zero component edits. Browse the themes page and pick one that matches the look you are already going for.",
"install": "npx @21st-dev/magic@latest"
},
{
"slug": "refero-styles",
"name": "Refero Styles",
"url": "https://styles.refero.design/",
"cat": "core",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "AI-readable design-token library",
"price": "Free (beta) · parent site $12/mo",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "2,000+ design systems reverse-extracted from real production sites and packaged as structured DESIGN.md files documenting colors, typography, spacing and motion. Filter by brand, mood (minimal, editorial, playful), palette or typeface.",
"why": "The single highest-leverage free thing on this list. Instead of telling Claude 'make it feel editorial', hand it exact tokens from a site whose type you admire. Filter by the editorial mood, paste the DESIGN.md as project context, then have Lovable generate to those tokens. An official Refero MCP and two community MCP servers exist.",
"install": "paste DESIGN.md into project context"
},
{
"slug": "shadcn-ui",
"name": "shadcn/ui",
"url": "https://ui.shadcn.com/",
"cat": "core",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Component foundation + registry",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "50+ accessible components built on Radix (now Base UI by default) and Tailwind, distributed as source copied into your repo rather than an npm dependency. Also ships Blocks, Charts, a Themes browser, and the registry protocol. 121k stars.",
"why": "This is already your project. The reason it matters strategically: React Bits, 21st.dev, Magic UI, Kokonut and ElevenLabs UI all publish into its registry, so wiring the official shadcn MCP once gives Claude an install path into every one of them.",
"install": "npx shadcn@latest mcp init --client claude"
},
{
"slug": "radix-ui-primitives",
"name": "Radix UI Primitives",
"url": "https://www.radix-ui.com/",
"cat": "core",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Headless accessibility primitives",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Unstyled, behavior-only components — Dialog, Popover, Select, Dropdown — with focus traps, keyboard nav and ARIA solved. Zero CSS opinions, so no Tailwind conflict. Maintained by WorkOS. You already have it transitively via shadcn.",
"why": "Reach for it when your project needs a component shadcn does not ship — an issue-picker combobox, a lightbox with proper focus management, a filter drawer. Accessibility on a publication site is not optional.",
"warn": "Use Primitives, not Radix Themes — Themes brings its own CSS reset and token system and will fight your Tailwind setup. Also note shadcn defaulted to Base UI in July 2026; do not run both primitive layers.",
"install": "npm install radix-ui"
},
{
"slug": "magic-ui",
"name": "Magic UI",
"url": "https://magicui.design/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Animated components via shadcn CLI",
"price": "Free · MIT · Pro ~$199 once",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "150+ animated components built with React, TypeScript, Tailwind and Motion, explicitly designed as the companion to shadcn/ui. Installs with the exact same CLI you already use. No Three.js dependency; components stay under ~5 kB tree-shaken.",
"why": "Best stack fit of the animated libraries. Animated beams for a table-of-contents, number tickers for circulation stats, shimmer on a subscribe CTA, marquee for a sponsor row — polish without changing anything structural or blowing the image budget.",
"install": "pnpm dlx shadcn@latest add @magicui/globe"
},
{
"slug": "tailwind-plus",
"name": "Tailwind Plus",
"url": "https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Tailwind markup + templates (paid)",
"price": "$299 one-time · $149 per pack",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": true,
"what": "Formerly Tailwind UI, from Tailwind Labs. 500+ copy-paste blocks across Marketing, Application UI and Ecommerce, plus every site template (Catalyst, Spotlight, Salient, Studio, Keynote) and the Catalyst React kit. Built for Tailwind v4.3.",
"why": "The one component purchase I would actually make for a content site. Marketing pages, article headers, pricing and subscribe flows are exactly where default shadcn output looks unfinished, and this is first-party Tailwind markup that pastes straight in. One-time, lifetime, 30-day refund.",
"warn": "React blocks use Headless UI, so you end up with two primitive libraries alongside shadcn's Radix/Base UI. Licence bars repackaging blocks into anything you resell. No update mechanism once pasted."
},
{
"slug": "aceternity-ui",
"name": "Aceternity UI",
"url": "https://ui.aceternity.com/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Animated / visual-effect components",
"price": "Free tier · $199/yr · $299 lifetime",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "200+ copy-paste animated components built with Tailwind and Motion — 3D cards, parallax scroll, spotlight glows, animated text reveals, particle backgrounds. Premium adds hero blocks, feature sections and full templates.",
"why": "Genuinely hard-to-reproduce visual effects for a cover story or a launch page. Dark-mode-first aesthetic, so expect editing to match a lighter editorial palette.",
"warn": "The free components have no clearly published open-source licence — the licence page covers Pro terms only. For commercial project work that ambiguity is a real risk. Also: several components pull in Three.js, and the $199 tier is an annual subscription, not a one-time buy."
},
{
"slug": "ant-design",
"name": "Ant Design",
"url": "https://ant.design/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Enterprise CSS-in-JS library",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Large enterprise React library (v6.x) from Ant Group with its own design language and CSS-in-JS runtime. Unusually deep component set — DatePicker, Tour, Splitter, Masonry, and a complex Table with filtering and sorting.",
"why": "Realistically: skip it. If you need one specific component (the Table), extract the pattern rather than installing antd.",
"warn": "Worst fit on this list. Tailwind's Preflight reset collides with antd styles — long-documented and unresolved by design. The workarounds (disabling or scoping Preflight) break shadcn. Its CSS-in-JS runtime also fights Tailwind's static model."
},
{
"slug": "coss-ui",
"name": "coss ui (was Origin UI)",
"url": "https://coss.com/ui",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Base UI copy-paste components",
"price": "Free / open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Origin UI has been rebranded to coss ui and rebuilt on Base UI primitives — now the design system of Cal.com. 50+ components in three layers (Primitives, Particles, Atoms), copy-paste, explicitly built 'for developers and AI'.",
"why": "Its historic strength was a very large set of input, select, checkbox and slider variants that shadcn ships only one flavor of — useful for subscribe forms, submission portals and contributor onboarding.",
"warn": "Not the library you may be remembering. Old Origin UI was 400+ Radix-flavored components; coss ui is a smaller, differently-architected Base UI library under new branding with some pieces still 'coming soon'. Verify the licence file on GitHub before commercial use."
},
{
"slug": "elevenlabs-ui",
"name": "ElevenLabs UI",
"url": "https://ui.elevenlabs.io/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Audio & voice components (shadcn registry)",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "~22 components built directly on shadcn/ui for audio and conversational interfaces: Orb, Waveform, Live Waveform, Bar Visualizer, Audio Player, Scrub Bar, Transcript Viewer. Installs via the plain shadcn CLI.",
"why": "The audio-edition play. If your project runs interviews, a podcast, or narrated features, the Audio Player, Waveform and Scrub Bar are a finished listening UI you would otherwise build from scratch — and the visual components work standalone with no ElevenLabs account.",
"warn": "The Orb pulls in Three.js and React Three Fiber — heavy for one decorative element. Agent components like ConversationBar require a real ElevenLabs agentId. Docs target Next.js only; Vite works but is undocumented.",
"install": "npx shadcn@latest add https://ui.elevenlabs.io/r/all.json"
},
{
"slug": "heroui",
"name": "HeroUI (was NextUI)",
"url": "https://www.heroui.com/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Styled component library (npm)",
"price": "Free Apache-2.0 · Pro $249–$799",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Formerly NextUI. v3 is a ground-up rewrite on React Aria and Tailwind v4 with 75+ components, CSS variables, OKLCH colors and pure-CSS animations. ~341k weekly npm downloads.",
"why": "Only relevant if you are choosing a complete pre-styled system instead of assembling one.",
"warn": "A competing design system, not a complement. Running it beside shadcn means two button styles, two dialogs and two accessibility layers. Also: v2 and v3 cannot coexist, and Pro is still on v2 — a $249 purchase does not buy you v3 Pro."
},
{
"slug": "kokonut-ui",
"name": "Kokonut UI",
"url": "https://kokonutui.com/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Animated components via shadcn registry",
"price": "Free · MIT · Pro $119 once",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "100+ animation-heavy components built on shadcn/ui with Motion, installed through the standard shadcn CLI so source lands in your repo. Includes animated cards, hero sections, AI-chat inputs, gradient and beam effects, sign-in screens.",
"why": "The 'make this look designed, not generated' layer. Good for contributor cards, issue tiles and newsletter signup blocks.",
"warn": "Authored Next.js-first — some components import next/image or next/link and need one-line swaps in Vite. Small project, single-maintainer.",
"install": "npx shadcn@latest add @kokonutui/"
},
{
"slug": "mui",
"name": "MUI (Material UI)",
"url": "https://mui.com/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Styled library + commercial data grid",
"price": "Core free MIT · MUI X $299–$1,399/dev/yr",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Material Design implementation with 40+ components, styled with Emotion (runtime CSS-in-JS). MUI X is a separate commercial set — Data Grid, Pickers, Charts, Scheduler — with genuinely no free equivalent at the Premium tier.",
"why": "One legitimate use: if you ever need a virtualized data grid with pivoting and Excel export for an internal editorial tool, install only @mui/x-data-grid-premium and leave the rest of MUI out.",
"warn": "Emotion versus Tailwind means two styling systems, two theme sources of truth, and dark mode wired twice. Licence is per developer and MUI enforces it with console warnings and a watermark."
},
{
"slug": "react-bits",
"name": "React Bits",
"url": "https://reactbits.dev/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Animated component library (215 pieces)",
"price": "Free · MIT + Commons Clause",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "215 components — 33 text animations, 52 effects, 58 UI components, 72 backgrounds — each shipped in four variants (JS/TS × CSS/Tailwind). Installs via the shadcn registry. 45k stars. Has an llms.txt listing every component and its exact install command.",
"why": "The text-animation set is the relevant half: SplitText and GlitchText for feature headlines and pull quotes. The WebGL backgrounds (Galaxy, LiquidEther, Plasma) look spectacular and cost hundreds of KB — use at most one, on a landing page.",
"warn": "Components drag in real peer deps: gsap, motion, three, @react-three/fiber, ogl, lenis. Install per-component and read the dep list on each page. Commons Clause bars selling the components themselves.",
"install": "npx shadcn@latest add https://reactbits.dev/r/SplitText-TS-TW"
},
{
"slug": "react-bits-pro",
"name": "React Bits Pro",
"url": "https://pro.reactbits.dev/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Paid blocks + templates + agent kit",
"price": "$69 / $139 / $209 one-time",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "683 items: 134 animated components, 238 landing-page blocks, 300 application-UI blocks, 11 Next.js templates, and a 19-item Agent Kit of design skills and page prompts. Delivered through private shadcn registries authenticated with a licence key.",
"why": "The Agent Kit is the interesting part for you — 8 design skills including an Editorial style, plus page prompts and full-page assembly recipes. Explicitly tested against Lovable.",
"warn": "One seat per licence. The 11 full templates are Next.js and will not port to Lovable's Vite setup without rework. Bars using it to build competing prompt packs or skill libraries."
},
{
"slug": "smoothui",
"name": "SmoothUI",
"url": "https://smoothui.dev/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Micro-interaction components",
"price": "Free · MIT · Pro ~$12–23/mo",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "130 drop-in animated React components focused on micro-interactions — dynamic island, Siri-style orb, animated toggles and loaders. Built for React 19 and Tailwind v4, shadcn-CLI installable.",
"why": "Garnish, not foundation. Pick one signature interaction for your project — an issue-flip toggle or a reading-progress element — and leave the rest.",
"warn": "Some components pull GSAP as well as Motion. Premium blocks are subscription-priced, which is unusual here and unclear what happens to pasted blocks if you cancel.",
"install": "npx shadcn@latest add @smoothui/"
},
{
"slug": "tremor",
"name": "Tremor",
"url": "https://tremor.so/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Charts + dashboard components",
"price": "Free · MIT (Blocks now free)",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "35+ chart and dashboard components built on Recharts and Radix, copy-paste, requiring React 18.2+ and Tailwind v4. Tremor Labs was acquired by Vercel in Jan 2025 and the previously-paid Blocks were released free under MIT.",
"why": "If your project has an internal editorial dashboard — traffic per article, submission pipeline, subscriber growth over Supabase queries — this is the strongest free option and much better than hand-rolling Recharts.",
"warn": "There are two Tremors. The legacy npm package @tremor/react still has an unresolved Tailwind v4 bug (renders completely unstyled). Use the copy-paste components from the site; do not npm install the package."
},
{
"slug": "untitled-ui",
"name": "Untitled UI",
"url": "https://www.untitledui.com/",
"cat": "ui",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Figma system + React library + icons",
"price": "Free MIT tier · $349 Pro · $139 Figma · $59 icons",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Three products: an open-source React + Tailwind v4 component library built on React Aria (with an official Lovable starter kit), a Figma system with 10,000+ components and 420+ page examples, and a 4,600-icon set with a free 1,100-icon tier.",
"why": "The strongest option if design and dev need one shared system — the 420+ page examples fill exactly the gap shadcn leaves (primitives, not pages). Official Lovable starter is a real advantage.",
"warn": "Uses React Aria while shadcn uses Radix/Base UI — they coexist but you carry two primitive systems. Decide early which one owns your buttons. $349 is per seat."
},
{
"slug": "gsap-scrolltrigger",
"name": "GSAP + ScrollTrigger",
"url": "https://gsap.com/docs/v3/",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Timeline animation engine",
"price": "Free — all plugins, since 2025",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Framework-agnostic animation engine whose differentiator is the timeline model: sequence, offset, nest, reverse and scrub complex choreography with precise control. ScrollTrigger handles scroll-driven and pinned animation; SplitText does per-character reveals.",
"why": "This is the scrolled-feature-article tool. Pinned photo sequences, a headline that assembles as you scroll, a timeline piece that scrubs — that is ScrollTrigger, and nothing else comes close. Webflow acquired GreenSock and made every formerly-paid plugin free in 2025. Core + ScrollTrigger + SplitText is ~49 kB gz.",
"warn": "Free but not OSI open source — a custom Webflow-owned licence that bars using GSAP inside competing no-code animation builders. Building scroll-driven features with it is squarely permitted. Release cadence has slowed to 2–3/year under Webflow.",
"install": "npm install gsap @gsap/react"
},
{
"slug": "motion",
"name": "Motion (was Framer Motion)",
"url": "https://motion.dev/docs/react",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Declarative React animation",
"price": "Free MIT · Motion+ €299 once",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Renamed from Framer Motion and spun out as an independent MIT project at motion.dev. Declarative animation via props, AnimatePresence for exits, layout/layoutId for shared-element transitions, variants for staggering, useScroll for scroll-linked values.",
"why": "Page and route transitions between article and index, staggered card reveals on the issue grid, image-to-lightbox shared-element morphs. Composes cleanly with Tailwind and shadcn. Use LazyMotion + the m component to land near 18 kB instead of 38 kB.",
"warn": "Do not build long scroll narratives with useScroll — once you need pinning and scrubbing you are rebuilding ScrollTrigger badly. Do not wrap hundreds of list items in motion.div.",
"install": "npm install motion"
},
{
"slug": "lenis",
"name": "Lenis",
"url": "https://lenis.dev/",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Smooth-scroll library",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "From Darkroom Engineering. Intercepts wheel and touch input and lerps scroll position for the weighted, inertial feel of award sites — something CSS scroll-behavior cannot do. 5.3 kB gz core, 1.6 kB for the React binding.",
"why": "My one 'do not use this' on your project. Hijacked scroll fights readers on long text, breaks trackpad muscle memory and scroll-anchoring, and is a real accessibility problem. Long-form reading is your entire product. If you ship it anyway, gate it behind prefers-reduced-motion.",
"warn": "Adds a frame of latency and can interfere with browser lazy-loading heuristics. Wiring it to GSAP requires driving Lenis from GSAP's ticker or pinned sections jitter.",
"install": "npm install lenis"
},
{
"slug": "react-three-fiber",
"name": "React Three Fiber",
"url": "https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "React renderer for Three.js",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Express a 3D scene as JSX instead of imperative Three.js calls, with React state, hooks and Suspense for asset loading. The real draw is the ecosystem: drei (helpers, controls, text), postprocessing, rapier physics, gltfjsx.",
"why": "Realistic total for a 3D hero: 250–350 kB gz of JS plus model assets. Always lazy-load behind React.lazy so it never touches the initial chunk.",
"warn": "Version-lock trap: @react-three/fiber@9 requires React >=19 <19.3. Lovable scaffolds commonly sit on React 18.3.x — you need @react-three/fiber@8 on React 18, or upgrade React first.",
"install": "npm install three @react-three/fiber @react-three/drei"
},
{
"slug": "rive",
"name": "Rive",
"url": "https://rive.app/docs/",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Interactive vector animation",
"price": "Runtimes free MIT · publishing $9/seat/mo",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Design tool plus lightweight runtime for interactive vector animation — the Lottie alternative. You build a state machine so the animation responds to inputs, export a tiny .riv file, and drive it from code.",
"why": "Only worth it if you have three or more animations to amortize the WASM and a designer to own the files. An unowned .riv is an opaque binary nobody can edit.",
"warn": "Publishing moved behind a paywall in Oct 2025 — the free tier cannot export a .riv for production. And the runtime is 88 kB JS plus a 725 kB gzipped WASM binary (304 kB on canvas-lite), fetched from unpkg by default — self-host it and call RuntimeLoader.setWasmUrl().",
"install": "npm install @rive-app/react-canvas"
},
{
"slug": "three-js",
"name": "Three.js",
"url": "https://threejs.org/docs/",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "3D engine for the web",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The de-facto web 3D engine: scene graph over WebGL and now WebGPU, with cameras, lights, PBR materials and glTF/DRACO/KTX2 loaders. Current release r185. Measured at ~182 kB gz full, ~110–150 kB gz tree-shaken.",
"why": "Only if your project genuinely needs a 3D object — a rotating camera body, an interactive gear explainer. On a photo-led publication, 150 kB+ of engine competes directly with your actual images for LCP.",
"warn": "Still pre-1.0 (0.185.x) and minor bumps carry breaking changes — pin the version. Do not use it for decorative 2D motion; a CSS gradient gets 90% of the effect for 0 kB.",
"install": "npm install three @types/three"
},
{
"slug": "webgl",
"name": "WebGL",
"url": "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGL_API",
"cat": "anim",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Browser GPU rendering API",
"price": "Free — a browser standard",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The native JavaScript API underneath everything above: GPU-accelerated rendering in a canvas, programmed with GLSL shaders and manual buffer management. Zero bundle cost, nothing to install.",
"why": "Worth knowing as a term, not as a thing you write. A spinning cube is ~300 lines of raw WebGL versus ~20 of Three.js. Reach for it only when you need a custom shader no library exposes.",
"warn": "Each live WebGL canvas holds GPU memory, browsers cap concurrent contexts around 8–16, and an always-running rAF loop drains laptop batteries and pins mid-range Android."
},
{
"slug": "canva",
"name": "Canva",
"url": "https://www.canva.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Template-first graphic design",
"price": "Free · Pro $18/mo or $144/yr · Business around $25/user/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Template-driven design tool for the non-app graphics a product still needs: social cards, Open Graph images, pitch decks, ads and simple video. Bundles a large stock and template library, brand kits, background remover and one-click resizing across formats.",
"why": "For when you need a passable OG image or launch graphic in ten minutes and Figma would mean starting from an empty artboard. The resize-to-every-platform button alone saves an afternoon.",
"warn": "Canva's content licence lets you use stock elements inside your designs but not extract or resell them, and a logo built from stock elements cannot be trademarked. Prices rose again in 2026, so confirm current figures before budgeting."
},
{
"slug": "coolors",
"name": "Coolors",
"url": "https://coolors.co",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Palette generator",
"price": "Free · Pro from about $3/mo billed yearly",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Palette generator driven by the spacebar: lock the colours you like, hit space, and it regenerates the rest. Free accounts get up to five colours per palette, ten saved palettes, one project, a library of ready-made schemes, and colour picking from an uploaded image.",
"why": "The fastest way out of colour paralysis. Lock your brand hex, mash space until something clicks, then export the result as CSS variables or a config you can paste straight into a project.",
"warn": "The free tier is ad-heavy and caps palettes at five colours and ten saves; the contrast checker, palette visualiser and advanced exports are Pro-only."
},
{
"slug": "excalidraw",
"name": "Excalidraw",
"url": "https://excalidraw.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Hand-drawn style whiteboard",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed · Excalidraw+ $6/user/mo billed yearly ($7 monthly)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source virtual whiteboard with a deliberately hand-drawn look. The free web app gives the full editor, one infinite scene, unlimited live collaborators, end-to-end encrypted sessions and local-first autosave, plus PNG and SVG export. It also ships as an embeddable React component.",
"why": "The lowest-friction way to sketch an architecture diagram or user flow and drop it into a README. The sketchy aesthetic signals draft, so nobody mistakes a five-minute box diagram for a finished spec.",
"warn": "Free scenes live in browser storage, not an account — clearing site data or switching machines loses them unless you export the .excalidraw file or pay for Excalidraw+.",
"install": "npm i @excalidraw/excalidraw"
},
{
"slug": "figma",
"name": "Figma",
"url": "https://www.figma.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Collaborative UI design tool",
"price": "Free Starter · Professional $12/editor/mo billed yearly ($15 monthly) · Organization from $45/editor/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browser-based interface design and prototyping tool, and the file format the design world exchanges work in. Covers vector editing, auto layout, components and variables, multiplayer editing, prototyping, and Dev Mode, which exposes measurements and CSS or SwiftUI snippets to whoever is building the thing.",
"why": "Even if you never draw a frame, clients and designers hand you Figma links, and Dev Mode turns them into spacing values, hex codes and CSS you can paste. The free tier reads any file you are invited to.",
"warn": "The free Starter plan caps you at three files in one team. Figma bills by seat type — a full design seat costs more than a Dev or Collab seat — so check which one a collaborator actually needs before adding them."
},
{
"slug": "fontshare",
"name": "Fontshare",
"url": "https://www.fontshare.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free quality fonts from ITF",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Free font service from the Indian Type Foundry offering a small, tightly curated set of contemporary families — Satoshi, General Sans, Clash Display, Cabinet Grotesk and similar — many with variable versions. Serve from their CDN or download the files and self-host.",
"why": "The quickest way to stop looking like every other Google Fonts site. A handful of these faces read as expensive typography while costing nothing, which is exactly the trade a solo builder wants.",
"warn": "The ITF licence covers personal and commercial use and embedding in sites and apps, but you may not resell or redistribute the font files themselves. Check the terms per family — some are free cuts of larger paid families."
},
{
"slug": "google-fonts",
"name": "Google Fonts",
"url": "https://fonts.google.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free web font library",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Library of open-source typefaces, almost all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with a handful under Apache 2.0. Serve them from Google's CDN, self-host the files, or bundle them into a native app. Includes variable fonts and the Material Symbols icon set.",
"why": "Zero-cost, zero-friction type that is legally safe in commercial products, including ones you sell. Self-hosting a subset via Fontsource or next/font also kills a render-blocking third-party request.",
"warn": "Serving from Google's CDN sends visitor IP addresses to Google, which a German court ruled a GDPR violation — self-host the files if you have EU traffic. The OFL also bars selling the font files on their own and reserves certain names for modified versions.",
"install": "npm i @fontsource/inter, or import from next/font/google"
},
{
"slug": "happy-hues",
"name": "Happy Hues",
"url": "https://www.happyhues.co",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Palette-in-context inspiration",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Seventeen curated palettes demonstrated by recolouring the entire site as you switch between them. Every swatch is annotated with the role it plays — background, headline, paragraph, button, card, stroke — and clicking one copies its hex. Built by Mackenzie Child.",
"why": "Answers the question palette generators dodge: not which five colours, but which of them belongs on the button versus the card background. Copy the role assignments straight into your CSS variables.",
"warn": "Only 17 palettes and no generator — it is a reference you visit once per project, not a daily tool."
},
{
"slug": "heroicons",
"name": "Heroicons",
"url": "https://heroicons.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "MIT UI icon set",
"price": "Free · MIT licensed",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hand-drawn SVG icon set from the Tailwind CSS team, supplied in four cuts: 24px outline, 24px solid, 20px solid and 16px solid, each optically drawn for its size rather than scaled down. Official React and Vue packages ship every icon as a component.",
"why": "The default when you are already in Tailwind — stroke weights and sizes line up with Tailwind's spacing scale, so icons sit correctly beside text without nudging.",
"warn": "The set is deliberately small and UI-focused, so niche and brand icons are missing. Fill gaps from Phosphor or Iconify rather than mixing in a set with a different stroke weight.",
"install": "npm i @heroicons/react"
},
{
"slug": "iconify",
"name": "Iconify",
"url": "https://iconify.design",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Unified index of 300k+ icons",
"price": "Free · open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Framework that indexes over 300,000 open-source icons from more than 200 sets behind a single API and component. Search every set at once, then render any icon by name — mdi:home, ph:heart-fill — loading only the icons you actually use, on demand.",
"why": "Stops you installing five icon packages to fill five gaps. It also powers the Tailwind and UnoCSS icon plugins, so you can write an icon as a class name and get an inlined SVG at build time.",
"warn": "The Iconify code is open source, but each icon set keeps its own licence — some are MIT, some CC BY and need attribution, a few are more restrictive. Check the licence of the specific set you ship, not Iconify's.",
"install": "npm i @iconify/react"
},
{
"slug": "miro",
"name": "Miro",
"url": "https://miro.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Collaborative whiteboard",
"price": "Free (3 editable boards) · Starter $8/member/mo yearly · Business $20/member/mo yearly",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Large-canvas collaboration platform built around workshops: sticky notes, voting, timers, diagrams, docs, tables and 7,000-plus templates. The free plan lets you create unlimited boards but keeps only the three most recent editable. Deep integrations with Jira, Slack and similar tools.",
"why": "It is where clients and stakeholders already are. When someone books a discovery workshop or a retro, the invite is a Miro board, and insisting on your own tool means swimming upstream.",
"warn": "The free-tier rule is subtle: older boards go read-only rather than vanishing, so a client board from months ago may be locked exactly when you need to edit it."
},
{
"slug": "oklch-color-picker",
"name": "OKLCH Color Picker",
"url": "https://oklch.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Perceptual colour picker",
"price": "Free · open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Colour picker for the OKLCH space from Andrey Sitnik and Roman Shamin at Evil Martians. It renders a 3D model of the gamut, flags colours that fall outside sRGB, and offers the closest sRGB fallback by chroma next to the P3 value. Converts between hex, RGB, HSL and OKLCH.",
"why": "OKLCH lightness is perceptual, so holding L steady while rotating hue produces a palette where every colour carries the same visual weight — the trick that makes a generated ramp look designed rather than muddy.",
"warn": "P3 colours look rich on modern displays and dull or clipped on older sRGB screens, so ship the sRGB fallback the tool hands you rather than the raw P3 value."
},
{
"slug": "penpot",
"name": "Penpot",
"url": "https://penpot.app",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Open-source design tool",
"price": "Free cloud tier (up to 8 members, 10 GB) · Unlimited $7/user/mo capped at $175/mo · self-host free",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source design and prototyping tool under MPL 2.0 that stores work in open standards — SVG, CSS, HTML and JSON — rather than a proprietary binary. Ships native design tokens, an inspect tab that emits SVG and CSS, and deployment-agnostic self-hosting via Docker or Kubernetes.",
"why": "The only serious Figma alternative you can run on your own box, and its files are SVG underneath, so design work stays greppable and diffable instead of locked in a vendor format.",
"warn": "Far smaller plugin and community-template ecosystem than Figma, and importing complex Figma files is imperfect — plan to rebuild rather than migrate.",
"install": "Self-host with the official Docker Compose file, then docker compose up -d"
},
{
"slug": "pexels",
"name": "Pexels",
"url": "https://www.pexels.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free photos and stock video",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Free stock photo and video library under a permissive licence: commercial use allowed, no attribution required, modification allowed. Video coverage is the real differentiator, with usable background clips and b-roll at no cost alongside the photo library. A free API serves both.",
"why": "The free source for a looping hero video or a product-page background clip, which Unsplash largely does not cover. The API also makes it trivial to pull realistic placeholder imagery into a prototype.",
"warn": "You may not sell unmodified copies as prints or products, redistribute files to another stock site, use an image as a trademark, or show identifiable people in an offensive or endorsing way. Clip quality varies — check full resolution before committing."
},
{
"slug": "phosphor-icons",
"name": "Phosphor Icons",
"url": "https://phosphoricons.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "MIT icon family, six weights",
"price": "Free · MIT licensed",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Icon family of roughly 1,250 icons in six weights — thin, light, regular, bold, fill and duotone — drawn on a 16px grid so they stay legible small. Official packages for React, Vue, web components, Flutter, Elm and Swift, plus community ports for Svelte and Solid.",
"why": "The weights are the point: regular in body UI, bold for the active nav item, fill for a selected state, all without leaving one visual family. That kind of consistency is hard to fake by mixing sets.",
"warn": "Pulling icons from the package root can drag in every weight and bloat a bundle — import each icon from its specific path and check what your bundler actually emits.",
"install": "npm i @phosphor-icons/react"
},
{
"slug": "radix-colors",
"name": "Radix Colors",
"url": "https://www.radix-ui.com/colors",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Accessible 12-step colour system",
"price": "Free · MIT licensed",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source colour system of 32 scales, each with 12 steps mapped to a specific job: steps 1-3 backgrounds, 4-6 interactive component states, 7-8 borders and separators, 9-11 solid fills, 12 accessible text. Ships matched light and dark scales plus alpha variants, as CSS or a JS object.",
"why": "Removes all guesswork about which grey a hover state should be. Because every scale shares the same step semantics, you can swap blue for violet across an entire app by changing one import.",
"warn": "The step numbers are the API — step 9 means 'solid brand fill', not 'ninth darkest'. Wiring it into Tailwind needs a community plugin or hand-written theme keys; the package itself just gives you CSS custom properties.",
"install": "npm i @radix-ui/colors"
},
{
"slug": "realtime-colors",
"name": "Realtime Colors",
"url": "https://www.realtimecolors.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Palette previewer on a real page",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Applies your text, background, primary, secondary and accent colours to a full mock landing page live, so you judge a palette in situ instead of as five swatches. Also sets heading and body fonts from Google Fonts, applies a type scale, and reports AA/AAA contrast as you go.",
"why": "Kills the classic mistake of choosing a palette that looks great as swatches and awful as an actual page. Exports to CSS variables, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, daisyUI and more, so the result drops into your project.",
"warn": "Exports assume a fresh project and use the tool's own variable names — expect a rename pass when pasting into an existing design system."
},
{
"slug": "simple-icons",
"name": "Simple Icons",
"url": "https://simpleicons.org",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Brand and tech logo SVGs",
"price": "Free · CC0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Over 3,400 single-colour SVG logos for popular brands and technologies, released under CC0. Each icon carries the brand's official hex colour. Distributed on npm, via jsDelivr and unpkg, and through a CDN at cdn.simpleicons.org that serves any icon in a colour you name in the URL.",
"why": "The zero-effort answer for a tech-stack section, a footer social row or an integrations grid. One CDN URL per logo means no install and no SVG files sitting in your repo.",
"warn": "CC0 covers the SVG files, not the trademarks they depict. Brand guidelines still bind you — do not imply endorsement, do not recolour a mark where the owner forbids it, and read the project's legal disclaimer before shipping.",
"install": "npm i simple-icons, or fetch https://cdn.simpleicons.org/github/181717"
},
{
"slug": "storyset",
"name": "Storyset",
"url": "https://storyset.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Customisable illustrations",
"price": "Free with attribution · Freepik Premium removes the credit requirement",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Freepik's illustration library with an in-browser editor: change the colour scheme, swap background shapes, tweak the character, then export SVG, PNG or an animated version. Free downloads require crediting Storyset; a Freepik Premium subscription lifts the attribution requirement.",
"why": "The animation export is the differentiator — a moving hero illustration at no cost and with no Lottie pipeline to build. Editing before download also lets you dodge the identical-illustration look.",
"warn": "Attribution is mandatory on the free tier and must be a visible credit, not a line in your repo. You also cannot use the illustrations in a logo or trademark, resell them as stock, or use editorial-only content commercially."
},
{
"slug": "svgl",
"name": "SVGL",
"url": "https://svgl.app",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Searchable SVG logo library",
"price": "Free · MIT-licensed project",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browsable library of several hundred company and product logos as SVGs, grouped by category — AI, software, crypto, design, hosting. One click copies the markup, with full-colour, wordmark, and light or dark variants where they exist. The project is MIT licensed and exposes a public API.",
"why": "Better than Simple Icons when you need a logo in its real brand colours or with the wordmark attached — think a pricing comparison table or an 'integrates with' strip on a landing page.",
"warn": "The MIT licence covers the project's code, not the logos, which remain their owners' trademarks. Contributors are only asked to check rights before submitting, so verify each brand's own guidelines before you ship one."
},
{
"slug": "tabler-icons",
"name": "Tabler Icons",
"url": "https://tabler.io/icons",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "6,000+ MIT stroke icons",
"price": "Free (MIT) · optional $9 format bundle · $69 all-package",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Very large MIT-licensed stroke icon set: over 6,000 icons in outline and filled styles, all on a consistent 24px grid with matched line weights, free for personal and commercial use. Optional one-off purchases add compiled PNG, PDF and webfont formats plus templates and illustrations.",
"why": "Where you go when a smaller set simply lacks the icon. Coverage of obscure concepts is unmatched, so you rarely have to import a second, mismatched family for one missing glyph.",
"warn": "Its size is the trap: import icons individually rather than from the barrel file, or dev builds crawl and you risk shipping thousands of unused components.",
"install": "npm i @tabler/icons-react"
},
{
"slug": "tldraw",
"name": "tldraw",
"url": "https://tldraw.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Infinite canvas and React SDK",
"price": "tldraw.com free · SDK free with watermark · business licence quoted by sales",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Infinite-canvas whiteboard and, more importantly, a React SDK for putting a real canvas inside your own product. Shapes, arrows, multiplayer and an extensible custom-shape API are all exposed. The hosted app is free; the SDK is free to embed as long as the watermark stays visible.",
"why": "The default answer when your app needs a canvas — node editors, floor plans, moodboards — because you inherit production-grade panning, zooming and hit-testing without writing any of it.",
"warn": "The SDK is not open source. The licence forbids removing, hiding or interfering with the watermark or its licence-key check; shipping watermark-free needs a paid business licence priced by sales. A free hobby licence covers non-commercial use.",
"install": "npm i tldraw"
},
{
"slug": "uicolors",
"name": "uiColors",
"url": "https://uicolors.app",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Tailwind palette generator",
"price": "Free · optional Pro upgrade",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Tailwind CSS colour generator: paste a hex and it builds the full numbered shade ramp, then previews it on realistic components — cards, dashboards, charts — rather than bare swatches. Adds success, warning and error scales plus a custom neutral, and exports palettes for a Tailwind config.",
"why": "The standard fix for 'my brand colour is not one of Tailwind's'. It generates a ramp with sane lightness steps so bg-brand-50 through bg-brand-950 behave like the built-in palettes.",
"warn": "Generated ramps are mathematically even, not perceptually even — eyeball the middle shades against a real background, especially for yellows, greens and cyans."
},
{
"slug": "undraw",
"name": "unDraw",
"url": "https://undraw.co",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free illustration library",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Large library of flat vector illustrations under an open licence, with one defining feature: set a hex colour on the site and every illustration recolours to it before you download it as SVG or PNG. No account needed and no attribution required, including in commercial and paid products.",
"why": "Fills an empty state, a 404 page or a marketing hero in about a minute, already matching your brand colour. The licence is genuinely permissive, so there is nothing to track in an attributions file.",
"warn": "The licence forbids redistributing the assets as a pack, building a competing library from them, bulk scraping, and using them to train AI or ML models. The house style is also instantly recognisable — recolouring helps, but a whole site of unDraw reads as a template."
},
{
"slug": "unsplash",
"name": "Unsplash",
"url": "https://unsplash.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free high-res photography",
"price": "Free · Unsplash+ $7/mo or $84/yr promotional (list $20/mo)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Large library of high-resolution photographs free to download and use commercially with no attribution required. Unsplash+ is a paid tier of exclusive images that are model and property released, carries extra legal protection, and lifts download caps. There is a free developer API.",
"why": "The default source for a hero image or blog header when there is no photography budget. Credit is optional, so nothing has to survive into your footer or an attributions page.",
"warn": "The free licence forbids compiling Unsplash images into a competing service or selling unmodified copies. Free photos are not model or property released, so avoid them in ads implying endorsement — that is what Unsplash+ exists for. Popular shots are also everywhere and instantly recognisable."
},
{
"slug": "utopia",
"name": "Utopia",
"url": "https://utopia.fyi",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Fluid type and space calculator",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A set of free calculators for fluid responsive design by James Gilyead and Trys Mudford, backed by Clearleft. You define type and space scales at a minimum and maximum viewport and it emits CSS clamp() values that interpolate between them. Type, space and grid calculators included.",
"why": "Replaces a pile of breakpoint overrides with one generated block of custom properties. Paste it once and headings, gaps and padding scale continuously from phone to desktop without another media query.",
"warn": "Copy the whole generated custom-property block rather than cherry-picking values — the scale only holds together if every step comes from the same generation."
},
{
"slug": "whimsical",
"name": "Whimsical",
"url": "https://whimsical.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Flowcharts and wireframes",
"price": "Free (3 boards) · Pro $10/editor/mo · Business $20/editor/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Fast diagramming suite covering flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, sticky notes and docs in one file. Opinionated defaults mean connectors route themselves and elements snap to a grid, so diagrams look tidy without fiddling. The free plan allows three team boards and 7-day version history.",
"why": "The quickest way to turn a vague feature idea into a flowchart or lo-fi wireframe you can hand to a client or paste into an agent prompt. Much faster than Figma for anything that is boxes and arrows.",
"warn": "The three-board free limit arrives fast, and boards are not very portable — export is images and PDFs rather than an editable open format."
},
{
"slug": "whocanuse",
"name": "WhoCanUse",
"url": "https://whocanuse.com",
"cat": "design",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Contrast and vision simulator",
"price": "Free · open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Contrast checker that goes past the WCAG ratio. Enter a foreground and background pair and it simulates that combination through red-blindness, green-blindness, blue-yellow confusion and full colour blindness, plus cataracts, glaucoma, low vision, direct sunlight and night-shift filters. Built by Corey Ginnivan.",
"why": "It shows you the failure instead of a number, which is what actually changes your mind about a low-contrast grey. Useful for defending a colour choice to a client, or for killing your own.",
"warn": "It checks one colour pair at a time, so it complements rather than replaces a whole-page automated audit like axe or Lighthouse."
},
{
"slug": "ideogram",
"name": "Ideogram",
"url": "https://ideogram.ai/",
"cat": "assets",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "AI image generation (text rendering)",
"price": "Free · $20/mo · $60/mo · API $0.03–$0.10/img",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Ideogram 4.0 (June 2026, 9.3B params, native 2K, first open-weight model in the family). Its differentiator is confirmed, not marketing: reliable, legible text rendered inside images — headlines, packaging copy, signage — at multilingual and small-type scale.",
"why": "The cover-art and hero-image answer. Bounding-box layout control lets you reserve space for the masthead; Layerize Text (free on every tier, API-accessible) pulls generated type onto its own editable layer so you can change a headline without regenerating. Character reference keeps an illustrated persona consistent across an issue. At $0.03–$0.10/image the API is cheap enough to script batch cover variants.",
"warn": "The free tier makes every generation public — not viable for unreleased covers. Priority credits do not roll over, and every output image bills separately, so batch size is a direct cost multiplier."
},
{
"slug": "lucide",
"name": "Lucide",
"url": "https://lucide.dev/",
"cat": "assets",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Icon set (1,768 icons)",
"price": "Free · ISC",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Community fork and continuation of Feather Icons — same 24px grid and 2px stroke, vastly expanded. Already in your Lovable project, because shadcn/ui ships with it. Named exports, so props and Tailwind classes pass straight through to the SVG.",
"why": "Default to this for the entire interface icon layer and only reach elsewhere when a glyph genuinely does not exist.",
"warn": "Never do import * as Icons from 'lucide-react' or dynamic-name lookups — it defeats tree-shaking and pulls all 1,768 icons into the bundle. Stroke-only; if the design needs filled icons you are managing two sets.",
"install": "npm install lucide-react"
},
{
"slug": "envato-elements",
"name": "Envato Elements",
"url": "https://elements.envato.com/web-templates",
"cat": "assets",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Unlimited-download stock subscription",
"price": "$16.50/mo annual · $39/mo monthly",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "~29M assets. The web-templates category is a mixed bag of stacks — plain HTML, Bootstrap, Tailwind, React, Laravel, Figma-only — with no unified framework guarantee. Fonts, stock photography, video, music and SFX are in the same subscription.",
"why": "For a content site, the value is not the templates — it is the fonts, illustrations, stock photography and Figma files, plus video and audio if you run motion or podcast content.",
"warn": "One licence per end product — reusing an asset on a second site means registering a second licence. Licence becomes perpetual only if the project completes while you are subscribed; cancel mid-project and it terminates immediately."
},
{
"slug": "iconly",
"name": "Iconly (Animations)",
"url": "https://web.iconly.pro/animations",
"cat": "assets",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Animated icon set (Lottie)",
"price": "2,500 free · $8/mo · $189 lifetime",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "40,000+ icons across flat, 3D and animated categories, delivered through a web app and Figma plugin. Exports SVG, PNG, JSX, TSX, and for the animated packs Lottie JSON, dotLottie, GIF and MP4. No npm package or React runtime.",
"why": "A few deliberate moments only — a subscribe confirmation, an empty archive state, an onboarding step. Not interface chrome.",
"warn": "Not a drop-in: playing Lottie needs a runtime (lottie-react or @lottiefiles/dotlottie-react), which is meaningfully heavier than an inline SVG. Licence bars embedding icons in templates for resale or in logo marks — and it does not state what happens to downloaded assets if a subscription lapses."
},
{
"slug": "land-book",
"name": "Land-book",
"url": "https://land-book.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Curated full-page website gallery",
"price": "Free tier · $6/mo yearly · $9/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Hand-curated gallery of complete site designs, filterable by page type, 40+ industries, visual style (brutalism, gradients, editorial, 3D) and build platform. Full-page screenshots, mobile previews, and historical versions of the same site.",
"why": "Filter to blog and editorial and this becomes your art-direction board. Full-page screenshot download is the paywalled feature that makes the workflow actually work — those images are what you hand Lovable as the design target. The old-versions archive shows how publications evolved their redesigns."
},
{
"slug": "landingfolio",
"name": "Landingfolio",
"url": "https://www.landingfolio.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Gallery + real Tailwind/React components",
"price": "Free tier · $59 lifetime",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Two products: a gallery of shipped landing pages filterable by industry and color, and a component library shipping actual code in Tailwind, React, Vue, HTML, Figma and Webflow — extracted from real pages rather than invented.",
"why": "Best value on the whole list at $59 lifetime. Rare case where the answer is real code, not prompt fuel: grab the Tailwind version, paste into Lovable, then ask it to refactor into shadcn primitives. Ships an MCP server at 1,000 requests/day so Claude can pull components directly."
},
{
"slug": "mobbin",
"name": "Mobbin",
"url": "https://mobbin.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Real-app screenshot & flow library",
"price": "Free (thin) · ~$10–15/mo Pro",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "600,000+ screens and 300,000+ user flows from 1,000+ shipped apps and websites, organized as flow trees so you see complete journeys rather than isolated screens. OCR-indexed, so you can search text inside the screenshots.",
"why": "Worth paying for one specific reason: these are real shipped products, so they contain the empty states, error states, loading skeletons and validation that AI builders always skip. Search 'subscription paywall' or 'article archive', drop 4–6 screens into Lovable, and ask for the edge states too.",
"warn": "Free tier is deliberately thin — recent apps and ~3 collections. Screenshots only; nothing is importable."
},
{
"slug": "relume",
"name": "Relume",
"url": "https://www.relume.ai/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "AI sitemap + wireframes + React library",
"price": "Free tier · $18/user/mo · $40 Pro",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Describe a company and the AI generates a full sitemap in seconds, converts it to wireframes built from real components, then produces a style guide. Behind it is a 1,000+ component library maintained in Webflow, Figma and React (Tailwind + shadcn/ui) versions.",
"why": "Use the free tier for the sitemap alone. Getting a complete page-and-section hierarchy — issues, features, departments, contributors, archive, submissions — is the hardest part of AI site building, and it costs nothing. Paste the sitemap into Lovable as the build spec.",
"warn": "Sources conflict on which tier unlocks React export — Relume's own page says Pro ($40/user/mo), third-party reviews say Starter ($18). Verify before paying. The free tier explicitly cannot export."
},
{
"slug": "dribbble",
"name": "Dribbble",
"url": "https://dribbble.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Designer portfolio gallery",
"price": "Free · Pro $48–$1,188/yr",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Social portfolio network of static UI 'shots'. Images only — no files, no code, no Figma sources unless a designer chooses to link one. Much of what trends is unbuilt concept work.",
"why": "Two real uses: the color search (filter the entire gallery by a hex value, useful when a brand color is fixed), and vocabulary — shot titles teach you the terms ('bento grid', 'editorial hero') that make Lovable prompts land. Treat the polish as aspirational."
},
{
"slug": "flowbase",
"name": "Flowbase",
"url": "https://www.flowbase.co/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Webflow/Figma/Framer component library",
"price": "Free tier · $27–39/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "3,500+ components, 1,000+ wireframes, 1,000+ SVG illustrations and 15,000+ open-source icons — delivered via Chrome extension and Figma/Framer plugins. No React, Vite or Tailwind output at all.",
"why": "Weakest fit here. Free tier only: the 1,000+ wireframe library is a fast way to settle page structure before writing a prompt, and the icons are open-source. Skip the subscription.",
"warn": "Monthly plan caps you at 200 component copies; annual removes the cap. Copy does not work in Safari."
},
{
"slug": "flowponent",
"name": "Flowponent",
"url": "https://www.flowponent.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Webflow-only cloneable components",
"price": "335 free · Pro price unpublished",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "~1,090 components you copy to clipboard and paste into the Webflow Designer canvas, where they arrive as Webflow element trees. No React, JSX or Tailwind source is ever exposed. Sister property to Landingfolio.",
"why": "Realistically you would not use this. The clipboard payload is Webflow-internal and useless elsewhere; Unsection and Land-book give you the same visual reference with a bigger, cheaper corpus.",
"warn": "Pro pricing is not published in any machine-readable form — the pricing page renders client-side only."
},
{
"slug": "framer-marketplace",
"name": "Framer Marketplace",
"url": "https://www.framer.com/marketplace/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Framer template marketplace",
"price": "Free items · paid $5–$129",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "~9,300 community templates, components, 60+ plugins and icon sets for Framer. Nothing exports to React, Vite or Tailwind — assets never leave the platform in compilable form.",
"why": "Reference only, but with a specific extraction: motion patterns. Every template has a live interactive preview, so you can watch real scroll choreography, then describe it to Lovable in Motion vocabulary — which translates directly, since Motion is a real React library."
},
{
"slug": "motionsites-ai",
"name": "MotionSites AI",
"url": "https://motionsites.ai/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Prompt library for AI builders",
"price": "$49 packs · $129–$399 tiers",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "~364 engineered text prompts designed to make Lovable, Bolt, Cursor and Claude generate animated 3D landing pages, plus 159 animated video backgrounds and 40+ Lovable-specific templates. You buy English, not JSX.",
"why": "Targets Lovable as a first-class output, so nominally ideal — but there is no version pinning, no dependency guarantee and non-reproducible output between runs. The animated background library is the more concrete asset.",
"warn": "Pricing is inconsistently published and the /pricing URL 404s; the /unlimited page and third-party reviews list different structures. Confirm at checkout."
},
{
"slug": "mui-store",
"name": "MUI Store",
"url": "https://mui.com/store/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Commercial React template marketplace",
"price": "6 free templates · paid $39–$69",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The only entry here selling complete, runnable React + TypeScript source — dashboards and admin UI (Minimal, Devias Kit Pro, Mantis, Berry) targeting React 18, Next.js and Vite. All built on Material UI, not Tailwind.",
"why": "Download a free template and study architecture, not styling: routing, layout shells, auth guards, protected routes, sidebar state, data-table patterns. Then describe that structure to Lovable and rebuild in shadcn.",
"warn": "Do not import MUI styling into a shadcn app. MUI X licence costs ($299–$1,318) can be hidden inside a $69 template's dependencies."
},
{
"slug": "unsection",
"name": "Unsection",
"url": "https://www.unsection.com/",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Section-level inspiration gallery",
"price": "Free tier · $4/mo · $99 lifetime",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Individual page sections — heroes, pricing, FAQ, features, footers — cropped from real production sites, tagged by style and industry, each linking out to the live source site. Screenshots only, no code.",
"why": "Section-granular matches how you actually build in Lovable: one block at a time. The live-site link is the real value — open DevTools on the actual implementation and read the true spacing and type scale instead of eyeballing a JPEG."
},
{
"slug": "webflow-templates",
"name": "Webflow Templates",
"url": "https://webflow.com/templates",
"cat": "insp",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Webflow template marketplace",
"price": "Free previews · $79–$149 per template",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "2,000+ vetted templates. Code export exists but requires a paid Workspace plan and is lossy — CMS collections come out empty, template pages do not generate, forms render but do not submit, search and memberships break.",
"why": "Never buy one to convert it. Use the free full-site live previews as a structural library: study how a professional sequenced a 6–8 page publication, then screenshot into Lovable.",
"warn": "Paid templates carry a single-use licence — one purchase equals one site. Export needs a $16–19/mo Workspace plan on top."
},
{
"slug": "pencil",
"name": "Pencil (pen.dev)",
"url": "https://www.pen.dev/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Design canvas wired to your agent via MCP",
"price": "Free during early access",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "A Figma-like canvas inside Cursor/VS Code/Windsurf, storing designs as JSON .pen files inside your project folder so they are git-versioned next to the code. Runs as an MCP server, so the agent reads the canvas as structured design context rather than as an image. Two-way: you can import existing components back onto the canvas.",
"why": "Names your exact stack as a first-class target — React + Tailwind + shadcn/ui. Draw the article template, and the drawing becomes real components. Because the .pen file lives beside the code, the design and the build cannot silently drift.",
"warn": "Requires a local checkout via Lovable's GitHub sync — cannot touch the browser editor. Domain is mid-rename (pencil.dev → pen.dev), early access, no published pricing commitment.",
"install": "MCP server; assumes Claude Code as the agent"
},
{
"slug": "superdesign",
"name": "Superdesign",
"url": "https://superdesign.dev/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Open-source AI design agent (skill)",
"price": "Free tier · $20/mo flat",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Turns prompts into UI on an infinite canvas and writes production React + Tailwind into your repo via your coding agent. Its differentiator: it reads your existing codebase and design system first, so output matches conventions instead of generating a parallel island.",
"why": "The one that addresses 'my site looks like generic AI output' at the source. Because it inspects your design system, it has a real shot at emitting proper shadcn primitives rather than raw divs. Installs as a portable skill across 70+ agents.",
"warn": "Needs a local repo like Pencil. The original IDE extension is explicitly no longer maintained — development moved to the web app plus the skill. A 2026 review reports real instability (broken logins, canvas crashes).",
"install": "npx skills add superdesigndev/superdesign-skill"
},
{
"slug": "aura",
"name": "Aura",
"url": "https://www.aura.build/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "AI landing-page generator",
"price": "Free · $25 / $50 / $100 per mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Prompt- or screenshot-driven builder producing responsive HTML + Tailwind + vanilla JS, plus a Figma export with editable frames. Ships a hosted CMS and custom domains. Page builder, not app builder — no backend or auth.",
"why": "The Tailwind classes transfer almost losslessly: export HTML, paste into Lovable, ask it to convert to a React component keeping the classes. Better than re-prompting from a screenshot, worse than a real component export — it has zero awareness of shadcn, so you get raw divs, not <Card>."
},
{
"slug": "gemini-canvas",
"name": "Gemini Canvas",
"url": "https://gemini.google.com/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "AI code workspace inside Gemini",
"price": "Free · $7.99–$249.99/mo tiers",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A side panel where Gemini writes and iteratively edits an artifact with a live preview. For UI it defaults to a single HTML file with embedded CSS and vanilla JS; you can explicitly prompt for React instead. Copy from the Code tab is the only export mechanism.",
"why": "The cheapest way to test a UI idea before spending Lovable credits on it. No repo integration, no MCP, no awareness of your components — everything it writes is a self-contained island you reconcile by hand."
},
{
"slug": "google-stitch",
"name": "Google Stitch",
"url": "https://stitch.withgoogle.com/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Free AI UI generator (Google Labs)",
"price": "Free — ~550 generations/mo",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Generates multi-screen UI from a text prompt, sketch or screenshot, with an editable canvas and interactive prototype playback. Runs on Gemini 3. Confirmed output paths: Paste-to-Figma (editable layers) and HTML/Tailwind code copy. Some builds also emit a DESIGN.md spec.",
"why": "Free, high-volume screen ideation — lay out 8–10 screens before committing to building any. The DESIGN.md output is an excellent thing to hand an agent.",
"warn": "Sources conflict on React export; treat JSX output as unproven until you click it. Labs products carry real shutdown risk — do not build a workflow that depends on it."
},
{
"slug": "spline",
"name": "Spline",
"url": "https://app.spline.design/community",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "Browser 3D scene editor + React runtime",
"price": "Free (watermarked) · $12–$120/mo",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Real-time collaborative 3D in the browser with materials, timeline animation, physics, particles and event interactivity. Publishes a hosted .splinecode file consumed by a first-party React runtime. The Community gallery lets you remix existing scenes rather than modeling from zero.",
"why": "Best-in-class React embed story — but the heaviest thing on this list. A three.js-class runtime plus a scene file that routinely runs into megabytes. Use renderOnDemand, wrap in React.lazy, and never put it above the fold on a page where LCP matters.",
"warn": "No-watermark on web embeds is Pro ($20/mo yearly); Hobby only clears exports. Code/self-hosted export is Max-only at $120/mo. The React wrapper's last tagged release is v4.0.0 from June 2024.",
"install": "npm install @splinetool/react-spline @splinetool/runtime"
},
{
"slug": "unicorn-studio",
"name": "Unicorn Studio",
"url": "https://www.unicorn.studio/",
"cat": "builder",
"group": "design",
"tagline": "No-code WebGL motion editor + embed",
"price": "Free (watermarked, non-commercial) · $168/yr",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Layer-based real-time canvas stacking 75+ shader effects — distortion, noise, bloom, godrays, mouse trails — into an animated visual you publish as a live WebGL embed. This is the tool behind most of the animated gradient heroes you see on Framer sites.",
"why": "The cheap way to get one showpiece background — a cover hero or a section divider. Runtime is only ~50 kB gz, far lighter than Spline. Official React export button, or use the community unicornstudio-react package.",
"warn": "Free tier is watermarked and non-commercial — any commercial use needs the $20/mo. Every layer is a separate shader pass, so effects stack fast on low-end devices; use data-us-lazyload and data-us-scale. Cancel and republish, and the watermark returns.",
"install": "npm install unicornstudio-react"
},
{
"slug": "appwrite",
"name": "Appwrite",
"url": "https://appwrite.io",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source Firebase alternative",
"price": "Free: 2 projects, 5GB bandwidth, 2GB storage, 750K executions, 75K MAU. Pro from $25/member/mo (2TB bandwidth, 150GB storage, 200K MAU).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Self-hostable backend covering databases, authentication with dozens of OAuth providers, file storage, serverless functions, messaging and static site hosting via Appwrite Sites. The free cloud plan covers 2 projects, 75,000 monthly active users and 750,000 function executions. Pro starts at $25 per member monthly.",
"why": "The most generous free MAU allowance here at 75,000, and you can move the whole thing onto your own Docker host if the bill or the terms ever change. Official MCP servers exist for both the API and the docs.",
"warn": "Free cloud projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity. The free tier also caps you at 1 database, 1 bucket and 2 functions per project, which is tight for anything real.",
"install": "npx -y @appwrite/mcp-for-api"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-d1",
"name": "Cloudflare D1",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "SQLite on Cloudflare Workers",
"price": "Workers Free: 5M row reads/day, 100K writes/day, 5GB total, 10 databases at 500MB each. Workers Paid $5/mo: 25B reads and 50M writes monthly, then $0.001/M reads and $1.00/M writes.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A SQLite database built into the Cloudflare Workers platform and queried through a Worker binding rather than a connection string. The free plan allows 10 databases, 5 million row reads per day and 5GB total storage. Workers Paid at $5 monthly raises this to 25 billion reads.",
"why": "If your app already lives on Workers or Pages, D1 adds no extra vendor, no connection pooling and no cold start. Cloudflare ships a fleet of official remote MCP servers, including one for Workers bindings.",
"warn": "A hard 10GB ceiling per database that cannot be raised, and free databases cap at 500MB each. D1 is only reachable from Workers, so no psql, no BI tool and no generic driver.",
"install": "npx wrangler d1 create my-db"
},
{
"slug": "convex",
"name": "Convex",
"url": "https://www.convex.dev",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Reactive TypeScript backend platform",
"price": "Free: 0.5GB DB, 1GB file storage, 1M function calls/mo, 1GB egress. Starter adds usage-based overages. Professional $25/developer/mo. Business from $2,500/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A reactive backend where the database, server functions and scheduler are one TypeScript system. Queries are automatically reactive, so subscribed clients update without websocket plumbing. The free plan allows 0.5GB database storage, 1GB file storage and 1,000,000 function calls per month; Professional is $25 per developer monthly.",
"why": "Everything is typed end to end, so agents get compile-time feedback instead of runtime surprises. Convex ships an official MCP server plus Chef, its own open-source AI app builder that actually understands the backend.",
"warn": "Not Postgres — you write Convex queries, not SQL, so leaving means a real rewrite. The genuinely free limits (1M calls, 0.5GB) are far tighter than the headline numbers on the pricing page.",
"install": "npx convex dev, then add the Convex MCP server in your editor"
},
{
"slug": "drizzle-orm",
"name": "Drizzle ORM",
"url": "https://orm.drizzle.team",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "TypeScript SQL query builder and ORM",
"price": "Free and open source under Apache 2.0. Drizzle Studio and Drizzle Kit are free; Drizzle Gateway is in closed alpha.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A headless TypeScript ORM whose query API deliberately mirrors SQL, so a Drizzle query reads like the statement it compiles to. Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, SingleStore, MSSQL and CockroachDB, with dedicated drivers for Neon, Supabase, Turso, PlanetScale and Cloudflare D1. Drizzle Kit handles migrations.",
"why": "No code generation step and no separate engine binary, so it runs inside edge runtimes and whatever sandbox an agent is building in. Being close to SQL, models translate a schema idea into working queries with fewer invented helpers.",
"warn": "Relational query ergonomics are thinner than Prisma's, and drizzle-kit push against production can drop columns without much ceremony. Migration tooling has churned across versions.",
"install": "npm i drizzle-orm && npm i -D drizzle-kit"
},
{
"slug": "firebase",
"name": "Firebase",
"url": "https://firebase.google.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Google BaaS with NoSQL and auth",
"price": "Spark free: Firestore 1GiB, 50K reads/20K writes per day, 10GiB egress, 50K Auth MAU. Blaze is pay-as-you-go; Cloud Functions require Blaze.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's backend suite: Firestore and Realtime Database, Authentication, Hosting, Cloud Functions and Cloud Messaging. The no-cost Spark plan gives 1GiB Firestore storage with 50,000 reads and 20,000 writes per day. Blaze is pay-as-you-go and is required for Cloud Functions and outbound networking.",
"why": "Fifteen years of tutorials means models generate Firebase code confidently. An official MCP server ships inside firebase-tools, and Firebase Studio is Google's own AI app builder wired straight into it.",
"warn": "Per-document read billing punishes chatty UIs, and a runaway loop on Blaze can produce a shocking bill overnight. NoSQL modelling also resists later migration to SQL.",
"install": "npx -y firebase-tools@latest mcp"
},
{
"slug": "instant-db",
"name": "Instant DB",
"url": "https://www.instantdb.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Realtime graph database with sync",
"price": "Free: 1GB storage, unlimited API requests, 1 team member per app, never paused, commercial use allowed. Pro $30/mo (10GB, then $0.125/GB, 10 members, 7-day backups).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source realtime database modelled on Firebase but with real relations and a graph query language, offering optimistic updates, offline support and presence out of the box. The free plan gives 1GB of storage with unlimited API requests, one team member per app, and explicitly permits commercial use.",
"why": "Free projects are never paused, which is rare here — your weekend demo still works in six months. Ships a hosted MCP server at mcp.instantdb.com plus an agent skill that teaches models its schema syntax.",
"warn": "Small team and a young ecosystem, so models know it far less well than Firebase or Supabase — expect to paste docs into context. The jump to Pro is $30, steeper than Supabase's $25.",
"install": "npx skills add instantdb/skills"
},
{
"slug": "lovable-cloud",
"name": "Lovable Cloud",
"url": "https://lovable.dev/cloud",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Built-in backend for Lovable apps",
"price": "No separate subscription — metered through Lovable credits. Lovable has a free plan; paid plans start at $25/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The backend built directly into Lovable, giving generated apps a database, authentication, file storage and server-side functions with no setup step. Every Lovable Cloud project runs on Supabase behind the scenes, so the underlying store is real Postgres with row-level security rather than a proprietary engine.",
"why": "The zero-decision option: describe the app and the backend appears, with keys and secrets handled inside Lovable billing. You can still connect your own Supabase project instead if you want to own the infrastructure outright.",
"warn": "Usage is metered in Lovable credits rather than Supabase pricing, so costs are harder to predict. You do not get direct Supabase dashboard access unless you connect your own project."
},
{
"slug": "mongodb-atlas",
"name": "MongoDB Atlas",
"url": "https://www.mongodb.com/atlas",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed document database",
"price": "M0 free forever: 512MB, shared CPU, ~100 ops/sec. Flex from $0.011/hr up to about $30/mo. Dedicated M10 from about $57/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Managed hosting for MongoDB's document model, with Atlas Search, vector search and change streams built in. The M0 shared cluster is free forever with 512MB of storage and roughly 100 operations per second. The next step up is Flex at up to $30 monthly, then a dedicated M10 around $57.",
"why": "Schemaless documents suit prototypes where the shape of the data is still moving, which describes most vibe-coded apps. MongoDB ships an official MCP server plus an Atlas-managed remote MCP endpoint for agent access to live data.",
"warn": "M0 clusters are paused after roughly 60 days of inactivity and there are no backups on the free tier. The jump from free to a dedicated cluster is a steep price cliff.",
"install": "npx -y mongodb-mcp-server"
},
{
"slug": "neon",
"name": "Neon",
"url": "https://neon.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Serverless Postgres with branching",
"price": "Free: 0.5GB storage and 100 CU-hours per project, up to 100 projects, 10 branches each. Launch is usage-based: $0.35/GB-mo storage, $0.106/CU-hour, $1.50 per extra branch-month.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Serverless Postgres that separates storage from compute, so databases scale to zero after five minutes idle and Git-style branches copy a database instantly. The free tier covers up to 100 projects at 0.5GB storage and 100 compute-hours each, with 10 branches per project. Acquired by Databricks in 2025.",
"why": "Instant branching means an agent can spin up a throwaway database per pull request or per experiment. Its remote MCP server at mcp.neon.tech lets Claude create projects, branch and run SQL without leaving the chat.",
"warn": "Scale-to-zero means cold starts of roughly a second on the first query after idle, and it cannot be disabled on the Free plan. Billing meters compute-hours, not requests.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http neon https://mcp.neon.tech/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "nhost",
"name": "Nhost",
"url": "https://nhost.io",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres BaaS with GraphQL via Hasura",
"price": "Free Starter: 1 project, 1GB DB, 1GB storage, 5GB egress, unlimited users, paused after 1 week idle. Pro from $25/mo (10GB DB, 50GB storage) including $15 compute credit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source backend pairing Postgres with an auto-generated Hasura GraphQL API, plus authentication, file storage and serverless functions. The free Starter plan allows one project with a 1GB database, 1GB storage and unlimited users. Pro starts at $25 monthly including $15 of compute credit.",
"why": "If you want GraphQL rather than REST or a client SDK, Nhost gives you a typed schema-driven API for free, and models write GraphQL queries well. Unlimited users on a free plan is unusual.",
"warn": "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity and you only get one active project. A much smaller community than Supabase means fewer training examples for AI agents to draw on."
},
{
"slug": "planetscale",
"name": "PlanetScale",
"url": "https://planetscale.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed MySQL and Postgres at scale",
"price": "No free tier. PlanetScale Postgres single-node from $5/mo; PS-5 MySQL from $15/mo (10GB storage); Metal NVMe instances from $50/mo.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vitess-based managed MySQL, plus a Postgres offering added in 2025, aimed at horizontal scaling with online schema changes and branch-based deploy requests. There is no free tier — it was removed in 2024. Metal instances use local NVMe drives with unlimited IOPS starting around $50 monthly.",
"why": "Reached for when a vibe-coded prototype gets real traffic and needs a database that will not fall over under load. The $5 single-node Postgres tier finally makes it approachable for a solo builder.",
"warn": "No free tier at all — you pay from day one, which rules it out for throwaway experiments. The MySQL side historically disallows foreign key constraints under Vitess, which trips up ORM-generated schemas."
},
{
"slug": "pocketbase",
"name": "PocketBase",
"url": "https://pocketbase.io",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Single-binary Go backend on SQLite",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. You pay only for a host — roughly $4-6/mo on Hetzner, Fly.io or a small VPS.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "One executable containing an embedded SQLite database, REST API, realtime subscriptions, email and OAuth2 authentication, file storage and an admin dashboard. Extensible through Go or JavaScript hooks. Still pre-1.0 at the v0.39 series, but widely run in production on a single small server.",
"why": "Zero cloud bill, zero vendor account, and the entire backend is one file you can copy onto a $5 VPS. Ideal when you want the code and the data to be genuinely yours with no pausing rules.",
"warn": "Single node only — no horizontal scaling and no managed backups, so you own uptime, patching and disk. Pre-1.0 means occasional breaking changes between minor releases.",
"install": "Download the binary, then run ./pocketbase serve"
},
{
"slug": "prisma",
"name": "Prisma",
"url": "https://www.prisma.io",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Schema-first TypeScript ORM",
"price": "ORM is free and open source. Prisma Postgres free: 100K operations/mo, 500MB, up to 50 databases. Starter $10/mo (1M operations, 10GB, 1,000 databases).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A schema-first ORM that generates a fully typed client from a declarative schema.prisma file, with its own migration engine and a Studio data browser. The company also sells Prisma Postgres, a managed database whose free plan covers 100,000 operations monthly and 500MB across up to 50 databases.",
"why": "That single schema file is the most legible way to hand a data model to an agent, and there is more Prisma than any other TypeScript ORM in training data. The official MCP server at mcp.prisma.io includes a docs search tool.",
"warn": "Historically a heavy Rust query engine bloated serverless bundles and added cold-start latency; newer versions moved to TypeScript, so check your deployment target. Connection pooling still matters on serverless.",
"install": "npx prisma init"
},
{
"slug": "supabase",
"name": "Supabase",
"url": "https://supabase.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres BaaS with auth and storage",
"price": "Free: 500MB DB, 1GB storage, 5GB egress, 50K MAU, 2 active projects. Pro $25/mo (8GB DB, 100GB storage, 250GB egress, 100K MAU). Team $599/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Managed Postgres plus auth, row-level security, file storage, realtime subscriptions and edge functions, all open source and self-hostable. Free tier gives 500MB database, 1GB storage and 50,000 monthly active users across 2 active projects. Pro is $25/mo with $10 of compute credit included.",
"why": "The default backend for AI builders — Lovable Cloud runs on Supabase behind the scenes, and Bolt and v0 wire it up natively. Its official hosted MCP server lets agents run migrations, inspect schemas and manage branches directly.",
"warn": "Free projects pause after 1 week of inactivity and you get only 2 active ones. Egress and compute overages on Pro add up faster than the $25 headline suggests.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http supabase https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "turso",
"name": "Turso",
"url": "https://turso.tech",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Edge SQLite with embedded replicas",
"price": "Free: 100 databases, 5GB storage, 500M row reads and 10M row writes monthly. Developer $4.99/mo (9GB, 2.5B reads). Scaler $24.92/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted libSQL — a fork of SQLite — with per-tenant databases and embedded replicas that put a local copy of the data inside your application for microsecond reads. The free plan allows 100 databases, 5GB storage and 500 million monthly row reads. Developer tier is $4.99 monthly.",
"why": "The cheapest credible paid tier in this list at under $5, and database-per-user is trivial, which suits multi-tenant side projects. Drizzle has first-class Turso support that agents generate reliably.",
"warn": "Naming is genuinely confusing: Turso Cloud runs on libSQL today, while 'Turso Database', the Rust rewrite of SQLite, is still in beta. Billing meters rows read, so one unindexed query can burn a month of quota."
},
{
"slug": "upstash",
"name": "Upstash (Redis)",
"url": "https://upstash.com",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Serverless Redis over HTTP",
"price": "Free: 256MB storage, 500K commands/mo, 10GB bandwidth. Pay-as-you-go $0.20 per 100K commands plus $0.25/GB storage. Fixed plans from $10/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Serverless Redis billed per command and reachable over HTTP REST, so it works from edge functions and browsers where holding a TCP connection is impossible. The free tier gives 256MB storage, 500,000 commands and 10GB bandwidth monthly. Upstash also sells Vector and QStash queueing on the same model.",
"why": "The default answer for rate limiting, session storage and caching in a Next.js or Vercel app — @upstash/ratelimit is about five lines. Costs fall to zero when nobody is using your app.",
"warn": "The 500K free commands go faster than you expect — a polling UI or a chatty rate limiter can exhaust the monthly allowance in days. Per-command billing punishes hot loops.",
"install": "npm i @upstash/redis"
},
{
"slug": "xata",
"name": "Xata",
"url": "https://xata.io",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Branch-native Postgres with CoW forks",
"price": "Xata Cloud is pay-as-you-go from about $0.012/hr compute plus $0.28/GB-mo storage; the micro instance works out around $9/mo. Self-hosted open source is free.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vanilla Postgres 18 with copy-on-write branching: a branch of any size is created in seconds and stores only what changes. Idle branches hibernate and wake in about a second. Xata relaunched as a Postgres platform, replacing its earlier serverless data API product.",
"why": "A branch per coding agent or preview deploy costs cents — Xata quotes a thousand branches for a dollar. Useful when you want agents experimenting against production-sized data without any risk to it.",
"warn": "The old Xata serverless platform and its 15GB free tier are gone; the current Postgres cloud has no permanently free hosted plan, only pay-as-you-go compute or self-hosting."
},
{
"slug": "zero",
"name": "Zero (Rocicorp)",
"url": "https://zero.rocicorp.dev",
"cat": "backend",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres sync engine for local-first",
"price": "Open source and self-hostable for free. Cloud Zero: Hobby $30/mo, Professional $300/mo, BYOC from $1,000/mo plus your own AWS costs.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A general-purpose sync engine that keeps a queryable client-side replica in sync with an ordinary Postgres database, so UI reads are instant and offline works by default. It reached a stable 1.0 in June 2026. Runs as zero-cache alongside your own API servers.",
"why": "Gets you the instant, no-spinner feel of Linear without hand-writing cache invalidation, and it sits on plain Postgres you already own. Used in production by tldraw, Tines and Productlane.",
"warn": "Not a managed backend — you still need Postgres with logical replication, a zero-cache server and your own API endpoints. The cheapest hosted tier is $30/mo, and this is the most operationally demanding option on this list."
},
{
"slug": "auth0",
"name": "Auth0",
"url": "https://auth0.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Enterprise CIAM platform",
"price": "Free to 25k MAU · Essentials from $35/mo (500 MAU) · Pro from $240/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Okta-owned customer identity platform with deep enterprise features: SAML and OIDC federation, an extensibility rules engine, anomaly detection, compliance certifications and fine-grained authorization. The free tier covers 25,000 monthly active users. Paid B2C plans are priced by MAU band, starting at 500 users.",
"why": "Reach for it when a customer's procurement team demands SOC 2, SAML and audit logs, or when you want an identity vendor that enterprise buyers already recognize and trust.",
"warn": "Brutal cliff: the free plan holds 25k MAU, but the cheapest paid plan is $35/mo for only 500 MAU. Enabling any single paid feature — custom database connections, enterprise MFA — drops your ceiling from 25,000 users to 500.",
"install": "npm i @auth0/nextjs-auth0"
},
{
"slug": "better-auth",
"name": "Better Auth",
"url": "https://better-auth.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Self-hosted TypeScript auth framework",
"price": "Free and open source (MIT) · self-hosted, no MAU fees",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Framework-agnostic TypeScript authentication library that runs inside your own app and writes to your own database. Covers email/password, social OAuth, two-factor, organizations, passkeys and API keys through a plugin system. Vercel acquired the project in July 2026; it stays MIT-licensed, self-hosted and community-governed.",
"why": "No per-MAU bill ever and no vendor holding your user table — auth becomes just another dependency. The plugin system covers most of what you would otherwise pay Clerk or Auth0 for.",
"warn": "You own the hard parts: session security, email deliverability, rate limiting and breach response are all yours. Vercel's July 2026 acquisition preserves MIT licensing, but roadmap direction now sits with a hosting vendor.",
"install": "npm i better-auth"
},
{
"slug": "clerk",
"name": "Clerk",
"url": "https://clerk.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted auth with drop-in React UI",
"price": "Free to 50k MRU · $25/mo Pro then $0.02/MRU",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted authentication with prebuilt React and Next.js components — sign-in, user profile and organization UI you drop in as JSX. Handles sessions, MFA, passkeys, social login and B2B organizations. Billing is measured in monthly retained users rather than raw signups, so users who never return are never charged.",
"why": "Fastest zero-to-login path in the React world: drop in the SignIn component and you have a styled production auth page in minutes. The Feb 2026 jump to 50k free users made it viable far longer than before.",
"warn": "The free tier jumped to 50k MRU in February 2026, but enterprise SSO, user impersonation and enhanced B2B org features sit behind $100/mo add-ons that stack on top of Pro. Clerk-hosted components mean your login UI lives in their iframe-free but proprietary React layer.",
"install": "npm i @clerk/nextjs"
},
{
"slug": "firebase-auth",
"name": "Firebase Auth",
"url": "https://firebase.google.com/products/auth",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Mobile-first auth from Google",
"price": "Free · Identity Platform free to 50k MAU · SMS billed per message",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's authentication service, strongest on mobile. Standard email and social sign-in is free with no user cap; the upgraded Identity Platform tier is free to 50,000 MAU and then billed through Google Cloud. Phone and SMS verification is billed per message and requires the paid Blaze plan.",
"why": "Still the least-effort option for a native iOS or Android app, with mature SDKs, offline handling and free anonymous auth for try-before-you-signup flows.",
"warn": "SMS auth is both a real cost and a fraud target — SMS pumping attacks on Blaze projects have produced large surprise bills. Exporting users is possible, but passwords use a Google-specific scrypt variant that complicates migration.",
"install": "npm i firebase"
},
{
"slug": "hexclave",
"name": "Hexclave (Stack Auth)",
"url": "https://www.hexclave.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source Clerk alternative",
"price": "Free to 10k MAU · $49/mo Team (50k) · $299/mo Growth · self-host free",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source Clerk alternative, formerly Stack Auth, now a Y Combinator-backed company called Hexclave. Ships prebuilt React components, organizations, RBAC and user impersonation. Client SDKs are MIT-licensed and the server is AGPLv3 with commercial licensing available; the whole stack self-hosts for free.",
"why": "The closest thing to Clerk's component-level developer experience that you can also run on your own infrastructure, which makes the escape hatch real rather than theoretical.",
"warn": "Rebranded from Stack Auth during 2026, so docs, packages (@stackframe/stack) and URLs still mix both names. AGPLv3 on the server means self-hosting inside a closed-source product requires a commercial license.",
"install": "npx @stackframe/init-stack@latest"
},
{
"slug": "kinde",
"name": "Kinde",
"url": "https://kinde.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted auth with built-in billing",
"price": "Free to 10.5k MAU · $25/mo Pro then $0.0175/MAU",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted auth and user management with organizations, roles, feature flags and built-in subscription billing. Free to 10,500 monthly active users. Paid plans start at $25/mo with overage at $0.0175 per MAU, and Kinde takes 0.5-0.7% of volume when you bill customers through it.",
"why": "One of the few auth vendors that also sells billing and entitlements, so a solo builder ships signup, plans and feature gating without wiring in a second product.",
"warn": "Bundling auth and billing deepens lock-in — migrating away means moving users and live subscriptions at the same time. Kinde's billing fee stacks on top of Stripe's own processing fee.",
"install": "npm i @kinde-oss/kinde-auth-nextjs"
},
{
"slug": "logto",
"name": "Logto",
"url": "https://logto.io",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source OIDC identity service",
"price": "Free to 50k MAU · Pro $24/mo (unlimited MAU) + per-feature add-ons",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source identity service built on OIDC, available self-hosted or cloud-hosted. Provides a customizable sign-in experience, RBAC, organizations, MFA and machine-to-machine tokens. The free tier covers 50,000 MAU; the $24/mo Pro plan removes the MAU cap and bills on tokens plus per-feature add-ons.",
"why": "A proper standards-based OIDC provider you can run yourself, useful when you need to issue tokens to your own APIs and services rather than only log humans into a web app.",
"warn": "Pro looks cheap until add-ons stack up: enterprise SSO is $48 per connector, SAML apps $96 each, and the organizations, MFA and advanced security bundles are $48 each — a modest B2B setup passes $200/mo quickly.",
"install": "npm i @logto/next"
},
{
"slug": "lucia",
"name": "Lucia",
"url": "https://lucia-auth.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Deprecated lib, now auth guide",
"price": "Free · deprecated library, now MIT reference code and a written guide",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "No longer a library. Lucia was deprecated in March 2025 and now exists as a learning resource: a copy-paste auth_session.ts reference implementation plus The Auth Book, a free guide covering sessions, tokens and password handling. The site was last refreshed in July 2026.",
"why": "Read it before choosing any vendor — it is the fastest way to genuinely understand what session auth does, and the single-file implementation is enough for small projects.",
"warn": "Do not install the npm package for new work; it is unmaintained and will not receive security fixes. This is documentation and example code, not a supported dependency."
},
{
"slug": "supabase-auth",
"name": "Supabase Auth",
"url": "https://supabase.com/auth",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres-native auth",
"price": "Free to 50k MAU · Pro $25/mo incl. 100k then $0.00325/MAU",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Authentication built into the Supabase Postgres platform. Users live in an auth.users table inside your own database, and row-level security policies read the JWT directly. The free tier covers 50,000 monthly active users; the $25/mo Pro plan includes 100,000 then charges $0.00325 per extra MAU.",
"why": "If your data already sits in Supabase, auth is effectively free and authorization becomes a SQL policy instead of application middleware you have to remember to apply.",
"warn": "Per-MAU overage is the cheapest in this list, but SAML SSO is billed separately at $0.015/MAU. Free projects pause after a week of inactivity, and misconfigured row-level security is a common route to leaking a whole table publicly.",
"install": "npm i @supabase/supabase-js"
},
{
"slug": "supertokens",
"name": "SuperTokens",
"url": "https://supertokens.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Self-hostable auth with add-ons",
"price": "Self-host free · cloud free under 5k MAU then $0.02/MAU · add-ons $100/mo min",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source authentication you self-host, with a managed cloud option. Core email/password, social login and session management are free forever when self-hosted; you pay only for add-on modules such as MFA and account linking. Managed cloud is free under 5,000 MAU then $0.02 per MAU.",
"why": "The self-hosted core is genuinely full-featured rather than deliberately crippled, and its session handling with rotating refresh tokens is stronger than most drop-in competitors offer.",
"warn": "Paid add-ons carry a $100/mo minimum regardless of your size, so adding MFA to a tiny app takes you from $0 to $100/mo. Self-hosting also means running a separate SuperTokens core service alongside your application.",
"install": "npm i supertokens-node"
},
{
"slug": "workos",
"name": "WorkOS",
"url": "https://workos.com",
"cat": "auth",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "B2B auth with enterprise SSO",
"price": "AuthKit free to 1M MAU · SSO/SCIM $125 per connection/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "B2B identity platform. AuthKit gives you hosted sign-in, sessions and user management free up to one million monthly active users. The revenue model lives in enterprise add-ons instead: SAML single sign-on and SCIM directory sync, sold per connected customer organization.",
"why": "The free ceiling is absurd for a solo builder, and when your first enterprise buyer demands Okta SSO you switch it on per-connection rather than rebuilding your entire auth stack.",
"warn": "The generous free MAU tier is a funnel into the real product: each SSO or SCIM connection costs $125/mo, so three enterprise customers means $750/mo. A custom domain is a further $99/mo.",
"install": "npm i @workos-inc/authkit-nextjs"
},
{
"slug": "autumn",
"name": "Autumn",
"url": "https://useautumn.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Billing layer on top of Stripe",
"price": "Free to ~$8k/mo processed · $375/mo to $50k · self-host free (Apache-2.0)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source billing layer that sits between your app and Stripe. It moves pricing from code into config and handles subscription state, usage metering, credits, entitlements and upgrade or downgrade proration, returning Stripe Checkout URLs. Stripe remains the processor, so Autumn is not a merchant of record.",
"why": "Kills the worst part of a Stripe integration — webhook handling and feature gating — behind calls like check and track, so usage-based AI pricing takes an afternoon instead of a sprint.",
"warn": "Not an MoR: Stripe fees and your own global tax obligations still apply on top. The hosted free tier stops around $8k processed per month and the next step is a steep $375/mo, though Apache-2.0 self-hosting is an escape hatch.",
"install": "npm i autumn-js"
},
{
"slug": "creem",
"name": "Creem",
"url": "https://www.creem.io",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Low-fee merchant of record",
"price": "3.9% + $0.40 per transaction, MoR · optional Pro plan $99/mo",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Merchant of record for indie SaaS and digital products at 3.9% + $0.40 per transaction, the cheapest headline MoR rate in this list. Handles VAT, GST and sales tax across 190+ countries, plus subscriptions, chargeback protection and revenue splits, with payouts on the 1st and 15th.",
"why": "Roughly a full percentage point cheaper than Paddle or Lemon Squeezy on every sale while still taking tax compliance off your plate — a gap that compounds as revenue grows.",
"warn": "Younger and smaller than Paddle or Stripe, so platform risk is real: merchant payouts are documented for only about 86 countries, and routing all of your revenue through a startup processor is itself a bet."
},
{
"slug": "dodo-payments",
"name": "Dodo Payments",
"url": "https://dodopayments.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Global MoR with India coverage",
"price": "4% + $0.40 US · +1.5% intl · +0.5% subscriptions · MoR",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Merchant of record covering 220+ countries with unusually strong India and emerging-market support. Charges 4% + $0.40 on domestic US transactions, plus 1.5% for international cards and 0.5% for subscriptions. Handles tax compliance, chargebacks and invoicing across 40+ payment methods and 80+ currencies.",
"why": "The practical choice if you are based outside the US or EU — India especially — where Stripe onboarding and payouts are painful, while still giving you merchant-of-record tax coverage.",
"warn": "The headline 4% is only a base rate: international cards, subscriptions and buy-now-pay-later stack surcharges that can push real cost past 6%. Payouts under $1,000 carry a $5 fee and USD SWIFT transfers cost $25."
},
{
"slug": "gumroad",
"name": "Gumroad",
"url": "https://gumroad.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Creator storefront and MoR",
"price": "10% + $0.50 direct sales · 30% marketplace sales · MoR",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Creator storefront for selling digital products, memberships and courses with no monthly fee. It charges 10% + $0.50 on direct sales through your own links and 30% on sales it sources through its own marketplace. Gumroad became merchant of record on 1 January 2025 and handles sales tax worldwide.",
"why": "Zero setup: you can be selling an ebook, template or course within about ten minutes, with hosting, checkout, file delivery and tax all handled and no integration code at all.",
"warn": "10% + $0.50 is by far the most expensive merchant of record here — on a $9 sale you keep roughly $7.60. It is a hosted storefront rather than an API-first billing layer, so it suits products, not SaaS with entitlements."
},
{
"slug": "lemon-squeezy",
"name": "Lemon Squeezy",
"url": "https://www.lemonsqueezy.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Merchant of record for digital goods",
"price": "5% + $0.50 per transaction, MoR including all tax handling",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Merchant of record for digital products and SaaS at a flat 5% + $0.50 per transaction. Handles global sales tax, EU VAT and GST calculation, collection and filing, plus hosted checkout, subscriptions, licence keys and affiliates. Stripe acquired the company in 2024.",
"why": "One flat fee erases every tax-compliance question a solo builder has, which is worth more than a couple of percentage points once you are selling into dozens of countries.",
"warn": "Now in maintenance limbo: Stripe is steering users toward Stripe Managed Payments and has promised a migration path, with no committed sunset date as of August 2026. Starting a new business here means planning a migration you did not choose.",
"install": "npm i @lemonsqueezy/lemonsqueezy.js"
},
{
"slug": "paddle",
"name": "Paddle",
"url": "https://www.paddle.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Merchant of record for SaaS",
"price": "5% + $0.50 all-inclusive MoR (custom pricing for items under $10)",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Merchant of record aimed at software companies, charging 5% + $0.50 all-inclusive. That single fee covers payment processing, global tax registration and filing, subscription billing, fraud handling, chargebacks and buyer support. Products priced under $10 require custom pricing arranged with sales.",
"why": "The most mature merchant of record for SaaS — enterprise invoicing, dunning and multi-currency have worked for years, so nothing breaks when you start selling annual plans to companies.",
"warn": "Onboarding is a genuine approval process with compliance review, unlike Stripe's instant signup, so expect to justify your product. The $0.50 floor punishes cheap items: on a $5 sale the effective rate is about 15%.",
"install": "npm i @paddle/paddle-js"
},
{
"slug": "polar",
"name": "Polar",
"url": "https://polar.sh",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source merchant of record",
"price": "Starter 5% + $0.50 · Pro $20/mo at 3.8% + $0.40 · Scale $400/mo at 3.4% + $0.30",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source merchant of record built for developers, with usage-based billing, licence keys, digital file delivery and customer portals. New organizations pay 5% + $0.50 on the free Starter tier, and paid monthly plans buy the rate down. Polar acts as seller of record and handles VAT and GST.",
"why": "The best developer experience among the merchant-of-record options — real SDKs, a sandbox environment, and first-party adapters for Better Auth and Next.js let you wire up entitlements same-day.",
"warn": "Rates rose in May 2026: organizations created before 27 May keep 4% + $0.40, while everyone new starts at 5% + $0.50. Moving to a paid plan to buy a lower rate permanently forfeits any grandfathered pricing.",
"install": "npm i @polar-sh/sdk"
},
{
"slug": "revenuecat",
"name": "RevenueCat",
"url": "https://www.revenuecat.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Mobile IAP subscription layer",
"price": "Free under $2.5k monthly tracked revenue · then 1% of tracked revenue",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Subscription infrastructure layered on top of Apple and Google in-app purchases, now extended to web billing through Stripe. It normalizes receipts, entitlements, trials and renewals across platforms and adds paywall and analytics tooling. Free under $2,500 monthly tracked revenue, then 1% of tracked revenue.",
"why": "In-app purchase receipt validation is miserable to build and worse to maintain; RevenueCat reduces cross-platform subscriptions to a single entitlement check and stays free until you have real income.",
"warn": "The 1% is charged on revenue before Apple and Google take their 15-30% cut, so the effective bite is larger than it appears. It is not a payment processor — on mobile the app stores remain merchant of record.",
"install": "npm i @revenuecat/purchases-js"
},
{
"slug": "stripe",
"name": "Stripe",
"url": "https://stripe.com",
"cat": "pay",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Payment gateway (not MoR)",
"price": "2.9% + $0.30 US cards · +1.5% intl · Billing 0.7% · Tax from 0.5%",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default payment gateway: 2.9% + $0.30 for domestic US cards, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed. On standard accounts Stripe is not a merchant of record — you are the seller of record and you own global tax registration and remittance.",
"why": "Best APIs, docs and test tooling in payments, and every AI coding assistant already knows them cold. Reach for it when you want maximum control and sell mostly domestically.",
"warn": "The tax burden is the catch: as seller of record you owe EU VAT, UK VAT and US state sales tax registration yourself. Stripe Managed Payments makes Stripe the MoR but adds 3.5% on top of processing — roughly 6.4% all-in.",
"install": "npm i stripe"
},
{
"slug": "aws-amplify-hosting",
"name": "AWS Amplify Hosting",
"url": "https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "AWS-managed frontend hosting",
"price": "Free tier: 1,000 build minutes, 5 GB stored, 15 GB served, 500k SSR requests, 100 GB-hours SSR compute per month. Then $0.01 per standard build minute, $0.023/GB stored, $0.15/GB served, $0.30 per 1M SSR requests, $0.20 per SSR GB-hour.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "AWS's managed CI/CD plus CloudFront hosting for React, Vite and Next.js, with SSR on Lambda and first-party wiring into Cognito, AppSync, DynamoDB and S3. Pricing is pure pay-per-unit — $0.15 per GB served, $0.01 per build minute, $0.30 per million SSR requests.",
"why": "If the rest of your stack already lives in AWS, Amplify keeps auth, data and hosting inside one IAM boundary with per-branch environments. The free tier covers a low-traffic first year comfortably.",
"warn": "AWS has no hard spend cap — Budgets only send alerts. Amplify tutorial defaults have produced four-figure bills, including a documented $1,100 charge from an undisclosed OpenSearch instance (refunded). Create an AWS Budget with an SNS or Lambda action that disables the offending resources.",
"install": "npm create amplify@latest && npx ampx sandbox"
},
{
"slug": "bunny-net",
"name": "Bunny.net",
"url": "https://bunny.net",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Cheap CDN + edge containers",
"price": "$1/mo minimum, prepaid. CDN bandwidth $0.01/GB Europe and North America, $0.03/GB Asia and Oceania, $0.045/GB South America, $0.06/GB Middle East and Africa; Volume network $0.005/GB. Magic Containers $0.02 per core-hour and $0.005 per GB RAM-hour, storage $0.10/GB-mo.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A pay-per-gigabyte CDN across 119 points of presence, with edge storage, image optimization, video streaming, Edge Scripting and Magic Containers for serverless compute in 41 regions. There are no plans or seats — you top up a balance and pay per unit above a $1 monthly minimum.",
"why": "The bandwidth escape hatch: park a Vite build or media on Bunny at $0.01/GB and the terabyte that costs about $150 on Vercel costs $10. Setup is one pull zone and a CNAME.",
"warn": "Prepaid balance means an attack drains credit instead of generating an invoice — safer, but the site goes dark at zero, so keep auto top-up modest and alerts on. It is not a Git-deploy platform: you still need somewhere to build, and Edge Scripting is a far smaller ecosystem than Workers.",
"install": "Create a Pull Zone, point a CNAME at it, upload the build to Edge Storage"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-pages-workers",
"name": "Cloudflare Pages + Workers",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Edge CDN + isolate serverless",
"price": "Free: unmetered static bandwidth, 500 builds/mo, 100k Worker requests/day, 10 ms CPU per invocation. Workers Paid $5/mo covers 10M requests + 30M CPU-ms, then $0.30 per extra 1M requests and $0.02 per 1M CPU-ms. Egress always $0.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Static hosting on Cloudflare's CDN plus Workers, a V8-isolate runtime executing in 300+ cities. Static asset bandwidth is unmetered on every tier and there are no egress fees; you pay only for Worker requests and CPU milliseconds. Pages Functions bill exactly as Workers.",
"why": "The one major host where a viral spike does not become a bill: bandwidth is free and DDoS mitigation is on by default. Isolates give effectively zero cold start, and $5/mo buys 10M requests.",
"warn": "Bandwidth is free but D1, KV, R2 operations, Durable Objects and Workers AI meter separately and creep up. Node compatibility still needs nodejs_compat and some libraries never work. No hard spend cap exists — set billing notifications.",
"install": "npx wrangler pages deploy ./dist"
},
{
"slug": "coolify",
"name": "Coolify",
"url": "https://coolify.io",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Self-hosted PaaS (open source)",
"price": "Self-hosted free forever with no feature limits. Coolify Cloud $5/mo for 2 connected servers, +$3/mo per extra server, 20% off annual. You still pay your own VPS bill (Hetzner from about EUR 5.49/mo).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source Vercel and Heroku replacement you install on any VPS with a single shell command. It handles Git deploys, Docker Compose stacks, automatic Let's Encrypt certificates, databases, scheduled backups and preview environments on servers you own. The Cloud tier only hosts the control plane.",
"why": "Flat, knowable cost: one EUR 5 Hetzner box with 20 TB of included traffic runs a dozen apps for less than a single Vercel seat, and unmetered bandwidth means bill shock is structurally impossible.",
"warn": "You become the sysadmin — OS patching, backups, uptime and the 3am reboot are yours. Coolify has shipped breaking upgrades; snapshot the VPS first, and keep the control plane off your production box. No managed DDoS: put Cloudflare in front.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash"
},
{
"slug": "deno-deploy",
"name": "Deno Deploy",
"url": "https://deno.com/deploy",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Edge JS/TS serverless runtime",
"price": "Free: 1M requests, 20 GB egress, 15 CPU-hours, 350 GB-hr memory, 1 GiB KV. Pro $20/mo: 5M requests, 200 GB egress, 40 CPU-hours. Overage $2 per 1M requests, $0.50/GB egress, $0.05/CPU-hour. Builder $200/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Deno's globally distributed serverless platform, fully rebuilt — Deploy Classic sunset on 20 July 2026. The current version runs Deno, Node and mainstream frameworks at V8-isolate speed with built-in KV, CDN caching, queues and OpenTelemetry observability from a Git connection.",
"why": "TypeScript with no build config, effectively zero cold starts, and a global KV store included, so a small API or edge function ships in minutes. The free tier is generous enough for genuine side projects.",
"warn": "Egress overage at $0.50/GB is the most expensive here — over 3x Vercel and 50x Bunny. Fine for JSON APIs, ruinous for images or video, so put assets on a CDN. Deploy Classic projects had to be migrated before the July 2026 sunset.",
"install": "deployctl deploy --project=my-app main.ts"
},
{
"slug": "digitalocean-app-platform",
"name": "DigitalOcean App Platform",
"url": "https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed app PaaS on DigitalOcean",
"price": "3 static-site apps free with 1 GiB transfer each. Cheapest container $5/mo (shared 1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 50 GiB transfer); $10/mo gives 1 GiB RAM and 100 GiB; $50/mo gives 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 250 GiB. Overage $0.02/GiB.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "DigitalOcean's Git-to-container PaaS built on their droplet infrastructure, with managed Postgres, autoscaling, cron jobs and a CDN for static components. Instances are always-on containers so there are no cold starts, and outbound transfer beyond the plan allowance is a flat $0.02 per GiB.",
"why": "Boring in the best way: flat monthly instance prices, one of the cheapest bandwidth overage rates on the market, and Spaces, managed Postgres and droplets one click away when you outgrow it.",
"warn": "The free static tier includes only 1 GiB of transfer per app before you must add a paid component. Transfer pools across the account, so one heavy app can consume another's allowance. Set a billing alert; there is no hard cap.",
"install": "doctl apps create --spec .do/app.yaml"
},
{
"slug": "firebase-app-hosting",
"name": "Firebase App Hosting",
"url": "https://firebase.google.com/products/app-hosting",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Google-managed Next.js SSR host",
"price": "Requires Blaze pay-as-you-go; not on the free Spark plan. 5 GB storage free then $0.10/GB; 10 GiB/mo uncached egress free then $0.20/GiB; cached egress $0.15/GiB. Classic Firebase Hosting stays free at 10 GB storage and 360 MB/day transfer.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's Cloud Run-backed hosting for Next.js and Angular, with GitHub integration, server-side rendering, rollouts and native hookups to Firestore, Auth and App Check. Classic Firebase Hosting remains a free static CDN with 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of daily transfer.",
"why": "If Firestore and Firebase Auth are already your backend, App Hosting deletes the glue code — SSR, secrets and the client SDK arrive pre-wired. Classic Hosting alone is still a fine free CDN for a Vite build.",
"warn": "Blaze has no spend cap — budget alerts notify but never stop anything, which is how Firebase earned its reputation for five-figure overnight bills. Wire the budget Pub/Sub topic to a function that calls the billing API and disables billing, and enable App Check everywhere.",
"install": "npm i -g firebase-tools && firebase init hosting && firebase deploy"
},
{
"slug": "fly-io",
"name": "Fly.io",
"url": "https://fly.io",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Global microVMs / edge containers",
"price": "Pay-as-you-go with no free allowance for new orgs. shared-cpu-1x 256 MB about $2.43/mo ($0.0034/hr), volumes $0.15/GB-month, outbound $0.02/GB in North America and Europe, $0.04/GB most other regions, $0.12/GB India. Support plans $29/mo and $199/mo.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Runs Firecracker microVMs of your Docker image across 35+ regions with anycast routing, private WireGuard networking and Machines that auto-stop and auto-start per request. Billing is per second on provisioned resources, and new organizations no longer receive the legacy free allowances.",
"why": "Puts your app physically near users worldwide without touching Kubernetes, and idle machines scale to zero so a side project runs for a couple of dollars a month. Postgres and Redis live in the same private network.",
"warn": "Volumes and stopped-machine rootfs keep billing when the app is off — orphaned volumes are the classic surprise line item. India egress is $0.12/GB, 6x North America. There is no hard spend cap; watch the dashboard and delete unused apps properly.",
"install": "fly launch && fly deploy"
},
{
"slug": "github-pages",
"name": "GitHub Pages",
"url": "https://pages.github.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Free static hosting from a repo",
"price": "Free on public repos with GitHub Free; private repos require Pro ($4/mo), Team or Enterprise. Soft limits: 1 GB published site, 100 GB bandwidth per month, 10 builds per hour (waived when using a custom Actions workflow).",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Serves a static site directly from a repository branch or a GitHub Actions build, with free HTTPS on custom domains. Limits are soft rather than metered: a 1 GB published site, 100 GB of bandwidth a month and 10 builds an hour. No server-side code at all.",
"why": "The zero-thought way to publish a Vite build, docs site or portfolio — one Actions workflow and it is live forever with no billing relationship to worry about and no credit card on file.",
"warn": "GitHub's terms forbid running a business, e-commerce or SaaS on Pages. Billing risk is genuinely zero, but so are redirects, SSR, server env vars and access control. Exceeding 100 GB earns a polite email, not an invoice.",
"install": "npx gh-pages -d dist"
},
{
"slug": "hetzner-dokploy",
"name": "Hetzner + Dokploy",
"url": "https://dokploy.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Cheap VPS + open-source PaaS",
"price": "Hetzner CX23 from about EUR 5.49/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic, EUR 1/TB overage); ARM CAX11 similar. Dokploy self-hosted free; Dokploy Cloud $4.50/mo per server, Startup $15/mo for 3 servers.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The budget stack: a Hetzner Cloud VPS running Dokploy, an open-source Vercel and Netlify alternative with Docker Compose support, Traefik routing, automatic SSL, preview deploys, multi-server management and database backups. EU servers include 20 TB of outbound traffic, with overage near EUR 1 per TB.",
"why": "Bandwidth roughly a thousand times cheaper than metered platforms — 20 TB for EUR 5 versus $0.15/GB. One box comfortably runs several apps, Postgres and n8n behind a UI that feels like a real PaaS.",
"warn": "Hetzner's US locations include far less traffic than EU ones (1-5 TB versus 20 TB) — check before choosing Ashburn or Hillsboro. Hetzner also runs identity verification and has suspended accounts abruptly, so keep off-site backups. Self-hosting means you own uptime and patching.",
"install": "curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh"
},
{
"slug": "koyeb",
"name": "Koyeb",
"url": "https://www.koyeb.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Serverless containers, global",
"price": "Free: one web service (512 MB, 0.1 vCPU, 2 GB SSD) in Frankfurt or Washington DC. Starter is pay-as-you-go; Pro $29/mo includes $10 compute; Scale $299/mo includes $100. Outbound 100 GB free (1 TB on paid), then $0.02/GB EU and US, $0.04/GB Asia.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "European serverless-container platform that deploys a Dockerfile or a Git repo onto a global anycast edge network with autoscaling and built-in load balancing. It still offers one genuinely free always-on web service, plus serverless GPUs from $0.50 per hour for inference workloads.",
"why": "One of the last real free tiers for an always-on container — no sleeping and no credit card games — and a single deploy puts your app behind global anycast without configuring a CDN.",
"warn": "The free instance is a single small box with no redundancy, and scale-to-zero is still rolling out, so pause services manually to stop billing. Asia egress costs double EU and US. Pro at $29/mo only credits $10 of compute, so the real floor is higher than the headline.",
"install": "koyeb deploy . my-app"
},
{
"slug": "netlify",
"name": "Netlify",
"url": "https://www.netlify.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Jamstack host / edge functions",
"price": "Free: 300 credits/mo, hard-capped (~15 GB bandwidth). Pro $20/mo flat, unlimited seats, 3,000-20,000 credits. Credits: 20 per GB bandwidth, 10 per compute GB-hour, 15 per production deploy, 2 per 10k requests. Top-up $10 per 1,500 credits.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Git-driven host for static and SSR sites with build plugins, edge functions, forms, identity and split testing. It has moved to a unified credit model: bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB, compute 10 credits per GB-hour and each production deploy 15 credits.",
"why": "The friendliest deploy-from-Git flow outside Vercel, with built-in forms, redirects and identity that save you writing a backend. Drag a dist folder onto the dashboard and it is live in seconds.",
"warn": "Netlify famously invoiced a hobbyist $104,000 after a 2024 DDoS (later waived). Today the Free plan is a genuine hard cap — sites pause rather than bill — and auto-recharge on Pro is off by default. Leave it off. The 300-credit free tier is far smaller than the old 100 GB.",
"install": "npx netlify-cli deploy --prod"
},
{
"slug": "northflank",
"name": "Northflank",
"url": "https://northflank.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Container platform, no seat fees",
"price": "Free sandbox: 2 services, 1 database, 2 cron jobs, always-on with no sleeping. Pay-as-you-go from $0/mo: $0.01667 per vCPU-hour, $0.00833 per GB RAM-hour, egress $0.06/GB (ingress free), SSD $0.15/GB-month. No per-seat pricing on any tier.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Container and microservice platform that builds from Git or a Dockerfile, with managed Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, GPUs, job runners and preview environments. The free sandbox runs two always-on services that never spin down, and teams are included free — nothing is charged per seat.",
"why": "A free tier that stays warm, so a hobby API answers instantly, plus per-second compute pricing that stays sane as you scale. Bring-your-own-cloud keeps the same UI while running inside your own AWS or GCP account.",
"warn": "Egress at $0.06/GB is pricier than Fly or DigitalOcean, so front static assets with Cloudflare or Bunny. The free sandbox has fixed small resources and is not intended for production traffic; GPU instances bill from $0.80 per hour and add up fast.",
"install": "Connect the repo in the dashboard, or use the Northflank CLI/API"
},
{
"slug": "railway",
"name": "Railway",
"url": "https://railway.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Container PaaS, usage-based",
"price": "Trial: $5 credit for 30 days. Hobby $5/mo including $5 usage. Pro $20/seat/mo including $20. Compute $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB RAM-month, egress $0.05/GB, billed per second.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Usage-based container PaaS that deploys any Dockerfile or auto-detected framework alongside one-click Postgres, Redis and Mongo. Subscription fees include an equal usage credit; past that you pay $20 per vCPU-month, $10 per GB RAM-month and $0.05 per GB egress.",
"why": "Fastest path from a repo plus a database to a live URL — templates, private networking and env var references just work. Ideal when your Vite frontend needs a real always-on API and Postgres beside it.",
"warn": "Egress at $0.05/GB is 2.5x Fly and 5x Bunny, so never serve media from it. Railway does offer a true hard usage limit: set one in workspace settings and all workloads go offline at 100% — note they do not auto-restart, you must restart manually.",
"install": "npm i -g @railway/cli && railway up"
},
{
"slug": "render",
"name": "Render",
"url": "https://render.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed PaaS, static + services",
"price": "Free static sites and 750 free instance-hours/mo (512 MB, 0.1 CPU, spins down). Starter web service $7/mo. Hobby workspace $0 + compute, 5 GB bandwidth then $0.15/GB. Pro $25/mo + compute with 25 GB. Basic Postgres $6/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Heroku-style PaaS covering static sites, web services, cron jobs, background workers, Postgres and key-value stores, all deployed from Git or a Blueprint YAML. The free web service tier gives 750 instance-hours a month but spins down after 15 minutes idle.",
"why": "Predictable flat instance pricing instead of per-request arithmetic: free static hosting for the Vite build plus a $7 box for the API. render.yaml defines the whole stack in one file.",
"warn": "Free services take roughly a minute to cold-start after 15 minutes idle — unusable for anything a human waits on. Free Postgres is deleted 30 days after creation. Bandwidth allowance is stingy (5 GB on Hobby) and overage is $0.15/GB, same as Vercel.",
"install": "Commit render.yaml, then New > Blueprint in the dashboard"
},
{
"slug": "vercel",
"name": "Vercel",
"url": "https://vercel.com",
"cat": "host",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Next.js host / serverless edge",
"price": "Hobby free: 100 GB fast data transfer, 1M invocations, 4 CPU-hours, 1M edge requests. Pro $20/user/mo with $20 credit, 1 TB transfer then ~$0.15/GB, edge requests $2/1M. Fluid compute Active CPU $0.128/hr (iad1) + $0.0106/GB-hr memory.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The company behind Next.js, turning a Git push into builds, a global CDN and Fluid compute functions. Hobby includes 100 GB transfer, 1M invocations and 4 Active CPU hours. Pro is $20 per seat with a $20 usage credit, 1 TB transfer and per-region compute rates.",
"why": "Zero-config Next.js: push to GitHub and get preview URLs, ISR, image optimization and analytics with no infra thinking. App Router features land here first and work without fighting adapters.",
"warn": "Hobby forbids commercial use — wire up Stripe and you are out of terms. Pro now ships a default $200 on-demand budget with hard caps that pause projects; set it to your real ceiling on day one. Transfer overage near $0.15/GB is ~15x Cloudflare or Bunny.",
"install": "npm i -g vercel && vercel --prod"
},
{
"slug": "airtable-as-a-cms",
"name": "Airtable as a CMS",
"url": "https://airtable.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Spreadsheet database as a content API",
"price": "Free: 5 editors, 1,000 records/base, 1GB attachments, 1,000 API calls/mo. Team $20/user/mo annual (50k records). Business $45/user/mo (125k records).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Airtable is a relational spreadsheet with a REST API, often used as a lightweight CMS for structured collections such as staff directories, event listings or product roundups. The free plan gives 5 editors and 1,000 records per base; read-only viewers are free and unlimited on every plan.",
"why": "Unbeatable for structured, tabular content a non-developer maintains daily. Views, filters and forms come free, and the grid is far faster to bulk-edit than any real CMS here.",
"warn": "The free tier's 1,000 API calls per month makes it viable only for build-time fetching. Long-form prose in a cell is miserable — rich text support is thin. Per-editor pricing scales badly for a large newsroom.",
"install": "npm i airtable"
},
{
"slug": "builder-io",
"name": "Builder.io",
"url": "https://www.builder.io",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Visual page builder with AI codegen",
"price": "Free: 5 users, 75 AI credits/mo. Pro around $24/user/mo, Team around $40/user/mo (20 users). Extra agent credits $25 per 500. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Builder.io is a visual CMS where editors drag and drop your own registered React components onto a canvas. It also does AI design-to-code, turning Figma files and prompts into component code. The free plan covers 5 users and 75 monthly AI credits.",
"why": "Marketing and editorial teams ship landing pages without a developer, using components you already built and approved. Deep React and Next.js integration keeps the design system intact.",
"warn": "Pro and Team prices are not published on the pricing page — the $24 and $40 per-user figures come from third-party trackers, so confirm with sales. AI agent work is metered separately.",
"install": "npm i @builder.io/react"
},
{
"slug": "contentful",
"name": "Contentful",
"url": "https://www.contentful.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Enterprise API-first headless CMS",
"price": "Free: 10 users, 10k records, 100k API calls/mo, 2 locales, 25 content types. Lite $300/mo (20 users, 1M calls, 3 locales). Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Contentful is a hosted API-first CMS with structured content modeling, a web editor, GraphQL and REST delivery APIs, and multi-environment workflows. The free plan covers 10 users, 10,000 records, 100,000 API calls per month, 2 locales and 25 content types.",
"why": "The safe enterprise choice when procurement, SSO, audit logs and SLAs matter more than price. Mature localization and a large app ecosystem make it defensible for a multi-brand publisher.",
"warn": "The jump from free to Lite is $300/mo with nothing in between, and only 2 locales are free. Personalization, AI Actions and Studio all require Enterprise. MCP support is community-maintained, not official.",
"install": "npm i contentful"
},
{
"slug": "directus",
"name": "Directus",
"url": "https://directus.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Data platform over any SQL database",
"price": "Core free (3 seats, free to self-host). Team $499/mo annual or $599/mo monthly (10 SSO seats); managed Cloud +$99/mo. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Directus wraps an existing or new SQL database with a REST and GraphQL API plus a no-code admin app. It does not impose its own storage model — you can point it at a database you already have and keep your tables exactly as they are.",
"why": "Best fit when content is one of several things living in your Postgres rather than the whole application. Official MCP server is generally available in both local and native forms.",
"warn": "The Open Innovation Grant only makes it fully free under $5M annual revenue and 50 employees; above that, Team is $499/mo. The editing UI is a data admin, not a writing tool — long-form editors will not love it.",
"install": "npx directus-template-cli@latest"
},
{
"slug": "ghost",
"name": "Ghost",
"url": "https://ghost.org",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Publishing platform with newsletters",
"price": "Self-host free (MIT). Ghost(Pro) Starter $18/mo yearly (1k members, 1 staff), Publisher $29/mo (3 staff), Business $199/mo (10k members, 15 staff).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Ghost is an MIT-licensed publishing platform with a genuinely polished writing editor, membership and paid-subscription billing, and email newsletters built in. It can run headless through its Content API while keeping the native admin for writers.",
"why": "The only option here that ships paid subscriptions and newsletter delivery out of the box — if the publication's business model is paying readers, Ghost skips months of build work.",
"warn": "Going headless means giving up its themes and much of its built-in SEO and membership front end. Self-hosting adds mail delivery costs of roughly $15-$35/mo. Content modeling is fixed to posts, pages, tags and authors.",
"install": "npm i -g ghost-cli"
},
{
"slug": "hygraph",
"name": "Hygraph",
"url": "https://hygraph.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "GraphQL-native federated content API",
"price": "Hobby free: 3 seats, 1,000 entries, 500k API operations/mo, 2 locales. Growth $199/mo (10 seats, 10k entries, 1M ops, 3 locales). Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hygraph is a GraphQL-native headless CMS whose distinguishing feature is content federation — remote REST or GraphQL sources are stitched into one schema, so a single query returns CMS content alongside data from other systems.",
"why": "Right choice when the publication pulls from external systems — commerce, ticketing, a legacy archive — and you want one query instead of an orchestration layer. MCP server entered early access in January 2026.",
"warn": "The free tier's 1,000-entry cap is small for any real content archive, and the step up to Growth is $199/mo. Everything is GraphQL with no REST fallback.",
"install": "npm i graphql-request"
},
{
"slug": "keystatic",
"name": "Keystatic",
"url": "https://keystatic.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "MIT Git-based CMS for Markdown files",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed with no seat limits. Keystatic Cloud is an optional free add-on for GitHub auth and image handling.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Keystatic from Thinkmill is an MIT-licensed CMS that makes Markdown, MDX, JSON and YAML in your repository editable through a React admin UI. There is no database. It runs against the local filesystem in development and against GitHub in production.",
"why": "Zero cost and zero vendor lock-in — the schema is a TypeScript file and content stays as plain files you can grep and diff. Ships integrations for Next.js, Astro and Remix.",
"warn": "Smaller community and slower release cadence than Tina or Payload. No official MCP server, no built-in scheduling, and no multi-stage editorial workflow or approval chain.",
"install": "npm create @keystatic@latest"
},
{
"slug": "mdx",
"name": "MDX",
"url": "https://mdxjs.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Markdown that renders JSX components",
"price": "Free, MIT-licensed open format.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "MDX is a format that lets you write JSX inside Markdown, so an article can embed live React components — charts, interactive figures, embeds — between paragraphs of prose. It compiles to a React component and is supported by Vite, Next.js and Astro.",
"why": "The reason a technical publication can ship an interactive explainer inside an ordinary article. Every file-based tool here — Tina, Keystatic, Outstatic, Velite — speaks it natively.",
"warn": "MDX is a compiler, not a CMS: no editor, no media library, no workflow, no roles. Non-technical writers will not author raw MDX, so pair it with an editing layer.",
"install": "npm i @mdx-js/rollup"
},
{
"slug": "notion-as-a-cms",
"name": "Notion as a CMS",
"url": "https://www.notion.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Docs workspace used as a content API",
"price": "Free plan (block limits once a workspace has multiple members). Plus $10/member/mo, Business $20/member/mo, Enterprise custom. API access on all plans.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Notion's public API exposes databases and pages as JSON, letting a team draft in Notion and publish to a React front end. The free plan is unlimited for a solo user but applies a block limit once a workspace has multiple members. Notion runs an official hosted MCP server.",
"why": "Editors already live here, so adoption cost is near zero and the writing surface is genuinely pleasant. Works well for a small publication running its editorial calendar in the same workspace.",
"warn": "The API is rate-limited around 3 requests/second and paginates blocks, so builds slow badly past a few hundred posts — cache aggressively. Rich-text to HTML conversion is your problem, and there is no preview or publish workflow.",
"install": "npm i @notionhq/client"
},
{
"slug": "outstatic",
"name": "Outstatic",
"url": "https://outstatic.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Static CMS writing Markdown to GitHub",
"price": "Free and open source (MIT). Deploys inside your Next.js app; no hosted service, seats or API quotas.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Outstatic is an open-source static CMS for Next.js that mounts a writing dashboard inside your own app and commits Markdown or MDX directly to your GitHub repository. Content lives in the repo — there is no database and no external service to pay for.",
"why": "The lowest-cost way to give a writer a real editor on a Next.js blog: no subscription, no seat count, no API limit. Sets up in minutes on Vercel.",
"warn": "Next.js only, and tied to GitHub for both auth and storage. Small maintainer team and a modest feature set — no scheduling, no roles, no localization. Not a fit beyond a couple of writers.",
"install": "npx create-outstatic-app@latest"
},
{
"slug": "payload-cms",
"name": "Payload CMS",
"url": "https://payloadcms.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Code-first Node/React headless CMS",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. No seat fees, no API metering. You pay only for hosting. Enterprise support is custom-quoted.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Payload is an MIT-licensed TypeScript CMS that runs inside your own Next.js app. You define collections in code and it generates a React admin panel plus REST, GraphQL and local Node APIs. It joined Figma in 2025 and remains fully open source.",
"why": "No seats, no API quotas, no vendor pricing — a large publication costs the same as a hobby blog. The admin UI is React, so any field component can be replaced, and content lives in your own Postgres or Mongo.",
"warn": "You own the ops entirely: database, backups, scaling, upgrades. Payload Cloud is no longer the pushed path, so plan for Vercel, Cloudflare or your own infrastructure.",
"install": "npx create-payload-app@latest"
},
{
"slug": "prismic",
"name": "Prismic",
"url": "https://prismic.io",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Slice-based headless CMS for pages",
"price": "Free: 1 user, unlimited documents, 2 locales. Starter $10/mo (3 users). Small $25/mo (7). Medium $150/mo (25). Platinum $675/mo (unlimited).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Prismic pairs a hosted CMS with Slice Machine, a workflow where developers define React components as reusable slices and editors compose pages from them. Documents are unlimited on every plan including free; tiers differ by user count and locale count.",
"why": "The cheapest credible ramp for a small publication — $10/mo buys three editors with unlimited documents. Friendly page composition, an official MCP server, and an AI landing page builder add-on.",
"warn": "Free is one user only, and locales are rationed by tier (2 free, 3 on Starter). Slice Machine couples your content model to component code, which makes a later replatform expensive.",
"install": "npx @slicemachine/init@latest"
},
{
"slug": "sanity",
"name": "Sanity",
"url": "https://www.sanity.io",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Headless CMS with real-time editing",
"price": "Free: 20 seats, 10k documents, 250k API + 1M CDN requests/mo, unlimited locales. Growth $15/seat/mo (25k docs, up to 50 seats). Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Sanity stores content as structured JSON queried with GROQ or GraphQL. Its Studio is an open-source React app you configure in code and deploy yourself. The free tier allows 20 seats, 10,000 documents, 250k API requests and 1M CDN requests per month with unlimited locales.",
"why": "Studio is a React app that drops into a Vite or Next workspace and is customizable down to the individual input component. Real-time collaborative editing and scheduled content releases make it a genuine newsroom tool. Official MCP server ships 40+ tools.",
"warn": "Overages bite: $1 per 25k API requests and $1 per 250k CDN requests past quota. AI credits run $0.05 each beyond the included 1,000/mo.",
"install": "npm create sanity@latest"
},
{
"slug": "storyblok",
"name": "Storyblok",
"url": "https://www.storyblok.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Visual-editor headless CMS",
"price": "Free: 1 seat, 1 space, 100k API requests/mo, 2 locales. Growth $99/mo (5 seats, 1M requests). Growth Plus $349/mo (15 seats). Extra seats $15/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Storyblok is a headless CMS built around a real-time visual editor that renders your live site in an iframe and lets editors click any component to edit it in place. The free tier is 1 seat, 1 space, 100k API requests per month and 2 locales.",
"why": "The visual editor is what wins editor buy-in — non-technical staff see the page exactly as it will publish. Official MCP server launched March 2026, and the React SDK works cleanly with Vite.",
"warn": "The free plan is genuinely one seat, so a second editor immediately costs money. Extra locales are $20/mo each and API overages $10 per 1M requests.",
"install": "npm i @storyblok/react"
},
{
"slug": "strapi",
"name": "Strapi",
"url": "https://strapi.io",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source self-hosted Node CMS",
"price": "Community self-hosted free (MIT, unlimited seats). Growth $45/mo (3 seats, +$15/seat). Strapi Cloud $35 / $90 / $450 per mo. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Strapi is an MIT-licensed Node.js headless CMS with an auto-generated admin panel, REST and GraphQL APIs, and a plugin system. The self-hosted Community edition is free with unlimited seats; Strapi Cloud starts at $35/mo for 100k API requests and 50GB storage.",
"why": "The default when you want a conventional admin UI plus full control of the database and hosting. Large plugin ecosystem and a well-trodden migration path off WordPress.",
"warn": "Editorial extras — review workflows, audit logs, SSO — sit behind Growth or Enterprise. Cloud overages run $1.50 per extra 25k API requests. Native MCP is still in development; today's options are community plugins.",
"install": "npx create-strapi@latest"
},
{
"slug": "tinacms",
"name": "TinaCMS",
"url": "https://tina.io",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Git-backed visual editor for Markdown",
"price": "Free: 2 users. Team $24/mo (3 users, extra seats $90/yr). Team Plus $41/mo (5 users). Business $249/mo (20 users). Priced per project.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "TinaCMS puts a visual editing layer on top of Markdown and MDX files committed to your Git repository. Every edit becomes a commit, so content is versioned alongside code. TinaCloud handles authentication and the content API; the core editor is open source.",
"why": "The bridge between a developer's Git workflow and an editor who will never touch a pull request. Live side-by-side preview of the real React page while typing makes it a plausible writing surface.",
"warn": "Pricing is per project, not per organization, so a content site plus a marketing site is two subscriptions. Free tier is 2 users, and Git-backed content scales poorly past a few thousand entries.",
"install": "npx @tinacms/cli@latest init"
},
{
"slug": "velite",
"name": "Velite",
"url": "https://velite.js.org",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Type-safe build-time content layer",
"price": "Free, MIT-licensed, no hosted service or seats.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Velite compiles Markdown, MDX, YAML and JSON files into a validated, typed data layer using Zod schemas, emitting JSON plus TypeScript definitions at build time. It is bundler-agnostic and works with Vite, webpack and Next.js. It is the maintained successor to the abandoned Contentlayer.",
"why": "Gives a file-based publication real type safety — a missing frontmatter field fails the build instead of a page. No database, no API quota, no runtime cost.",
"warn": "No editing UI at all — writers need a Git workflow or a separate CMS layer on top. Contentlayer, the tool it replaced, is effectively unmaintained; do not start new projects on it.",
"install": "npm i velite -D"
},
{
"slug": "wordpress",
"name": "WordPress (headless / WPGraphQL)",
"url": "https://www.wpgraphql.com",
"cat": "cms",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Headless WordPress via GraphQL",
"price": "WordPress and WPGraphQL are free and GPL-licensed. Real cost is hosting: roughly $10-$50/mo shared, $20-$300/mo managed.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "WPGraphQL is a free GPL plugin that exposes WordPress content as a GraphQL API so a React or Next.js front end can consume it while editors stay in wp-admin. WordPress 6.9 added the Abilities API and an official MCP Adapter for agent access.",
"why": "Unbeatable when the newsroom already knows WordPress — you replatform the front end without retraining a single writer. Enormous plugin ecosystem for SEO, advertising and syndication.",
"warn": "You now maintain two systems. Many plugins assume the theme layer and simply break when headless — SEO, forms and page builders especially. Preview and draft workflows need custom wiring.",
"install": "wp plugin install wp-graphql --activate"
},
{
"slug": "aws-s3-cloudfront",
"name": "AWS S3 + CloudFront",
"url": "https://aws.amazon.com/s3/",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Object storage + global CDN",
"price": "S3 Standard $0.023/GB-month (us-east-1), PUT $0.005/1K, GET $0.0004/1K. CloudFront: first 1 TB/mo and 10M requests free, then $0.085/GB NA/EU declining to $0.020/GB. S3 direct-to-internet egress $0.09/GB",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default building blocks: S3 for durable object storage, CloudFront for global caching and delivery. Neither transforms images — that means Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions or a separate service. CloudFront now also sells flat-rate plans, free at 100 GB and Pro at $15/mo.",
"why": "Unmatched ecosystem, durability and regional control, and serving through CloudFront avoids the $0.09/GB S3 egress rate. The 1 TB per month always-free CloudFront tier covers a surprising share of a small publication's traffic.",
"warn": "S3 egress straight to the internet is $0.09/GB — always front it with CloudFront. There is no built-in image optimization, so AVIF/WebP negotiation is entirely yours to build and maintain.",
"install": "npm i @aws-sdk/client-s3"
},
{
"slug": "backblaze-b2",
"name": "Backblaze B2",
"url": "https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Cheap S3-compatible object storage",
"price": "$6.95/TB/month (about $0.0069/GB), first 10 GB free. Egress free up to 3x average monthly storage, then $0.01/GB. Class A/B/C API calls free; Class D $0.004 per 10K",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "S3-compatible object storage priced at roughly a third of S3. Egress is free up to three times your average stored data each month, and unlimited and free when delivered through partner CDNs including Cloudflare, Fastly and bunny.net. Most API call classes cost nothing.",
"why": "The cheapest durable home for a large archive of originals and masters. Pair it with bunny.net or Cloudflare and both storage and egress land near zero while you keep a standard S3 API.",
"warn": "Free egress is capped at 3x stored data — a small bucket serving heavy traffic blows past it and pays $0.01/GB. The unlimited-egress promise only holds through partner CDNs, not direct to the internet.",
"install": "npm i @aws-sdk/client-s3"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-images",
"name": "Cloudflare Images",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Image storage + edge transforms",
"price": "5,000 unique transformations/mo free on every plan including Free. Then $0.50 per 1,000 unique transformations; $5 per 100,000 images stored/mo; $1 per 100,000 images delivered/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Store, resize and deliver images from Cloudflare's edge. Two modes: a managed image bucket, or transformations applied to images already sitting on R2, S3 or any origin. Handles AVIF and WebP negotiation automatically and supports signed URLs and named variants.",
"why": "If the site is already on Cloudflare this is the lowest-friction optimization layer. Transformations on remote origins bill only for the transform, so pairing it with R2 yields edge-optimized images with zero egress cost.",
"warn": "Billing counts unique transformations, so every distinct width, quality and format combination is a separate billable render — a wide srcset across AVIF and WebP multiplies the count fast."
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-r2",
"name": "Cloudflare R2",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "S3-compatible storage, zero egress",
"price": "Free 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A ops, 10M Class B ops. Then $0.015/GB-month, $4.50/M Class A, $0.36/M Class B. Egress always $0 at any volume",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees — bandwidth out is free at any volume. Uses the same API and SDKs as S3, so most tooling works by changing the endpoint. An Infrequent Access class runs $0.01/GB-month plus a $0.01/GB retrieval fee.",
"why": "For an image-heavy publication the egress line is usually the whole bill, and R2 deletes it. Keeping originals on R2 and transforming through Cloudflare Images makes total cost proportional to storage, not traffic.",
"warn": "Zero egress applies to R2 itself, but Infrequent Access adds a $0.01/GB retrieval charge and a 30-day minimum storage duration. Class A write operations at $4.50/M add up during bulk imports.",
"install": "npx wrangler r2 bucket create my-media"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-stream",
"name": "Cloudflare Stream",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Video hosting and streaming",
"price": "$5 per 1,000 minutes stored/mo, prepaid in $5 blocks; $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. Ingest and encoding always free. No free tier",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "End-to-end video: upload or push RTMP, Cloudflare encodes to adaptive bitrate, stores it and delivers over its own network with a bundled player. Pricing ignores file size and resolution entirely — you are billed on minutes stored and minutes watched.",
"why": "Resolution-independent pricing is the differentiator: a 4K upload costs the same per minute as 720p, unlike Mux. Ingest and encoding are free, so re-uploading or re-encoding a back catalog carries no processing charge.",
"warn": "No free tier at all, and storage is prepaid in $5 blocks of 1,000 minutes. The bundled player and signed-URL scheme are Cloudflare-specific, so moving off means re-embedding every video."
},
{
"slug": "cloudinary",
"name": "Cloudinary",
"url": "https://cloudinary.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Image/video CDN + DAM",
"price": "Free 25 credits/mo; Plus $99/mo (225 credits); Advanced $249/mo (600 credits). 1 credit = 1,000 transformations or 1 GB storage or 1 GB bandwidth",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted media platform combining upload, storage, a URL-based transformation API and CDN delivery. Handles automatic format negotiation via f_auto and quality via q_auto, emitting AVIF or WebP per browser. Includes a DAM layer, AI cropping and video transcoding.",
"why": "The most complete single-vendor answer: upload, transform, optimize and deliver without stitching services together. f_auto,q_auto alone typically cuts image weight 40-70% and improves LCP with a one-line URL change.",
"warn": "The credit model blends storage, bandwidth and transformations into one pool, so a traffic spike burns the same budget as a storage spike — hard to forecast. Transformation URLs are Cloudinary-shaped, so migrating means rewriting every image URL in your content.",
"install": "npm i cloudinary"
},
{
"slug": "filestack",
"name": "Filestack",
"url": "https://www.filestack.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Upload widget + transform API",
"price": "Free: 1 GB bandwidth, 500 uploads, 1,000 transformations, 1 GB storage. Start $69/mo (75 GB, 20K uploads); Grow $199/mo (200 GB); Scale $379/mo (400 GB)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Upload, transformation and delivery service centered on a hosted file picker that imports from local disk, Facebook, Google Drive, Dropbox and device cameras. Adds a URL-based transformation API for cropping, filters and format conversion, plus OCR, virus scanning and content moderation.",
"why": "The fastest way to ship a polished multi-source upload experience without building it. The picker handles OAuth to a dozen cloud sources out of the box, with resilient ingestion for flaky connections.",
"warn": "Every limit is metered separately — uploads, transformations, bandwidth and storage each carry their own cap and overage rate, so a single dimension can force a plan upgrade. The 1 GB free tier is a demo, not a launch tier.",
"install": "npm i filestack-js"
},
{
"slug": "imagekit",
"name": "ImageKit",
"url": "https://imagekit.io",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Image/video CDN + DAM",
"price": "Free 20 GB bandwidth/mo + 3 GB DAM storage; Lite $9/mo (40 GB, $0.50/GB over); Pro $89/mo (225 GB bandwidth + 225 GB storage, $0.45/GB over)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Media optimization and delivery platform with URL-based transformations, a DAM and video streaming. Bills primarily on delivered bandwidth rather than per transformation. Attaches to an external origin such as S3 or your own server, or stores media itself.",
"why": "The cheapest credible Cloudinary alternative with a real forever-free tier. Bandwidth-only billing means unlimited transformation variants cost nothing extra — good for responsive srcset where one image spawns eight renditions.",
"warn": "The free tier grants 20 GB bandwidth but only 3 GB of managed DAM storage, so a large photo archive needs an external origin. Video and AI extensions bill in separate unit pools on top of bandwidth.",
"install": "npm i @imagekit/javascript"
},
{
"slug": "imgix",
"name": "imgix",
"url": "https://imgix.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Real-time image CDN",
"price": "No free tier; 30-day trial with 100 credits. Starter $25/mo (100 credits, 50 GB storage, 100 GB bandwidth); Basic $75/mo; Growth $300/mo. Overage $0.12-$0.25/credit",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Real-time image processing CDN that sits in front of your existing origin — S3, GCS, a web folder — and transforms on request via URL parameters. Supports over 100 params, automatic AVIF/WebP with auto=format, and content-aware cropping. No re-upload or migration needed.",
"why": "Best when your images already live somewhere and you only want a rendering layer. Point it at your bucket, add ?auto=format,compress, and every image negotiates AVIF or WebP with no storage migration.",
"warn": "Moved to a credit-based model, so storage, bandwidth and renders draw on one pool and forecasting is harder than the old per-origin-image pricing. There is no permanent free tier — only a 30-day trial.",
"install": "npm i @imgix/js-core"
},
{
"slug": "mux",
"name": "Mux",
"url": "https://mux.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Video API — encode, host, stream",
"price": "Free: 100K delivery min/mo, 10 videos stored. Then storage from $0.0024/min and delivery from $0.0008/min at 720p (1080p 1.25x, 4K 4x). Encoding free on Basic; player and analytics free",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Video infrastructure API: POST a source file or push RTMP, get back adaptive-bitrate HLS, thumbnails, captions and a player. Bills per minute of video stored and delivered rather than per GB. Includes Mux Data, a QoE analytics product tracking startup time and rebuffering.",
"why": "The fastest path from a raw MP4 to a production-grade adaptive stream — one API call and encoding is handled. Per-minute billing is predictable for editorial video where you know runtime but not viewer bandwidth.",
"warn": "Per-minute delivery scales with resolution — 4K costs 4x the 720p rate — so one popular 4K feature can dominate the bill. Storage bills per stored minute indefinitely, not per GB.",
"install": "npm i @mux/mux-node"
},
{
"slug": "sharp",
"name": "Sharp",
"url": "https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Node.js image processing library",
"price": "Free and open source under Apache-2.0. Infrastructure cost only — you run it on your own compute",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "High-performance Node.js image processing built on libvips. Reads and writes JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and SVG, and resizes roughly 4-5x faster than ImageMagick by streaming small regions of uncompressed data instead of loading whole images into memory.",
"why": "The engine underneath most hosted services and Next.js image optimization. Use it to pre-generate AVIF and WebP derivatives at build time and serve them as static files — zero per-transformation cost, forever.",
"warn": "You own the caching, invalidation, URL scheme and CDN — Sharp is a library, not a service. Native libvips binaries can complicate deployment on some serverless targets and on Alpine or musl-based containers.",
"install": "npm i sharp"
},
{
"slug": "transloadit",
"name": "Transloadit",
"url": "https://transloadit.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "File encoding pipelines API",
"price": "Community free: 5 GB/mo processed, watermarked output, service stops at the cap. Startup $54/mo for 40 GB then $1.80/GB extra. Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "File processing API driven by declarative JSON Templates called Assemblies: chain import, resize, transcode, watermark, OCR, virus scan and export steps into one pipeline. Handles images, video, audio and documents. Bills on gigabytes processed rather than per operation or per file.",
"why": "Reach for it when uploads need a real workflow, not just a resize — ingest a RAW photo, generate five derivatives, extract EXIF and push to S3 in a single declarative Template.",
"warn": "The free Community tier watermarks images and trims audio and video, so it is unusable in production. Billing counts every gigabyte flowing through the pipeline, so multi-step chains bill the same bytes repeatedly.",
"install": "npm i transloadit"
},
{
"slug": "uploadthing",
"name": "UploadThing",
"url": "https://uploadthing.com",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Typed file uploads for Next.js",
"price": "Free 2 GB storage; $10/mo for 100 GB; $25/mo usage-based with 250 GB included then $0.08/GB. Unlimited uploads and downloads on all tiers",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Type-safe file upload service built for Next.js and React by the makers of the T3 stack. Provides a server-side file router with per-route size and MIME limits, plus prebuilt React dropzone components. Storage sits on S3 behind the scenes.",
"why": "Removes the presigned-URL boilerplate entirely — define a route with allowed types and a max size, drop in the UploadButton component, done. The typed contract between client and server catches upload mistakes at compile time.",
"warn": "It is an upload and storage layer, not an image pipeline — no resizing and no AVIF/WebP negotiation. An image-heavy site still needs a transformation CDN in front of it.",
"install": "npm i uploadthing @uploadthing/react"
},
{
"slug": "uppy",
"name": "Uppy",
"url": "https://uppy.io",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source JS file uploader",
"price": "Free and MIT licensed, no paid edition — all plugins ship in the base package. Self-host the optional Companion server, or use the one Transloadit hosts",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Modular JavaScript upload UI: drag and drop, progress, retries, resumable tus uploads, crash recovery, image cropping before upload and 40 locales. The optional Companion server pulls files straight from Google Drive, Dropbox, Instagram or a URL without routing through the user's device.",
"why": "The best upload front end you can get without building one. Resumable uploads and remote-source imports work against any backend — S3, tus, XHR or Transloadit — and nothing about it locks you to a vendor.",
"warn": "Uppy only handles the client side; storage, transformation and delivery are still yours to build. Remote sources require running and securing the Companion server plus your own OAuth credentials.",
"install": "npm i @uppy/core @uppy/dashboard @uppy/tus"
},
{
"slug": "vercel-blob",
"name": "Vercel Blob",
"url": "https://vercel.com/docs/vercel-blob",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed blob storage for Vercel",
"price": "Hobby free: 5 GB storage, 100 GB transfer, 100K simple + 10K advanced ops. Pro on-demand: $0.023/GB-month storage, $0.05/GB transfer (iad1), $0.40/M simple ops, $5.00/M advanced ops",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Object storage wired into the Vercel platform, with public and private stores, client-direct uploads that bypass your server, and files up to 5 TB. Billed on stored GB, data transfer, and simple versus advanced operations. Cache hits do not count as billable operations.",
"why": "Best when the app already runs on Vercel — put() from a server action or a client upload, with no bucket, IAM policy or CORS config to manage. Client uploads skip data-transfer charges entirely.",
"warn": "Advanced operations cost $5.00/M and multipart uploads bill one per part, so bulk-importing a photo archive is surprisingly expensive. Blobs over 512 MB are never cached and incur origin transfer on every single access.",
"install": "npm i @vercel/blob"
},
{
"slug": "vercel-image-optimization",
"name": "Vercel Image Optimization",
"url": "https://vercel.com/docs/image-optimization",
"cat": "media",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Next.js edge image transforms",
"price": "Hobby free: 5K transformations, 300K cache reads, 100K cache writes per month. On-demand $0.05-$0.0812 per 1K transformations, $0.40-$0.64 per 1M cache reads, $4.00-$6.40 per 1M cache writes",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The optimization layer behind the Next.js next/image component. Resizes on demand at the edge, negotiates AVIF or WebP from the Accept header, and caches results globally. Billing moved off source images to transformations, cache reads and cache writes.",
"why": "Zero configuration if you already use Next.js — next/image gives correct srcset, lazy loading, explicit dimensions that prevent layout shift, and a priority hint for the LCP image.",
"warn": "Transformations bill on every cache MISS and STALE, and cache writes run up to $6.40 per million — a wide srcset across many breakpoints multiplies both. Source images must be JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF; anything else passes through unoptimized."
},
{
"slug": "algolia",
"name": "Algolia",
"url": "https://www.algolia.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted keyword search API",
"price": "Free: 10K search requests/mo + 50K records. Grow: $0.50 per 1K searches + $0.40 per 1K records (10K searches / 100K records included). Grow Plus $1.75 per 1K searches. Elevate with NeuralSearch is custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The incumbent hosted search-as-a-service: you push records to an index over an API and get typo-tolerant, sub-50ms keyword search with faceting, synonyms and analytics. Free tier covers 10,000 search requests and 50,000 records per month. Not self-hostable — it is closed SaaS.",
"why": "InstantSearch UI widgets for React, Vue and vanilla JS mean a working search box in an afternoon, and DocSearch is free for open-source docs sites. Models know its API surface cold.",
"warn": "Billing is per search request, not per user — an as-you-type box fires a request per keystroke unless you debounce. Costs scale with traffic, fast.",
"install": "npm i algoliasearch react-instantsearch"
},
{
"slug": "brave-search-api",
"name": "Brave Search API",
"url": "https://brave.com/search/api/",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Independent web index search API",
"price": "$5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Web search over Brave's own crawled index rather than a resold Google or Bing feed. Returns organic results, news, images and videos as structured JSON, with an Answers endpoint that generates a cited response. Enterprise plans offer full-funnel zero data retention.",
"why": "An independent index surfaces pages Google-derived APIs cannot, and the licensing is clean for AI grounding. It ships a first-party MCP server so agents can call it directly.",
"warn": "The $5 monthly credit is roughly 1,000 Search requests and there is no free plan beyond it. Long-tail coverage is shallower than Google's index."
},
{
"slug": "chroma",
"name": "Chroma",
"url": "https://www.trychroma.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Embedded vector DB + cloud",
"price": "OSS free (Apache 2.0). Chroma Cloud Starter: $0/mo base with $5 free credits, then usage. Team $250/mo + usage with $100 credits. Rates: $2.50 per GiB written, $0.33 per GiB-month stored, $0.0075 per TiB queried, $0.09 per GiB returned.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The vector store that runs in-process. pip install chromadb gives a persistent local database with no server to run, and the same client points at Chroma Cloud when you deploy. Cloud adds serverless vector, hybrid and full-text search on a Rust core.",
"why": "Fastest possible RAG prototype: three lines to a collection, and it embeds your documents with a sensible default model. You get working retrieval before choosing an embedding provider.",
"warn": "Embedded mode is single-process and not safe under a concurrent web server — run chroma run as a server for that. Collections sometimes need migration across major versions.",
"install": "pip install chromadb"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-vectorize",
"name": "Cloudflare Vectorize",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Serverless vector DB on Workers",
"price": "Workers Free: 5M stored vector dimensions, 30M queried dimensions/mo. Workers Paid ($5/mo): 10M stored and 50M queried included, then $0.05 per 100M stored dimensions and $0.01 per million queried dimensions.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Cloudflare's vector database, queried from a Worker with no network hop or over an HTTP API. Billing is purely by vector dimensions stored and queried — no CPU, memory, active index hours, index count or data transfer charges, and empty indexes cost nothing at all.",
"why": "If the app already lives on Cloudflare this is the vector store with zero added latency and near-zero idle cost. Workers AI can generate the embeddings inside the same request.",
"warn": "Dimension-based billing misleads — 1M vectors at 768 dimensions is 768M dimensions, far past the free allowance. Query and filter features are thinner than Qdrant or Weaviate.",
"install": "npx wrangler vectorize create my-index --dimensions=768 --metric=cosine"
},
{
"slug": "elastic-cloud",
"name": "Elastic Cloud",
"url": "https://www.elastic.co/cloud",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Managed Elasticsearch + vector",
"price": "14-day free trial. Cloud Hosted from $99/mo Standard (120GB storage, 2 zones); Gold $114, Platinum $131, Enterprise $184. Serverless from $0.047 per GB retained/mo, $0.09 per search VCU-hour, $0.14 per ingest VCU-hour.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "The managed version of Elasticsearch, covering BM25 keyword search, dense and sparse vector search and its own ELSER learned-sparse model in one engine. Serverless bills by GB retained plus VCU-hours; Cloud Hosted bills provisioned resources across four support tiers. Elasticsearch itself is self-hostable.",
"why": "Reach for it when search is the product and you need aggregations, relevance tuning, log analytics and vectors in the same cluster rather than three services.",
"warn": "Overkill and overpriced for a docs site or blog — the $99/mo floor buys machinery most apps never touch, and self-hosting a cluster is a real ops job.",
"install": "docker run -p 9200:9200 docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:9.0.0"
},
{
"slug": "exa",
"name": "Exa",
"url": "https://exa.ai",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Neural web search API for agents",
"price": "$20 free credits at signup (about 2,800 searches) plus $10 in free credits every month, no card. Search $7 per 1K requests for 10 results, $1 per 1K extra results, Contents $1 per 1K pages per content type, Answer $5 per 1K requests.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A web search API built on an embeddings index rather than a keyword index, so you query by meaning and describe the page you want instead of guessing keywords. Returns cleaned page contents, highlights and AI summaries in the same call, plus an Answer endpoint that cites its sources.",
"why": "When an agent needs sources rather than blue links, Exa hands back full extracted text in one round trip. The recurring $10 monthly credit means a small agent never sees a bill.",
"warn": "Neural search costs more per query than SERP resellers and can miss exact-string lookups — switch to keyword or auto mode for those. Rate limited to 5 QPS on the free tier.",
"install": "npm i exa-js"
},
{
"slug": "fuse-js",
"name": "Fuse.js",
"url": "https://www.fusejs.io",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Client-side fuzzy search library",
"price": "Free, Apache-2.0. No service, no account, no limits, no bill.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A zero-dependency fuzzy-search library using the Bitap algorithm — roughly 6.8kB gzipped for the basic build, 8.6kB for the full one. Searches arrays of JS objects in memory with typo tolerance, field weighting, nested keys and extended query operators. Runs in browsers, Node and Deno.",
"why": "When a few hundred to a few thousand items already sit in your app state — a command palette, a settings list, a filterable table — this is ten lines of code and no infrastructure.",
"warn": "It scores every item on every keystroke, so it degrades noticeably past roughly 10K records. Use MiniSearch or a real index above that.",
"install": "npm i fuse.js"
},
{
"slug": "jina-ai",
"name": "Jina AI",
"url": "https://jina.ai",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Reader, embeddings and reranker",
"price": "Free API key on signup with a bundled token allowance, no card. Token-metered after that. Rate limits: Reader and Embeddings/Reranker 500 RPM, Search 100 RPM; premium raises Reader to 5K RPM and Search to 1K RPM.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A set of small search-infrastructure APIs. Reader turns any URL into clean LLM-ready markdown by prefixing it with r.jina.ai/. Alongside it sit multilingual multimodal embeddings, a reranker for tightening retrieval precision, and a DeepSearch endpoint. All are plain HTTP, no SDK required.",
"why": "The reranker is the cheapest single upgrade to a mediocre RAG pipeline — retrieve 50 chunks, rerank down to 5, and answer quality jumps. Reader needs no key at all for quick tests.",
"warn": "Rate limits bite before token costs do. Keyless r.jina.ai requests get a much lower RPM ceiling and are throttled first under load.",
"install": "curl https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com"
},
{
"slug": "lancedb",
"name": "LanceDB",
"url": "https://lancedb.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Embedded multimodal vector DB",
"price": "OSS free (Apache 2.0), embedded, no server. LanceDB Cloud is usage-based across writes, queries and storage with $100 in free credits on the first month. Enterprise is custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An embedded vector database built on the Lance columnar format — no server process, data sits as files on local disk or in S3. Does vector similarity, full-text search and SQL filtering over the same table, and stores raw bytes, images and video alongside embeddings. Python, TypeScript and Rust SDKs.",
"why": "Think SQLite for vectors: pip install lancedb, point it at a directory, done. Zero-copy automatic versioning lets you time-travel an index, and the same code scales to the cloud tier.",
"warn": "Embedded mode has no multi-writer coordination — one writer at a time, or move to the managed tier. Cloud per-unit rates are behind a calculator rather than published.",
"install": "pip install lancedb"
},
{
"slug": "meilisearch",
"name": "Meilisearch",
"url": "https://www.meilisearch.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source search engine + cloud",
"price": "OSS free (MIT). Cloud: 14-day trial, no card. Usage-based from about $30/mo (100K documents, 50K searches) or resource-based from $23/mo for an XS instance (0.5 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 32GiB disk). Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Rust search engine with a REST API, tuned for instant search-as-you-type in under 50ms. The MIT-licensed Community Edition covers typo tolerance, filtering, faceting, geosearch, multi-tenancy and hybrid vector search. Meilisearch Cloud is the managed version with usage-based or fixed-instance billing.",
"why": "The friendliest self-hosted option — one binary, sane defaults, and relevance that works without tuning. A drop-in Algolia replacement with fewer knobs and no per-request meter.",
"warn": "Some newer capabilities ship in an Enterprise Edition under BSL 1.1, not MIT. Check the license before you build on a feature.",
"install": "curl -L https://install.meilisearch.com | sh"
},
{
"slug": "minisearch",
"name": "MiniSearch",
"url": "https://github.com/lucaong/minisearch",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "In-memory JS full-text index",
"price": "Free, MIT-licensed. No service or account.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A dependency-free JavaScript full-text search engine that builds a real inverted index in memory, in the browser or in Node. Supports prefix search, fuzzy matching, field boosting, modern relevance ranking, auto-suggestion, and adding or removing documents at any time. The index serializes to JSON so it can be prebuilt.",
"why": "The step up from Fuse.js when you have tens of thousands of records — a proper index instead of rescoring every item per keystroke, still with no backend and no bill.",
"warn": "The whole index ships to the client, so a large corpus means a large download. Prebuild and cache the serialized JSON rather than indexing on every page load.",
"install": "npm i minisearch"
},
{
"slug": "orama",
"name": "Orama",
"url": "https://orama.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Embeddable JS search library",
"price": "OSS free (Apache 2.0). Orama Cloud is a flat monthly rate plus a one-time onboarding — no published price list; the number appears at checkout or on a sales call.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A sub-2kB search engine that runs anywhere JavaScript does — browser, Node, Deno, edge workers. Does full-text, vector and hybrid search over the same index, plus faceting, geosearch, typo tolerance and stemming for 30+ languages. Orama Cloud adds hosted indexes and AI answers with citations.",
"why": "The only search engine small enough to ship inside a Cloudflare Worker or a client bundle and still do hybrid vector search. No server, no cold start, no API key.",
"warn": "The index lives in memory and is rebuilt on every cold start, so it fits thousands of docs, not millions. Cloud pricing is not published.",
"install": "npm i @orama/orama"
},
{
"slug": "pagefind",
"name": "Pagefind",
"url": "https://pagefind.app",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Static-site search, zero infra",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. No hosting cost — the index is static files served from the CDN you already pay for.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Rust CLI that crawls your built HTML after a static site generator runs, then writes a chunked search index and JS bundle into your output folder. Browsers fetch only the chunks a query needs — full-text search across a 10,000 page site in under 300kB of total payload.",
"why": "Zero backend, zero API key, zero monthly bill. Point it at dist/ and you have working site search with prebuilt UI web components — ideal for Astro, Hugo, Eleventy or a Next static export.",
"warn": "It only indexes what is in your built HTML. Client-rendered content, authenticated pages and data fetched at runtime are invisible to it.",
"install": "npx pagefind --site dist"
},
{
"slug": "perplexity-api",
"name": "Perplexity API",
"url": "https://docs.perplexity.ai",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Grounded answer API with citations",
"price": "Sonar $1/M input and $1/M output tokens; Sonar Pro $3/M in, $15/M out; Sonar Reasoning Pro and Deep Research $2/M in, $8/M out. Request fee $5-$12 per 1K by search context size. Search API $5 per 1K requests with no token cost.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Perplexity's search-grounded Sonar models exposed through an OpenAI-compatible chat API. Every response is generated against live web results and returns with citations. A separate Search API returns ranked web results with no generation at all, billed flat at $5 per 1,000 requests.",
"why": "One call replaces the whole search-then-summarize pipeline — you get a cited answer instead of building retrieval yourself. Drop-in for any code already using the OpenAI SDK.",
"warn": "You pay a per-request search fee on top of tokens, so real bills run well above the headline token rate. You cannot control which sources it grounds on."
},
{
"slug": "pgvector",
"name": "pgvector",
"url": "https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Vector search inside Postgres",
"price": "pgvector itself is free and open source. On Supabase it is a one-click extension included at every tier: Free plan 500MB database, 50K MAU, 2 active projects; Pro from $25/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Postgres extension adding a vector column type with HNSW and IVFFlat indexes, L2, cosine, inner-product, L1, Hamming and Jaccard distance, and up to 16,000 dimensions. Supabase enables it in one click, so embeddings live in the same database and the same transaction as your app rows.",
"why": "One database instead of two. You can join a similarity search against your users table and enforce row-level security on retrieval — impossible with a separate vector service.",
"warn": "HNSW builds are memory-hungry and slow on small instances, and a missing index silently degrades to a full scan. Past a few million vectors a dedicated vector DB wins.",
"install": "create extension vector;"
},
{
"slug": "pinecone",
"name": "Pinecone",
"url": "https://www.pinecone.io",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted serverless vector DB",
"price": "Starter free: 2GB storage, 2M write units/mo, 1M read units/mo, up to 5 indexes, 100 namespaces per index. Standard from $50/mo minimum usage (3-week trial includes $300 credits). Enterprise $500/mo minimum.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The best-known managed vector database. Fully serverless — create an index, upsert vectors with metadata, query by similarity, and never size a node. Supports namespaces for multi-tenancy, metadata filtering, and integrated embedding and reranking models. Closed-source SaaS with no self-host option.",
"why": "The lowest-friction path from embeddings to working RAG: no Docker, no schema, no index tuning. Nearly every LangChain and LlamaIndex tutorial uses it, so models write correct Pinecone code first try.",
"warn": "Standard carries a $50/mo minimum whether you use it or not, and read/write units stay opaque until you have real traffic to measure.",
"install": "npm i @pinecone-database/pinecone"
},
{
"slug": "qdrant",
"name": "Qdrant",
"url": "https://qdrant.tech",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source vector DB + cloud",
"price": "OSS free (Apache 2.0). Cloud free tier forever: 1GB RAM, 0.5 vCPU, 4GB disk, single node. Standard is usage-based hourly for compute, memory, storage and backup. Premium has a minimum spend. Hybrid and Private Cloud are custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Rust vector database with the strongest payload filtering in the category — combine vector similarity with keyword, full-text, numeric-range, geo and boolean conditions in one query. Supports hybrid search with reciprocal rank fusion, sharding, multitenancy, GPU indexing, and quantization that cuts RAM by up to 97%.",
"why": "The best free-forever managed tier of any serious vector DB: 1GB RAM with no clock running is enough for a real side project, and docker run qdrant/qdrant is identical locally.",
"warn": "The free cluster is a single node with no backups and no HA — a prototype home, not a production one. Filtered search over high-cardinality payloads needs index planning.",
"install": "docker run -p 6333:6333 qdrant/qdrant"
},
{
"slug": "serper",
"name": "Serper",
"url": "https://serper.dev",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Google SERP API for agents",
"price": "2,500 free queries at signup, no card. From $0.30 per 1,000 queries at volume. Credits are prepaid with no monthly subscription. Covers search, images, news, maps, places, videos, shopping, scholar, patents and autocomplete.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A fast, cheap Google Search results API returning structured JSON — organic results, knowledge graph, people-also-ask and related searches, plus dedicated endpoints for images, news, maps, places, videos, shopping, scholar and patents. Responses typically land in one to two seconds.",
"why": "By far the cheapest way to give an agent real Google results — at $0.30 per 1,000 it is roughly 15x cheaper per query than Brave or Exa. Prepaid credits, no monthly minimum.",
"warn": "You get links and snippets, not page contents — pair it with a fetcher. It resells scraped Google results, so terms-of-service risk sits with you commercially."
},
{
"slug": "tavily",
"name": "Tavily",
"url": "https://www.tavily.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Search API built for RAG agents",
"price": "Free: 1,000 API credits/month, no card required. Pay-as-you-go $0.008 per credit ($8 per 1K). Project plans on a sliding scale starting around 4,000 credits/mo. Free for students. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A search API designed as an LLM tool rather than a browser replacement: one call runs the search, fetches the pages, extracts the relevant passages and returns a short synthesized answer alongside sources. Also exposes extract, crawl and map endpoints for site-scoped retrieval.",
"why": "The default web-search tool in most LangChain and LangGraph agent templates, so models reach for it unprompted. 1,000 free credits a month genuinely covers a side project.",
"warn": "Advanced search costs more credits than basic, so a naive agent loop can burn the monthly free tier in a day. Results skew toward summarized text over raw page HTML.",
"install": "npm i @tavily/core"
},
{
"slug": "turbopuffer",
"name": "turbopuffer",
"url": "https://turbopuffer.com",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Object-storage vector + FTS DB",
"price": "No free tier. Launch $16/mo minimum usage, Scale $256/mo minimum, Enterprise from $4,096/mo with a 35% usage premium. Usage-based charges accrue against the minimum.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A search database that keeps data on object storage such as S3, with memory and SSD caching in front — which is where its claim of roughly 10x lower cost than in-memory vector DBs comes from. Does vector and full-text search with filtering in one query, scaling a namespace to 256TB.",
"why": "Built for the shape where you have millions of tenants who each search rarely — an idle namespace costs almost nothing. Anthropic, Notion, Linear and Grammarly run production search on it.",
"warn": "No free tier and a $16/mo floor, so it is not a weekend-project database. Cold namespaces pay a first-query latency penalty while data loads from object storage."
},
{
"slug": "typesense",
"name": "Typesense",
"url": "https://typesense.org",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source search engine + cloud",
"price": "OSS free (GPL-3.0, self-host). Typesense Cloud bills hourly per configured cluster (RAM/vCPU) with no per-search fees. Free tier is 720 hours + 10GB bandwidth, once for the lifetime of the account.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A C++ search engine built as an open-source alternative to Algolia. Ships typo tolerance, faceting, geosearch, vector and hybrid search in a single self-contained binary. Typesense Cloud gives you a dedicated cluster billed by the hour with no limits on records or search operations.",
"why": "Fixed hourly pricing makes a search-as-you-type box safe to ship — you are not billed per keystroke. One docker run gets an identical instance running locally.",
"warn": "The Cloud free tier is one-time, not monthly: 720 hours total per account, then the cluster starts billing. The server is GPL-3.0, which matters if you embed it.",
"install": "docker run -p 8108:8108 -v/tmp/data:/data typesense/typesense:29.0 --data-dir /data --api-key=xyz"
},
{
"slug": "upstash-vector",
"name": "Upstash Vector",
"url": "https://upstash.com/docs/vector",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Serverless vector DB, per request",
"price": "Free: 10K queries/updates per day, 1GB storage, 1,536 max dimensions, 100 namespaces. Pay-as-you-go $0.40 per 100K requests + $0.25/GB storage, 50GB cap. Fixed $60/mo for 1M requests/day. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An HTTP-first vector database billed per request, with no cluster to provision and true scale-to-zero. Because it speaks REST rather than a persistent socket, it works from edge runtimes and serverless functions where connection pooling is painful. Hosted embedding models let you upsert raw text.",
"why": "The right shape for a hobby project that sits idle for weeks — you pay nothing while nothing happens. Calls work directly from Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge functions.",
"warn": "The free tier caps vectors at 1,536 dimensions, so larger embedding models force a paid plan. Per-request billing punishes chatty multi-query retrieval loops.",
"install": "npm i @upstash/vector"
},
{
"slug": "weaviate",
"name": "Weaviate",
"url": "https://weaviate.io",
"cat": "search",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source vector DB + cloud",
"price": "OSS free (BSD-3). Cloud free sandbox always free: 100K objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk, 1 collection, 3 tenants, 1 cluster. Flex from $45/mo. Premium from $400/mo. Vector dimensions $0.00465 per 1M on Flex; storage from $0.12/GiB.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Go vector database that stores objects and vectors together and does hybrid BM25-plus-vector search natively. Its module system calls OpenAI, Cohere, HuggingFace or its own embedding service for you at ingest and query time, so you never write embedding code. Built-in generative search and reranking.",
"why": "Vectorizer modules let you hand it raw text and skip the embedding pipeline entirely. Its Query Agent turns natural-language questions into filtered searches without you learning the query DSL.",
"warn": "The free sandbox allows one collection and three tenants. On Flex, dimensions and embeddings bill separately from the $45 base, so the real invoice is not $45.",
"install": "docker run -p 8080:8080 cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.36.0"
},
{
"slug": "ably",
"name": "Ably",
"url": "https://ably.com",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Realtime messaging platform",
"price": "Free: 6M messages/mo, 200 concurrent connections, 200 channels, 500 msg/sec. Standard $29/mo plus usage (10k connections, 10k channels); Pro $399/mo plus usage (50k). Usage: $2.50 per million messages, $1.00 per million connection-minutes, $0.25/GiB transfer",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Global realtime messaging platform with pub/sub channels, presence, message history and connection state recovery so a client that drops offline resumes without gaps. Integrations fan channel data out to webhooks, serverless functions, Kafka and queues. Multi-region by default, with a far larger free allowance than most competitors.",
"why": "Reach for it when dropped or out-of-order messages would genuinely break something — live scores, an auction, a running liveblog. History rewind after a reconnect is the feature you cannot easily rebuild, and 6M free messages monthly is generous.",
"warn": "Usage is billed on three separate meters — messages, connection-minutes and channel-minutes — so idle-but-open browser tabs cost money even when nothing is being published. Forecasting the bill takes real modelling rather than a headline price.",
"install": "npm i ably"
},
{
"slug": "agora",
"name": "Agora",
"url": "https://www.agora.io",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Metered RTC voice and video API",
"price": "Free monthly: 10,000 combined RTC minutes, 1M signaling messages, 500 chat users, 300 conversational AI minutes. RTC $0.59 per 1,000 minutes; recording $0.99 per 1,000; speech-to-text $16.99 per 1,000; real-time translation $8.99 per 1,000 per language. Analytics add-on from $449/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Global realtime engagement platform selling voice, video, interactive live streaming, signaling and chat as metered minutes across its own software-defined network. Video is priced by resolution tier, so standard definition costs materially less than Full HD or 2K. Notably strong routing and presence across Asia, including mainland China.",
"why": "Cheapest headline per-minute rate among the large video vendors and the broadest platform SDK coverage, including Unity and Electron. Its interactive live-streaming mode handles one host plus thousands of viewers, which a plain SFU room cannot.",
"warn": "Minutes are aggregated and priced by resolution tier, so a 1080p multi-party call bills at several times the advertised standard-definition rate — read the resolution table before modelling costs. The SDK surface is large and the docs are dense next to Daily or LiveKit.",
"install": "npm i agora-rtc-sdk-ng"
},
{
"slug": "chatwoot",
"name": "Chatwoot",
"url": "https://www.chatwoot.com",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source support inbox + chat",
"price": "Self-host free under the MIT licence. Cloud Hacker $0 (2 agents, 500 conversations/mo, live chat only, 30-day retention); Startups $19/agent/mo annual; Business $39/agent/mo; Enterprise $99/agent/mo. Extra Captain AI credits $20 per 1,000",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source customer engagement suite built around a shared inbox that unifies website live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram and other channels, with canned responses, automation rules, teams and an AI assistant called Captain. MIT licensed and self-hostable via Docker Compose, Helm or a cloud one-click install.",
"why": "Effectively the self-hostable Intercom. Drop a live chat bubble on the site during a launch or a live event, keep every conversation on your own server, and pay nothing beyond the VPS it runs on.",
"warn": "The MIT community edition omits enterprise features such as SSO and audit logs, and self-hosting means keeping Rails, Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq healthy. Cloud is priced per agent, so a large editorial or support team adds up quickly.",
"install": "Deploy with the official Docker Compose file or Helm chart"
},
{
"slug": "circle",
"name": "Circle",
"url": "https://circle.so",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted community and courses",
"price": "Professional $89/mo (3 admin seats, 2% transaction fee, 200 GB); Business $199/mo (5 seats, 1% fee, 500 GB); Circle Plus custom (unlimited seats, 0.5% fee, 1 TB). Unlimited members on every plan. 14-day trial, no permanent free plan",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted community platform bundling discussion spaces, live streaming and events, courses, member directories and paid memberships behind your own branding and domain. Native payments let you sell subscriptions or course access directly, and branded mobile apps are available. Fully managed, with no self-hosting option.",
"why": "The turnkey way to put a paid subscriber community, live events and a course behind one login. For a content site monetising membership, Circle collapses forum, streaming and billing into a single vendor and a single bill.",
"warn": "No free tier, a $89/mo floor, and a 2% cut of every transaction on the entry plan stacked on top of Stripe fees. You are renting your community — content and member relationships live inside Circle with limited export."
},
{
"slug": "crisp",
"name": "Crisp",
"url": "https://crisp.chat",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Live chat and shared inbox",
"price": "Free: 2 seats, 100 customer profiles, no AI credits. Mini $45/mo per workspace (4 seats, 5,000 profiles, $5 AI credits); Essentials $95/mo (10 seats, 50,000 profiles, $25 credits); Plus $295/mo (20+ seats, 200,000 profiles). Extra seats $10/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Live chat widget plus a shared team inbox covering email, chat, WhatsApp and social channels, with a knowledge base, chatbot builder, co-browsing and campaign messaging. Priced per workspace with seats bundled in rather than strictly per agent, which is unusual in this category and much cheaper for small teams.",
"why": "The cheapest way to put a real support widget and shared inbox on a site — $45/mo covers four people where Intercom bills each of them separately. The free tier is enough for a two-person project to answer reader mail.",
"warn": "The free plan caps you at 100 customer profiles, which a public site burns through in days. AI and chatbot features are metered as credits on top of the plan price, so the sticker price is not the whole bill.",
"install": "npm i crisp-sdk-web, or paste the Crisp website script tag"
},
{
"slug": "cusdis",
"name": "Cusdis",
"url": "https://cusdis.com",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Lightweight privacy-first comments",
"price": "Self-host free under GPLv3. Hosted free tier: 1 site, 100 approved comments/mo, 10 quick approves/mo. Cloud Pro $12 per year for unlimited sites, comments and quick approvals",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Roughly 5 KB embeddable comment widget positioned as a privacy-friendly Disqus alternative. Readers comment without signing in and it sets no cookies whatsoever. Submissions land in a moderation queue you approve by email or from the dashboard. Self-hostable via Docker or a one-click Railway deploy; current version is 1.4.0.",
"why": "The cheapest real comment system that works for a non-technical audience — $12 a year hosted, or free on a box you already run. No login wall means casual readers actually leave comments instead of bouncing.",
"warn": "Development is slow and the maintainer has publicly offered to sell the project, so treat it as low-activity software you may end up maintaining. No-login commenting plus a thin anti-spam story means you personally moderate every single thread.",
"install": "Self-host with Docker or Railway, or paste the widget script from cusdis.com"
},
{
"slug": "daily-co",
"name": "Daily.co",
"url": "https://www.daily.co",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Video call API, usage-based",
"price": "10,000 free participant-minutes every month. Video $0.004 per participant-minute (down to $0.0015 at volume); audio-only $0.00099; cloud recording $0.01349 per recorded minute; RTMP streaming $0.015/min, HLS $0.03/min. HIPAA add-on $500/mo. No subscription tiers",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Usage-based video and audio call API with no subscription plans at all — you pay per participant-minute and volume discounts apply automatically. Ships Daily Prebuilt, a drop-in embeddable call UI, plus a lower-level JavaScript SDK for custom layouts. Also maintains Pipecat, its open-source framework for realtime voice agents.",
"why": "The fastest path from nothing to a working video call: Daily Prebuilt in an iframe gives you a full call UI, device pickers and screen share in an afternoon. Pure per-minute pricing means a quiet month costs literally nothing.",
"warn": "Per-participant-minute billing scales with audience rather than with events, so a 200-person town hall runs roughly $48 an hour before extras. Recording, RTMP and HLS are each metered separately on top of the call minutes.",
"install": "npm i @daily-co/daily-js"
},
{
"slug": "discourse",
"name": "Discourse",
"url": "https://www.discourse.org",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source forum platform",
"price": "Self-host free and open source. Hosted: free plan (2 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 5 GB); Pro $100/mo (5 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 20 GB); Business $500/mo (15 seats, 100 GB); Enterprise custom. 85% education and 50% non-profit discounts available",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Mature open-source discussion platform with categories, trust levels that grant moderation powers as members participate, a genuine moderation toolkit, full-text search, reply-by-email and a large plugin ecosystem. Ships a comment-embed mode that mirrors blog post comments into forum topics through a single script tag.",
"why": "The serious answer when comments should grow into a community rather than stay a per-article afterthought. Embed mode gives you article comments today and a full forum later without migrating any content.",
"warn": "It is a Rails app needing Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq, so self-hosting is real sysadmin work and the official floor is a 2 GB VPS. Communities also need active human moderators — trust levels reduce that burden but never remove it.",
"install": "Run the official Docker discourse-setup script, or use hosted"
},
{
"slug": "electric",
"name": "Electric (ElectricSQL)",
"url": "https://electric.ax",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres sync engine, read path",
"price": "Cloud pay-as-you-go: $0/mo base, $1 per 1M writes, $0.10 per GB-month retention, with usage under $5/mo waived. Reads, egress, fan-out and concurrent users are free. Pro $249/mo; Scale $1,999/mo. Sync service is open source and self-hostable",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Sync engine that streams partial replicas of Postgres — called shapes — to clients over plain HTTP. It handles the read path only: your app writes through your own API and Electric fans the resulting changes out to every subscribed client. Now rebranded simply as Electric and positioned around collaborative multi-agent systems.",
"why": "Turns an ordinary Postgres table into a live-updating client cache without rewriting your backend or adopting a proprietary database. Because reads and fan-out are free, a liveblog read by 50,000 people costs close to nothing.",
"warn": "Read-path only — writes, conflict resolution and auth remain your problem, which catches out people expecting two-way sync. The project has moved domains from electric-sql.com to electric.ax and revised its pricing model more than once.",
"install": "npm i @electric-sql/client"
},
{
"slug": "giscus",
"name": "Giscus",
"url": "https://giscus.app",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Comments via GitHub Discussions",
"price": "Free forever and open source. No hosting cost, no database, no accounts to administer — every thread is stored as a GitHub Discussion in a repository you already own",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Comment widget that stores each thread as a GitHub Discussion. You install the giscus app, enable Discussions on a public repo, and a script tag maps each page to a discussion by pathname, URL or og:title. Supports threaded replies, reactions, themes and lazy loading, with no database of your own.",
"why": "Zero infrastructure, zero cost, zero moderation queue — GitHub handles authentication, spam and abuse reporting for you. For a developer-audience project or a docs site it is the default answer and takes about ten minutes.",
"warn": "Commenters need a GitHub account and must authorise the app, which excludes almost all non-technical readers — usually disqualifying for a general-audience project. The repository must be public, so every comment is public too.",
"install": "Paste the generated script tag from giscus.app/#configuration"
},
{
"slug": "intercom",
"name": "Intercom",
"url": "https://www.intercom.com",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Support platform with AI agent",
"price": "Essential $29 per seat/mo; Advanced $85 per seat/mo (20 free Lite seats); Expert $132 per seat/mo (50 free Lite seats). Fin AI agent $0.99 per resolved outcome on all plans. No free tier; Early Stage programme offers eligible startups 93% off",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Full customer communication platform spanning messenger, shared inbox, ticketing, help centre, product tours and outbound campaigns. Its Fin AI agent answers from your help content and is billed per successful resolution rather than per message, and can run standalone on top of another helpdesk such as Zendesk or Salesforce.",
"why": "The polished incumbent, with the best messenger UX and the deepest reporting in the category. Worth it when reader support is a real revenue function and Fin can deflect the endless subscription, paywall and login questions.",
"warn": "Comfortably the most expensive option here: per-seat pricing plus $0.99 per Fin resolution plus pay-as-you-go email, SMS and WhatsApp. There is no free tier, and outbound message volume is billed entirely separately from seats.",
"install": "npm i @intercom/messenger-js-sdk"
},
{
"slug": "liveblocks",
"name": "Liveblocks",
"url": "https://liveblocks.io",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Collaboration + comments API",
"price": "Free: unlimited MAU, unlimited rooms, 10 projects, 10 simultaneous connections per room, 10 MB storage per room, 30-day version history. Pro $25/mo billed annually with $30 monthly credits. Team $500/mo with $600 credits. Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted realtime collaboration infrastructure covering presence, multiplayer state, a Yjs-compatible sync backend and a full Comments product with threads, mentions and email notifications. Ships pre-built React components alongside lower-level primitives, so threaded annotations can be attached to an article, editor or media player without running a socket server.",
"why": "Fastest route to Google-Docs-style presence plus inline comments on a page. The Comments product alone replaces a homegrown thread, mention and notification stack, and the free tier has no monthly-active-user cap at all.",
"warn": "The free plan caps simultaneous connections at 10 per room, which a busy live article thread will exceed. Paid plans meter usage against monthly credits rather than a flat seat price, so a traffic spike converts directly into overage.",
"install": "npm i @liveblocks/client @liveblocks/react"
},
{
"slug": "livekit",
"name": "LiveKit",
"url": "https://livekit.com",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source WebRTC SFU + cloud",
"price": "Cloud Build free: 5,000 WebRTC minutes/mo, 100 concurrent connections, 1,000 agent session minutes. Ship from $50/mo (150,000 WebRTC minutes then $0.0005/min, 1,000 connections). Scale from $500/mo (1.5M minutes, 5,000 connections). Self-hosting free and open source",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source WebRTC selective forwarding unit with a managed global cloud layered on top. Handles multi-party video and audio rooms, screen share, server-side recording, HLS and RTMP egress for broadcasting out, and SIP telephony ingress. Its agents framework adds server-side participants for realtime AI voice.",
"why": "The only serious option that is both a credible hosted product and fully self-hostable, so you can prototype on cloud and move in-house when minutes get expensive. HLS egress turns a four-person panel into a public livestream.",
"warn": "WebRTC minutes bill per participant, so a 500-viewer live event burns 500 minutes per wall-clock minute — push large audiences to HLS egress rather than into the room. Self-hosting means running TURN servers and scaling the SFU yourself.",
"install": "npm i livekit-client @livekit/components-react"
},
{
"slug": "partykit",
"name": "PartyKit",
"url": "https://www.partykit.io",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "WebSocket rooms on Cloudflare edge",
"price": "Individual free: deploy to PartyKit cloud, up to 10 live projects, room storage cleared every 24 hours. Commercial free: deploy to your own Cloudflare account with unlimited projects and custom domains, paying only Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects usage",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source framework for stateful realtime servers built on Cloudflare Durable Objects. Each 'party' is a server-side class owning a room of WebSocket clients, so presence, chat, cursors and Yjs sync take a few dozen lines. PartyKit announced it was joining Cloudflare in April 2024.",
"why": "You want a multiplayer backend without operating one. npx partykit dev gives a local room server in seconds, and deploying to your own Cloudflare account keeps the bill at raw Workers prices instead of a per-message meter.",
"warn": "Since the Cloudflare acquisition, momentum has shifted toward Cloudflare's own Durable Objects and Agents SDK — treat PartyKit as a convenience layer that may fold into the platform. Free-tier room storage is wiped every 24 hours, so it is not durable.",
"install": "npm create partykit@latest"
},
{
"slug": "pusher-channels",
"name": "Pusher Channels",
"url": "https://pusher.com/channels",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Hosted pub/sub WebSockets",
"price": "Sandbox free: 200,000 messages/day, 100 concurrent connections. Startup $49/mo (1M msgs/day, 500 connections); Pro $99/mo (4M, 2,000); Business $299/mo (10M, 5,000); Premium $499/mo (20M, 10,000); Growth $699/mo (40M, 15,000)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The classic hosted pub/sub WebSocket service: your backend triggers events on named channels and browser clients subscribe. Supports private and presence channels with server-side auth endpoints, official SDKs for every major platform, and webhooks for connection and channel events. No infrastructure to run.",
"why": "Notification badges, live comment counts and 'N people reading this' banners in an afternoon. The API surface is small enough to learn in one sitting, and 200,000 free messages a day covers a lot of ordinary ordinary traffic.",
"warn": "Billing keys on concurrent connections and messages per day, both of which spike exactly when an article goes viral. Exhausting the daily message cap on the free plan stops delivery entirely until the counter resets at midnight UTC.",
"install": "npm i pusher pusher-js"
},
{
"slug": "socket-io",
"name": "Socket.IO",
"url": "https://socket.io",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Open-source WebSocket library",
"price": "Free and MIT licensed, with no hosted service and no vendor bill — you pay only for the server you run it on. The Redis and cluster adapters used for multi-node scaling are also free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Node.js library wrapping WebSockets with automatic reconnection, HTTP long-polling fallback, rooms, namespaces and message acknowledgements; version 4.x is current. Scaling past a single process requires an adapter such as Redis to broadcast between nodes. Client libraries exist for browsers, React Native, Python, Java and Swift.",
"why": "Zero vendor bill and total control over the protocol. If you already run a Node server, adding live comments or a presence counter is one dependency and about twenty lines, not a new SaaS contract with a per-message meter.",
"warn": "You own the operations: sticky sessions behind the load balancer, a Redis adapter once you exceed one node, and reconnect storms after every deploy. Most serverless hosts — Vercel and Netlify functions among them — cannot hold the long-lived connections it needs.",
"install": "npm i socket.io socket.io-client"
},
{
"slug": "stream",
"name": "Stream",
"url": "https://getstream.io",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Chat, feeds and video SDKs",
"price": "Free Build tier: 1,000 MAU and 100 concurrent connections for chat, 333,000 participant-minutes/mo for video, plus $100 first-month credit. Free for makers under 5 team members and under $10k monthly revenue. Chat Start plan $399/mo annual ($499 monthly) for 10,000 MAU",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Managed SDK suite spanning chat, activity feeds, video and moderation, with polished pre-built UI components for React, iOS, Android and Flutter. Chat bills on monthly active users while video bills on participant-minutes. Includes automated moderation and a review dashboard rather than leaving policy enforcement entirely to you.",
"why": "For a chat or activity feed that looks finished on day one — threads, reactions, typing indicators, read state, moderation queue — instead of six months building chat UI. The makers exemption keeps genuinely small projects at zero.",
"warn": "The step from the 1,000-MAU free tier to $399/mo for 10,000 MAU is the steepest cliff in this category. MAU counts anyone who connects, so a public public chat bills for lurkers who never type a word.",
"install": "npm i stream-chat stream-chat-react"
},
{
"slug": "supabase-realtime",
"name": "Supabase Realtime",
"url": "https://supabase.com/realtime",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Postgres-backed realtime channels",
"price": "Free: 200 concurrent peak connections, 2M messages/mo, 256 KB max message size. Pro $25/mo: 500 connections then $10 per 1,000, 5M messages then $2.50 per million, 3 MB messages. Team $599/mo. Self-hostable",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The realtime layer bundled with Supabase, offering three modes: Broadcast for ephemeral pub/sub, Presence for who-is-online state, and Postgres Changes for streaming row-level inserts, updates and deletes directly off the database write-ahead log. Row Level Security policies govern the realtime stream as well as the table.",
"why": "If your content already lives in Supabase Postgres, live comments cost one postgres_changes subscription and no extra vendor. The same RLS policy that protects the table protects the socket, which removes a whole class of auth bugs.",
"warn": "Postgres Changes does not scale like dedicated pub/sub — Supabase itself steers high-throughput use toward Broadcast, since every change is authorised and filtered per connection. Limits are on peak concurrent connections, so one spike bills even when average usage is tiny.",
"install": "npm i @supabase/supabase-js"
},
{
"slug": "whereby-embedded",
"name": "Whereby Embedded",
"url": "https://whereby.com/information/embedded",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "Embeddable video rooms via iframe",
"price": "Explore free: up to 2,000 participant-minutes/mo. Build $9.99/mo including 2,000 minutes, then $0.004 per participant-minute. Recording $0.01/min; transcription from $0.0065 per unmuted participant-minute; HIPAA add-on $16.99/mo. Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Video calling delivered as a room URL you drop into an iframe, with an optional React SDK and web component for tighter control. Rooms, layouts, branding, recording and breakout features arrive pre-built, so there is no WebRTC code to write. Whereby operates all the media infrastructure.",
"why": "One embedded iframe and you have branded video on the page — genuinely the lowest-effort option in this whole category. For a content site running a subscriber Q and A or an author interview, that is the entire integration.",
"warn": "The iframe is the product, so deep UI customisation and bespoke video layouts are limited next to an SDK like Daily or LiveKit. Participant-minute billing means viewers drive the bill, not the number of events you run.",
"install": "npm i @whereby.com/browser-sdk"
},
{
"slug": "yjs",
"name": "Yjs",
"url": "https://yjs.dev",
"cat": "rt",
"group": "back",
"tagline": "CRDT for collaborative editing",
"price": "Free and MIT licensed. Transport and persistence are your choice: self-host y-websocket or Hocuspocus for nothing, or buy hosting from Liveblocks, y-sweet or Hocuspocus Cloud",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "CRDT implementation exposing shared types — Map, Array, Text and XML — that merge concurrent edits without conflicts or a central authority. Network-agnostic, with providers including y-websocket, y-webrtc and Hocuspocus, and persistence via IndexedDB or Postgres. Bindings exist for ProseMirror, Tiptap, Lexical, Slate, CodeMirror, Monaco and Quill.",
"why": "The de facto standard for multiplayer text. Pair it with Tiptap or Lexical and two editors merge cleanly with live cursors and offline edits included — and nearly every commercial collaboration vendor is really selling you hosted Yjs.",
"warn": "Yjs is only the data structure; you still supply the websocket server, auth and persistence, which is where the real engineering sits. Documents grow with accumulated edit history unless you snapshot, and there is no built-in permissions model.",
"install": "npm i yjs y-websocket"
},
{
"slug": "anthropic-api-claude-platform",
"name": "Anthropic API / Claude Platform",
"url": "https://platform.claude.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Frontier model provider API",
"price": "Per token. Opus 5 $5/$25 per M in/out; Sonnet 5 $2/$10; Haiku 4.5 $1/$5; Fable 5 and Mythos 5 $10/$50. Batch API 50% off; cache reads 0.1x input.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Anthropic's first-party API for the Claude models, plus the Agent SDK, tool use, MCP connectors, files and batch endpoints. This is a model provider, not a gateway — you get the models Anthropic trains and nothing else, with prompt caching and batch as the main cost levers.",
"why": "Best-in-class coding and agentic tool use, and the only place to get Claude with full feature support. Prompt caching at 0.1x read cost makes long system prompts and big codebase context genuinely affordable.",
"warn": "Output tokens cost 5x input, and extended thinking bills as output — a reasoning-heavy agent loop can 10x your bill versus the naive estimate. Tier-based rate limits throttle new accounts hard.",
"install": "npm i @anthropic-ai/sdk (or pip install anthropic)"
},
{
"slug": "braintrust",
"name": "Braintrust",
"url": "https://www.braintrust.dev",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "LLM eval and experiment platform",
"price": "Starter free ($10/mo model credits, 1GB data, 10k scores, 14-day retention), Pro $249/mo ($249 credits, 5GB, 50k scores), Enterprise custom. Overage $3-4/GB and $1.50-$2.50 per 1k scores.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An eval-first evaluation platform: datasets, scoring functions, experiment comparison, a prompt playground and production logging in one place. It aims to answer 'did this prompt change make things better or worse' with numbers, rather than only showing traces.",
"why": "Turns prompt tweaking from vibes into a regression suite — pin a dataset, run the eval, see which model or prompt scores higher before you ship. Included model credits mean the graders themselves are covered.",
"warn": "Billing on processed data volume and score counts punishes verbose traces — logging whole documents in every span pushes you past 1GB fast. Free retention is only 14 days.",
"install": "npm i braintrust (or pip install braintrust)"
},
{
"slug": "fal-ai",
"name": "Fal.ai",
"url": "https://fal.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Generative media inference host",
"price": "Per output or per second for media models: images ~$0.02-$0.04 at 1MP, video $0.05-$0.40 per second. Serverless GPU rates $1.10-$8.50/hr with committed-use discounts.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "An inference host specialised in generative media — diffusion image models, video models such as Veo, Kling and Wan, plus audio. It runs its own optimised inference stack, so the same open model is usually faster here than on a general-purpose GPU cloud.",
"why": "If your app generates images or video, fal is the media equivalent of Groq — low latency, streaming previews, and a clean JS and Python client. Per-image pricing makes unit economics easy to reason about.",
"warn": "Video generation gets expensive fast — at $0.40 per second a five-second clip is $2, so an unthrottled public demo can burn hundreds of dollars in an afternoon.",
"install": "npm i @fal-ai/client (or pip install fal-client)"
},
{
"slug": "fireworks-ai",
"name": "Fireworks AI",
"url": "https://fireworks.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Open-model inference host",
"price": "Per token serverless across Standard/Priority/Fast tiers; embeddings $0.008-$0.10/M. On-demand GPUs billed per second: H100/H200 ~$7-8/hr, B200 ~$10-13/hr. Fine-tuning $0.50-$40 per M training tokens. $1 free credit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A speed-focused inference host for open-weight models, offering serverless token endpoints, per-second on-demand GPU deployments and managed fine-tuning. It competes with Together and Groq on throughput and cold-start behaviour rather than on proprietary models.",
"why": "Good when you need a specific open model served reliably with tunable speed and price tiers, or want LoRA fine-tunes deployed without managing GPUs. Serverless has no cold starts, which suits bursty consumer traffic.",
"warn": "Only $1 in free credit, on-demand GPU rates are scheduled to rise on 1 September, and region-restricted deployments carry a 1.5x premium. Dedicated deployments bill while idle.",
"install": "pip install fireworks-ai"
},
{
"slug": "google-ai-studio-gemini-api",
"name": "Google AI Studio / Gemini API",
"url": "https://ai.google.dev",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Model provider API with free tier",
"price": "Free tier in AI Studio with rate limits. Paid: Gemini 3.7 Flash $0.75/$3.75 per M in/out; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite $0.30/$2.50; Gemini 2.5 Pro $1.25/$10.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's developer surface for Gemini: AI Studio is the browser playground and key issuer, the Gemini API is the endpoint. Uniquely among frontier labs it ships a genuinely usable free tier, plus huge context windows and native multimodal input across text, image, audio and video.",
"why": "You can ship a working prototype without entering a credit card, and Flash-tier pricing stays cheap when you scale. Best option when your app needs to read PDFs, screenshots or video without a separate vision pipeline.",
"warn": "Free-tier prompts and responses may be used to improve Google products and can be seen by human reviewers — never send customer data through an unpaid key. Paid-tier terms exclude training use.",
"install": "npm i @google/genai (or pip install google-genai)"
},
{
"slug": "groq",
"name": "Groq",
"url": "https://groq.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Ultra-fast open-model inference",
"price": "Per token: Llama 3.1 8B $0.05/$0.08 per M, GPT-OSS 120B $0.15/$0.60, Llama 3.3 70B $0.59/$0.79. Free tier ~30 RPM / 6k TPM / 14.4k RPD. Dev tier adds 10x limits and 25% off.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An inference host running open-weight models on custom LPU hardware, not a model lab. It serves Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS and Whisper at several hundred tokens per second — often an order of magnitude faster than GPU-based providers — behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.",
"why": "When latency is the product — voice agents, autocomplete, live chat — Groq makes an open model feel instant. The free tier needs no credit card, so it is the fastest path to a working LLM call.",
"warn": "No GPT, Claude or Gemini — open weights only, so quality tops out below frontier. Free-tier limits apply per organization, and extra API keys will not raise them."
},
{
"slug": "helicone",
"name": "Helicone",
"url": "https://www.helicone.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "LLM observability proxy",
"price": "Hobby free (10,000 requests, 1GB, 7-day retention), Pro $79/mo, Team $799/mo, Enterprise custom, all usage-based above included requests. Open source and self-hostable; 50% startup discount.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source LLM observability that works as a one-line proxy: change your base URL and every request is logged with cost, latency and prompt content. It adds caching, rate limiting and per-user spend tracking, with an async SDK if you would rather not proxy.",
"why": "The lowest-effort way to find out where your token spend actually goes — no instrumentation, no framework buy-in, just a base URL swap. Per-user cost tracking is what makes usage-based billing possible.",
"warn": "Proxy mode puts a third party in your critical path, adding latency and an outage dependency — use the async logger in production, or self-host. Free retention is only 7 days.",
"install": "npm i @helicone/helpers"
},
{
"slug": "hugging-face-inference-providers",
"name": "Hugging Face Inference Providers",
"url": "https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Inference provider router",
"price": "Pass-through provider rates with no HF markup. Monthly credits: free accounts $0.10, PRO $2, Team and Enterprise $2 per seat, then pay-as-you-go. Bringing your own provider key bills that provider directly.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A routing layer on the Hugging Face Hub that fans a single API out to 18+ inference providers including Groq, Together, Fireworks, Replicate, Cerebras and fal. It covers chat, vision, embeddings, image, video and speech, with :fastest and :cheapest routing suffixes.",
"why": "You are already browsing models on the Hub, so calling one is a token away — no separate signup per provider. The :cheapest suffix auto-picks the lowest-cost host for the same open weights.",
"warn": "The free monthly credit is only $0.10 — enough for a handful of calls, not a demo. Provider capability varies, so a model may support tool calling on one backend and not another.",
"install": "pip install huggingface_hub"
},
{
"slug": "langchain",
"name": "LangChain",
"url": "https://www.langchain.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Agent framework plus observability",
"price": "Framework free and open source. LangSmith: Developer $0 (1 seat, 5k traces/mo), Plus $39/seat/mo (10k traces), Enterprise custom. Usage adds $1.50 per compute unit and $1.00 per storage unit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two things people conflate: LangChain is the open-source agent framework for Python and JS, while LangSmith is the paid tracing, eval and deployment platform. LangGraph adds stateful, durable agent graphs. Together they cover build, observe and host.",
"why": "The biggest integration surface in the ecosystem — vector stores, loaders, retrievers and hundreds of tools already wrapped. LangSmith tracing shows exactly which agent step burned the tokens, and its free tier is enough for solo work.",
"warn": "Abstraction depth is the classic complaint — debugging often means reading LangChain internals. LangSmith seat pricing at $39 each adds up before you have traced much.",
"install": "pip install langchain (or npm i langchain)"
},
{
"slug": "langfuse",
"name": "Langfuse",
"url": "https://langfuse.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Open-source LLM observability",
"price": "Hobby free (50k units/mo, 30-day retention, 2 users), Core $29/mo (100k units), Pro $199/mo, Enterprise $2,499/mo; extra units $8 per 100k. Self-hosting free and open source.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source LLM observability: traces, prompt management, evals, datasets and cost tracking, framework-agnostic via OpenTelemetry and SDKs. It is purely an observability layer — it does not proxy or route your inference, so it cannot break the request path.",
"why": "Self-hostable with Docker Compose, so you can keep prompt and completion data entirely on your own infrastructure — the usual blocker for observability SaaS. The free cloud tier is generous enough for a small product.",
"warn": "Billing is in 'units', not requests — one trace with many spans and scored evals consumes several, so a chatty agent hits the 50k free ceiling faster than the number suggests.",
"install": "pip install langfuse (or npm i langfuse)"
},
{
"slug": "llamaindex",
"name": "LlamaIndex",
"url": "https://www.llamaindex.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "RAG framework and doc parsing",
"price": "Framework free and open source. LlamaCloud credits: Free 10,000 credits, Starter $50/mo (40k credits), Pro $500/mo (400k credits), Enterprise custom. 1,000 credits = $1.25.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source data framework for connecting LLMs to your documents — ingestion, chunking, indexing, retrieval and agent workflows. LlamaCloud is the commercial side, mainly LlamaParse, which turns messy PDFs, tables and slides into clean model-ready text.",
"why": "If the app is 'chat with my documents', this is the shortest path from a folder of PDFs to a working retriever. LlamaParse handles the tables and scanned pages that break naive text extraction.",
"warn": "Parsing credits burn faster than expected — agentic LLM-backed parsing costs many credits per page versus one for basic mode, so a large corpus blows through the free 10,000 quickly.",
"install": "pip install llama-index"
},
{
"slug": "lm-studio",
"name": "LM Studio",
"url": "https://lmstudio.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Local model desktop app",
"price": "Desktop app free for local use. Optional pay-as-you-go cloud credits for frontier open models, e.g. DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.13/M input, Kimi K3 $3.00/M. Enterprise pricing on request.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A desktop GUI for running open models locally on Mac, Windows and Linux, built on llama.cpp and MLX. It includes a model browser, chat UI and a local OpenAI-compatible server, plus an lms CLI and Python and TypeScript SDKs for wiring apps to it.",
"why": "The friendly version of local inference — it tells you which quantisation fits your RAM before you download 40GB. Good for comparing open models side by side, then serving the winner to your app on localhost.",
"warn": "GUI-first design makes it awkward to run headless on a server — use Ollama or vLLM for that. Commercial use inside a company may require the separate enterprise licence."
},
{
"slug": "modal",
"name": "Modal",
"url": "https://modal.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Serverless GPU compute platform",
"price": "Per second. H100 $0.001097/s (~$3.95/hr), B200 $0.001736/s, A100 40GB $0.000583/s, T4 $0.000164/s; CPU $0.0000131/core-s. Starter $0 with $30/mo free credits; Team $250/mo with $100 credits.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Serverless compute for Python: decorate a function and Modal containerises it and runs it on GPUs with fast cold starts and scale-to-zero. It is infrastructure, not a model API — you bring the model, the weights and the code.",
"why": "For when no hosted endpoint exists: custom fine-tunes, unusual pipelines, batch jobs, or an embedding service you want to own. The $30 of free credits each month covers a real side project.",
"warn": "You own the ops — model loading, memory sizing and concurrency are your problem, and a container that fails to scale to zero bills GPU seconds continuously. Starter caps you at 10 concurrent GPUs.",
"install": "pip install modal && modal setup"
},
{
"slug": "ollama",
"name": "Ollama",
"url": "https://ollama.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Local model runner",
"price": "Local runtime free and open source. Optional cloud: Free $0 (one model at a time), Pro $20/mo or $200/yr (3 models, 50x usage), Max $100/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source runtime that downloads and serves open-weight models locally with one command, exposing both its own and an OpenAI-compatible API on localhost. A newer hosted cloud tier runs larger models on Ollama's servers through the same client.",
"why": "Zero marginal cost and zero data egress — point your app at localhost:11434 and iterate on prompts all day for free. Ideal for offline dev, privacy-sensitive features and CI tests that must not call a paid API.",
"warn": "Local quality is capped by your RAM — a 7B quantised model is not Claude or GPT, and prompts tuned on it often break when moved to a frontier model. Cloud models do leave your machine.",
"install": "curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh"
},
{
"slug": "openai-api",
"name": "OpenAI API",
"url": "https://platform.openai.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Frontier model provider API",
"price": "Per token. gpt-5.6-sol $2.50/$15 per M in/out; gpt-5.6-terra $1/$6; gpt-5.6-luna $0.10/$0.60; gpt-5.3-codex $1.75/$14. Batch 50% off, cached input 90% off.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "OpenAI's first-party API covering the GPT-5.6 family, Codex models, realtime audio, images and embeddings, with Responses-style agent primitives. A model provider rather than a router; long-context requests and fast mode bill at higher tiers than the headline rate.",
"why": "The default the whole ecosystem is shaped around — every framework, gateway and tutorial speaks the OpenAI chat-completions dialect. gpt-5.6-luna at $0.10/M input is cheap enough for classification and routing at scale.",
"warn": "Long-context tiers roughly double per-token rates once you cross the threshold, and fast mode is 2x standard — bills surprise you unless you set a per-model spend cap in the dashboard.",
"install": "npm i openai (or pip install openai)"
},
{
"slug": "openrouter",
"name": "OpenRouter",
"url": "https://openrouter.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Multi-provider LLM router",
"price": "No inference markup; 5.5% (min $0.80) fee on credit top-ups, 5% via crypto. BYOK 5% above a $25k/mo free allowance. Free models capped at 50 req/day, 1,000 with $10 credit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A single OpenAI-compatible endpoint that fronts 500+ models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and dozens of inference hosts. It is a router, not a model provider — it resells other people's inference at list price and picks a backend by price, latency or uptime.",
"why": "One API key and one billing relationship for every model, so you can swap anthropic/claude-opus-5 for google/gemini-3.7-flash in a string and A/B the cost. Free models let you prototype at zero spend.",
"warn": "Routing is opaque by default — the same model slug can land on providers with different quantization, context limits and data-retention policies. Pin providers explicitly for production."
},
{
"slug": "portkey",
"name": "Portkey",
"url": "https://portkey.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "AI gateway with guardrails",
"price": "Developer free forever (10,000 logs/mo, 3-day log retention), Production $49/mo (100k logs, $9 per extra 100k), Enterprise custom for 10M+ logs. Open-source gateway is self-hostable.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An AI gateway that sits between your app and providers: one API for 250+ models with automatic fallbacks, load balancing, retries, semantic caching, budget-capped virtual keys and guardrails, plus built-in observability. It is a control plane, not a model host.",
"why": "When one provider going down must not take your app with it, Portkey fails over automatically. Virtual keys with hard budget caps stop a runaway loop or a leaked key from producing a five-figure bill.",
"warn": "The free tier keeps logs for only 3 days, often too short to debug an incident reported the next week. The hosted gateway adds a network hop unless you self-host it.",
"install": "npm i portkey-ai (or pip install portkey-ai)"
},
{
"slug": "replicate",
"name": "Replicate",
"url": "https://replicate.com",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Per-run model hosting API",
"price": "Per second of compute (T4 $0.000225/s, A100 80GB $0.0014/s) or per output for media models (FLUX Dev $0.025/image, video from $0.09/s). Some LLMs bill per token. No free plan.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A catalog of thousands of community and official models — image, video, audio, LLM — each behind one prediction API. It is an inference host: you push a Cog container or run someone else's, and billing is per second of GPU time or per generated output.",
"why": "The fastest way to call a weird open model — a niche upscaler, a voice clone, a brand-new video model — without touching CUDA. Public models cost nothing when idle, so hobby projects sit at $0.",
"warn": "Private and dedicated models bill for boot and idle time, not just inference — a deployment left running overnight can cost more than a month of API calls. Cold starts on rare models take minutes.",
"install": "pip install replicate (or npm i replicate)"
},
{
"slug": "together-ai",
"name": "Together AI",
"url": "https://www.together.ai",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Open-model inference and GPU cloud",
"price": "Serverless per token from ~$0.14/M (DeepSeek V4 Flash) to ~$1.04/M (Llama 3.3 70B); embeddings $0.02/M. Dedicated H100 $5.49/GPU-hr, B200 $8.99. Clusters from $3.19/hr reserved.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An inference host and GPU cloud for open models: serverless per-token endpoints for 100+ open-weight LLMs, plus fine-tuning, provisioned throughput and raw H100/B200 clusters. It runs other labs' weights rather than training frontier models itself.",
"why": "The natural graduation path when a prompt works on an open model and you now need it cheap, fine-tuned and at volume. One account covers experimentation, LoRA training and dedicated capacity.",
"warn": "Serverless rate limits scale with sustained traffic, so a launch spike can get throttled. Dedicated GPUs bill for idle time — a forgotten H100 endpoint is roughly $130 a day.",
"install": "pip install together"
},
{
"slug": "vercel-ai-sdk",
"name": "Vercel AI SDK",
"url": "https://ai-sdk.dev",
"cat": "ai",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "TypeScript AI app framework",
"price": "Free and open source. No cost beyond the model provider you call; Vercel AI Gateway usage is billed separately if you opt into it.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A TypeScript toolkit that gives every model provider one interface — generateText, streamText, structured object generation, tool calling — plus React, Svelte and Vue hooks for streaming UI. It supports 100+ models across 20+ providers; a Python version is in beta.",
"why": "Swapping providers is a one-line change, and streaming chat UI that would take a day of SSE plumbing takes about ten lines. It is the default choice for anything Next.js shaped.",
"warn": "Major versions have shipped breaking API changes, so older tutorials and AI-generated snippets often will not compile — check which version an example targets before copying it.",
"install": "npm i ai"
},
{
"slug": "adobe-firefly",
"name": "Adobe Firefly",
"url": "https://firefly.adobe.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Indemnified, commercially safe gen",
"price": "Free tier with limited watermarked credits. Standard $9.99/mo (2,000 credits), Pro $19.99 (4,000), Premium $199.99 (50,000). API is enterprise contract only.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Adobe's generative suite, currently on Firefly Image 5, trained on Adobe Stock, openly licensed and public-domain material rather than scraped web images. Now also brokers third-party models and generates video. Credit cost varies by model: Image 5 is 10 credits, Image 4 Ultra 20.",
"why": "The pick when legal sign-off matters more than raw quality: Adobe offers IP indemnification to enterprise customers, which no other major generator does. Deep native integration into Photoshop, Illustrator and Express beats any bolt-on plugin.",
"warn": "Free-tier outputs are watermarked. Consumer plans include no API access at all - Firefly Services is an enterprise sales contract with no published rate card, and community reports suggest a starting commitment near $1,000/month.",
"install": "Firefly Services API is enterprise-only via Adobe Sales; there is no self-serve developer tier."
},
{
"slug": "black-forest-labs",
"name": "Black Forest Labs (FLUX)",
"url": "https://bfl.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Open-weight image models + API",
"price": "API per image: FLUX.2 klein from $0.014, pro from $0.03, flex $0.05, max $0.07. Kontext pro $0.04, max $0.08. Open weights free to self-host.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The FLUX family from the ex-Stable Diffusion team. FLUX.2 ships as klein, dev, pro, flex and max; FLUX 3 landed 26 July 2026 as one multimodal model doing image, 20-second video with native audio, and robot action prediction, still in gated early access.",
"why": "The pragmatic pick when image generation lives inside your own product: cheap per-image API, plus dev and klein open weights you can run on your own GPUs with no per-call fee. Kontext remains the best instruction-based image editor.",
"warn": "Open weights are not an open licence - dev and klein are non-commercial unless you buy a BFL commercial self-hosting licence. FLUX 3 access is staged and gated: video first, image later, open weights last.",
"install": "Direct REST API at api.bfl.ai, plus resale through fal, Replicate and Together."
},
{
"slug": "cartesia",
"name": "Cartesia",
"url": "https://cartesia.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Ultra-low-latency TTS for agents",
"price": "Free 20K credits, personal use only. Pro $5/mo (100K), Startup $49 (1.25M), Scale $299 (8M). TTS is 1 credit/character, Ink STT 1 credit/second, Line voice agents $0.014/min.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Voice infrastructure company built on state-space models. Sonic 3 does text-to-speech in 40-plus languages with emotion controls, laughter tags and voice cloning from a 3-second sample. Ink handles speech-to-text and Line orchestrates phone-based voice agents.",
"why": "Around 90ms time-to-first-audio, and 40ms on Sonic Turbo - fast enough that a phone agent never sounds like it is thinking. That latency, not raw voice beauty, is why realtime builders pick it over ElevenLabs.",
"warn": "The free tier is personal use only; any commercial deployment needs at least the $5 Pro plan. Pro voice cloning bills at 1.5 credits per character rather than 1, so cloned-voice costs run 50% above the headline rate.",
"install": "Low-latency streaming API with WebSocket support; SDKs for Python, Node and Rust."
},
{
"slug": "descript",
"name": "Descript",
"url": "https://www.descript.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Doc-style video and audio editor",
"price": "Free 1 hr/mo, 720p watermarked. Hobbyist $16/mo annual (10 hrs, 400 AI credits), Creator $24 (30 hrs, 800), Business $50 (40 hrs, 1,500). Monthly billing runs about 45% higher.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Edits audio and video by editing the transcript - delete a word in the document and it vanishes from the timeline. Underlord is the AI editing agent that removes filler, finds clips and drafts sequences; Overdub does voice cloning and Studio Sound rescues bad recordings.",
"why": "The biggest time-saver for podcasts, interviews and talking-head content: fixing a misspoken line means retyping it, not re-recording it. Nothing else combines transcript editing, filler removal, voice cloning and multitrack screen recording in one app.",
"warn": "Media hours and AI credits are metered separately, so you can exhaust one while the other sits unused. The free tier watermarks exports and caps them at 720p, and voice cloning needs Creator ($24/mo annual) or above.",
"install": "No self-serve public generation API; integrations run through Zapier and the app ecosystem."
},
{
"slug": "elevenlabs",
"name": "ElevenLabs",
"url": "https://elevenlabs.io",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-speech, voice cloning",
"price": "Free 10K credits/mo. Starter $6 (30K), Creator $11 first month then $22 (121K), Pro $99 (600K), Scale $299 (1.8M), Business $990 (6M). About 17% off annual.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default voice AI platform: text-to-speech on Eleven v3, Scribe speech-to-text, Eleven Music, sound effects, dubbing into 30-plus languages, and Agents for realtime conversational voice. Flash and Turbo models trade a little quality for half the credit cost and much lower latency.",
"why": "Widest voice library and the most natural prosody and emotional delivery in the category, plus dubbing that preserves the original speaker's voice across languages. The de facto choice when audio quality itself is the product.",
"warn": "The free tier has no commercial licence and requires visible attribution to ElevenLabs in any public content; commercial use starts at $6/mo. Professional voice cloning needs Creator or above, 44.1kHz PCM output needs Pro ($99), and credits never roll over.",
"install": "Comprehensive REST and WebSocket APIs; low-latency TTS at about 5 cents/minute on Business."
},
{
"slug": "google-nano-banana-2",
"name": "Google Nano Banana 2",
"url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Conversational image gen + edit",
"price": "API: Nano Banana 2 $0.067 at 1K, $0.101 at 2K, $0.151 at 4K; Lite $0.034. Nano Banana Pro $0.134 (1K/2K), $0.24 (4K). Batch mode is 50% off. Free inside the Gemini app.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's image line, rebuilt as Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image) in February 2026, with a cheaper Lite variant and the higher-fidelity Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image). Generates and edits from plain-language instructions inside a normal Gemini conversation.",
"why": "Unbeatable at iterative conversational editing - change one element and everything else stays pixel-identical across many turns. Character and object consistency is the strongest available anywhere, and text rendering is close to best in class.",
"warn": "There is no free API tier for image models; free access exists only through the consumer Gemini app. All outputs carry invisible SynthID watermarking, and consumer-app generations may be used to improve Google products depending on account settings.",
"install": "Available via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio and Vertex AI; batch mode halves per-image price."
},
{
"slug": "google-veo",
"name": "Google Veo",
"url": "https://deepmind.google/models/veo/",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-video with native audio",
"price": "API per second: Veo 3.1 Lite $0.03-$0.05, Fast $0.10-$0.15, Quality $0.20-$0.40. Google AI Pro $19.99/mo (1,000 Flow credits), AI Ultra $249.99 (25,000 credits).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google DeepMind's video model, currently Veo 3.1 in Lite, Fast and Quality variants, generating synchronised dialogue, sound effects and music in a single pass. Consumer access runs through Flow and the Gemini app; developer access through the Gemini API and Vertex AI.",
"why": "The best native audio in AI video - lip-synced dialogue and matched foley emerge from one generation instead of a separate pass. Flow adds scene extension and ingredient-based shot assembly, and Lite makes bulk drafting genuinely cheap.",
"warn": "Every generation is capped at 8 seconds, so longer sequences mean stitching multiple runs and paying for each. Flow credits vary wildly by tier: a Quality clip costs 100 credits against 10 for Lite, so a $19.99 Pro plan is only about ten good clips.",
"install": "Gemini API and Vertex AI, priced per second of output."
},
{
"slug": "hailuo",
"name": "Hailuo (MiniMax)",
"url": "https://hailuoai.video",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Cheap text-to-video, 1080p",
"price": "Free tier is watermarked. Standard about $9.99/mo (1,000 credits), Pro $34.99-$54.99 (about 4,500), Unlimited about $94.99, Ultra about $124.99, Max about $199.99. API $0.19-$0.56 per video.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "MiniMax's video generator, currently Hailuo 2.3, doing text-to-video and image-to-video up to 1080p with a Fast variant for drafting. Known for expressive character motion and stylised animation as well as live-action looks.",
"why": "The best cost-per-clip in the category - roughly twenty to fifty cents a video through the API, a fraction of Veo or Runway. Unusually good at exaggerated anime-style character motion that photoreal-tuned rivals refuse to produce.",
"warn": "'Unlimited' does not mean unlimited at top quality or on the newest model - high-tier output stays metered. Free-tier clips are watermarked, queue slowly, and carry no commercial rights.",
"install": "API via the MiniMax platform and resellers including fal, Replicate and OpenRouter."
},
{
"slug": "higgsfield",
"name": "Higgsfield",
"url": "https://higgsfield.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Cinematic camera-control video",
"price": "Free tier with output, resolution and commercial caps. Starter $15/mo (200 credits), Plus $49 (1,000), Business $89-$267, Ultra $129-$375 (3,000 credits). About 20% off annual.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Video platform built around directorial control rather than one model. Director Mode ships twelve-plus named cinematic camera presets - dolly zoom, crash zoom, bullet time, FPV - plus identity anchoring for consistent characters. Aggregates 54 models including Sora 2, Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0 Omni and Veo 3.1.",
"why": "The fastest way to get repeatable, named camera moves without prompt-wrangling: you pick the shot instead of describing it. Identity anchoring keeps one character recognisable across a multi-clip sequence, the hardest problem in AI video.",
"warn": "Free-tier output is capped on resolution, length and count, and carries no commercial rights. Credit burn is steep - 200 credits on the $15 Starter plan is only a handful of premium-model clips, since each hosted model prices differently.",
"install": "API access varies by tier; MCP and CLI access are included on all plans."
},
{
"slug": "hume-ai",
"name": "Hume AI",
"url": "https://www.hume.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Emotionally expressive TTS",
"price": "Free 10K chars/mo, no commercial licence. Starter $3 (30K), Creator $14 (140K, commercial), Pro $70 (1M), Scale $200 (3.3M), Business $500 (10M). Overage $0.05-$0.15 per 1K characters.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Speech company focused on emotional prosody. Octave 2 is an LLM-based TTS that reads context to decide how a line should be delivered and accepts plain-language acting directions. EVI is its empathic voice interface for agents, and an Expression Measurement API scores emotion in audio, video and text.",
"why": "The only TTS you can direct like an actor - tell it to sound sarcastic, hesitant or relieved and it complies rather than just reading the words. Best fit for narrative games, audio drama and characters that need real range.",
"warn": "The commercial licence starts at the $14 Creator plan; the Free and $3 Starter tiers explicitly exclude commercial use. Overage rates vary nearly 3x across tiers, so heavy usage on a low plan gets expensive quickly.",
"install": "REST and WebSocket APIs for Octave TTS, EVI and Expression Measurement; measurement is pay-as-you-go from $0.0639/min."
},
{
"slug": "kling-ai",
"name": "Kling AI",
"url": "https://klingai.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-video, strong physics",
"price": "Free 66 credits/day (expire in 24h). Standard $10/mo (660 credits), Pro $37 (3,000), Premier $92 (8,000), Ultra $180 (26,000). API sold as prepaid packs from $9.80.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Kuaishou's video generator, now on Kling VIDEO 3.0 with 4K output added in April 2026 and native synchronised audio. A 5-second 1080p clip with audio costs about 60 credits. Includes lip-sync, motion brush and start/end frame control.",
"why": "Best-in-class physical realism - cloth, hair, water and human motion hold together where rivals melt into soup. Consistently the cheapest credible route to convincing 1080p character motion, and API failures do not consume credits.",
"warn": "Free-tier clips are capped at 360-540p, permanently watermarked, and carry no commercial rights. On consumer plans a failed generation still burns your credits - only the API refunds failed tasks.",
"install": "API sold as prepaid resource packs: $9.80 trial (100 units, 30 days) up to $7,560 for 60,000 units."
},
{
"slug": "krea",
"name": "Krea",
"url": "https://www.krea.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Multi-model canvas, realtime gen",
"price": "Free 100 compute units/day. Basic $9/mo (5,000 CU), Pro $35 (20,000), Max $70 (60,000), Business $200 (80,000). About 20% off annual.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Aggregator studio hosting 60-plus image, video, 3D and upscaling models behind one subscription, plus its own Krea 1 model tuned for skin texture and painterly styles. Bundles FLUX, Nano Banana, Veo, Sora, Kling and Topaz upscalers.",
"why": "Replaces four subscriptions with one and usually has new model releases live within the same week they ship. The realtime canvas re-renders in under 50ms as you drag, making it the fastest way to lock composition before spending credits.",
"warn": "Compute units burn at wildly different rates per model - premium video models can drain a month of Basic credits in a handful of clips. The commercial licence starts at Basic ($9); the free tier does not carry one.",
"install": "Unified REST API across 20+ image and video models on paid plans, metered in compute units."
},
{
"slug": "leonardo-ai",
"name": "Leonardo AI",
"url": "https://leonardo.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Image gen with model training",
"price": "Free 150 tokens/day. Essential $12/mo (8,500 tokens), Premium $30 (25,000), Ultimate $60 (60,000). Teams from $24/seat. API is pay-as-you-go with a $5 signup credit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Canva-owned generation platform with in-house models - Phoenix, Lucid Origin and Lucid Realism - alongside hosted Veo 3, Kling and Sora 2. Includes a realtime canvas, Elements, and custom model training on your own uploaded images.",
"why": "Best value if you need a fine-tuned model trained on your own product shots or character designs without leaving the browser. Token pricing is transparent and the 150-token daily free allowance is genuinely enough to evaluate the tool.",
"warn": "Free-tier outputs are public and Leonardo retains rights; commercial ownership starts at Essential ($12). Premium third-party models such as Veo 3 and Sora 2 always bill at full token rate, even on Ultimate, and are excluded from relaxed generation.",
"install": "Full REST API with pay-as-you-go credits; the $5 starter credit never expires."
},
{
"slug": "luma-ai",
"name": "Luma AI",
"url": "https://lumalabs.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-video with HDR and EXR",
"price": "Dream Machine free about 250 credits/day (watermarked). Lite $9.99/mo, Plus $29.99, Unlimited $94.99. Luma Agents: Plus $30, Pro $90, Ultra $300. API about $0.95 per 5s 1080p clip.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Dream Machine's current standard is Ray 3.14 - native 1080p, roughly three times cheaper than base Ray 3 at 720p and four times faster. Base Ray 3 is still needed for HDR/EXR output and character reference. Luma Agents is the newer agentic product line.",
"why": "The only mainstream video model producing genuine 16-bit HDR and EXR output, which is why VFX and colour-grading pipelines choose it. Modify Video handles clips up to 18 seconds, well past the 5 to 8 second ceiling most rivals impose.",
"warn": "Commercial rights begin at Plus - the $9.99 Lite plan does not include them, which catches people out. Monthly credits never roll over, and failed generations still consume credits on subscription plans, though the API refunds them.",
"install": "REST API with per-clip pricing; failed generations are fully refunded."
},
{
"slug": "magnific",
"name": "Magnific (formerly Freepik)",
"url": "https://magnific.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Creative upscaling + model suite",
"price": "Free about 20 images/day. Premium $20/mo (240K annual credits), Premium+ $45 (600K), Pro $280 (4M); annual about 25% off. API roughly $0.08 per 2K upscale.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Freepik rebranded its entire AI platform as Magnific on 28 April 2026, folding the standalone upscaler into one credit pool alongside stock assets and hosted models including Nano Banana 2, FLUX.2, Seedream 5.0 and Kling 3.0. Upscales up to 16x.",
"why": "Still the reference creative upscaler: Creative mode hallucinates convincing new detail into soft images, Precision mode enlarges without inventing anything. Premium+ gives effectively unlimited runs on roughly thirty workhorse image models for $45.",
"warn": "Credits are granted annually, not monthly, and do not roll into the next year - a heavy first quarter can leave you empty by summer. 'Unlimited' on Premium+ excludes video, audio and premium image variants, which always bill.",
"install": "API on Pro, Business and Enterprise, credit-metered. An MCP server is offered for Claude and ChatGPT."
},
{
"slug": "midjourney",
"name": "Midjourney",
"url": "https://www.midjourney.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-image, aesthetic-first",
"price": "No free tier. Basic $10/mo, Standard $30/mo, Pro $60/mo, Mega $120/mo; annual saves about 20%.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Subscription image generator running V8.2 as the default model since 24 July 2026, with V8.1 and Niji 7 still selectable via --v. Runs on web and Discord. Plans buy fast GPU-hours; Standard and above add unlimited relaxed generation.",
"why": "Still the default for painterly, art-directed stills that look composed rather than rendered. Personalization profiles learn your taste over time, which no rival matches. Style and character reference codes keep one look consistent across a whole campaign.",
"warn": "No official public API - every 'Midjourney API' is an unofficial reseller that can break or get your account banned. Generations are public by default; stealth mode requires Pro ($60) or Mega ($120). Companies over $1M annual revenue must sit on Pro or Mega.",
"install": "No official API. Third-party wrappers only, at your own risk."
},
{
"slug": "openai-sora",
"name": "OpenAI Sora",
"url": "https://openai.com/sora",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-video, API sunsetting",
"price": "API only: Sora 2 $0.10/sec at 720p; Sora 2 Pro $0.30/sec (720p), $0.50 (1024p), $0.70 (1080p). Batch mode is 50% off. No consumer plan exists any more.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "OpenAI's video model, Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro, offering synchronised audio, cameo-style character insertion and strong physical simulation. The Sora web and iOS apps were discontinued on 26 April 2026 after deepfake backlash and Disney's exit from the partnership.",
"why": "Still excellent at physically coherent multi-shot scenes and dialogue-driven storytelling, and Pro at 1080p remains a quality benchmark. Realistically it is now only worth touching to finish work already in flight.",
"warn": "The Sora API shuts down permanently on 24 September 2026 and accepts no requests after that date. The consumer apps are already gone and ChatGPT Plus and Pro lost Sora access in April 2026. Do not build anything new on it - export your assets now.",
"install": "REST API via OpenAI, live only until 24 September 2026."
},
{
"slug": "pika",
"name": "Pika",
"url": "https://pika.art",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Short social video + VFX effects",
"price": "Free 80 credits/mo at 480p, watermarked. Standard $10/mo (700 credits), Pro $35 (2,300), Fancy $95 (6,000). About 20% off annual.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Consumer-first video generator on Pika 2.5, best known for Pikaffects - one-click physical transformations like melt, explode, crush, inflate and cake-ify applied to an uploaded image or clip. Also handles standard text-to-video and image-to-video.",
"why": "Cheapest credible entry point into AI video, and the effects library produces exactly the viral formats TikTok and Reels reward. Faster to a usable social clip than any general-purpose model.",
"warn": "The free tier is watermarked, capped at 480p and personal use only - no commercial licence until $10/mo. Pika trails Runway, Kling and Veo badly on realism and prompt adherence; treat it as a novelty-effects tool, not a film tool.",
"install": "API available at pika.art/api and resold through fal.ai."
},
{
"slug": "recraft",
"name": "Recraft",
"url": "https://www.recraft.ai",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "True vector SVG + brand images",
"price": "Free 50 credits/day. Basic $12/mo (1,000 credits); Pro $20/$40/$80 for 2K/4K/8K credits. API $0.04 raster, $0.08 vector, $0.25 pro raster per image.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Design-focused generator whose Recraft V4 model (February 2026) outputs genuinely editable SVG rather than traced raster. Also covers raster images, mockups and infographics. One credit buys a raster image; a vector costs two.",
"why": "The only mainstream model emitting production-quality vector geometry you can open in Illustrator and edit node by node. Reach for it for logos, icon sets, and any layout where text must stay legible and infinitely resizable.",
"warn": "Free-tier images are owned by Recraft, published to the public community gallery, and carry no commercial licence - you need a paid plan before any client work. Subscription credits reset monthly and never roll over.",
"install": "Public REST API available on all plans including Free; billed per image."
},
{
"slug": "reve",
"name": "Reve",
"url": "https://reve.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Layout-accurate 4K image gen",
"price": "Free tier with daily creative energy. Lite $7.99/mo (5x free), Pro $19.99 (100x free, plus 250 video energy). API from a $10 minimum = 7,500 credits; about $0.007 to $0.20 per image by endpoint.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Image model built around typography and layout fidelity, currently Reve 2.1, with native 4K output and an editor that automatically detects layers. Consistently a top-two finisher on public text-to-image arena leaderboards. The Pro plan adds video generation.",
"why": "Reach for it when the image is really a design - posters, ad units, packaging, UI mockups - and the words on it must be spelled correctly and sit exactly where you asked. Cheapest credible route to native 4K output.",
"warn": "The free tier opts you into model training by default; opting out requires at least the $7.99 Lite plan. API endpoints vary in price by nearly 30x, so choose the endpoint deliberately or costs balloon.",
"install": "Pay-as-you-go credit API with a $10 minimum top-up."
},
{
"slug": "runway",
"name": "Runway",
"url": "https://runwayml.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-video + pro editing tools",
"price": "Free 125 one-time credits. Standard $12/user/mo (625 credits), Pro $28 (2,250), Max $76 (9,500), billed annually. API credits cost $0.01 each: Gen-4.5 $0.12/sec, Gen-4 Turbo $0.05/sec.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Video generation platform whose Gen-4.5 model has held the top slot on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard. Ships with a real editing suite: inpainting, motion brush, camera control, keyframes, Act-Two performance capture and video-to-video restyling.",
"why": "The most complete production toolchain rather than a prompt box - you direct a shot instead of rolling dice. Self-serve API with no waitlist and a flat $10 minimum makes it the easiest premium video model to wire into a product.",
"warn": "Free credits are a one-time 125, not a monthly refill, and the free tier cannot touch Gen-4 or Gen-4.5 video at all. Paid plans are priced per seat, so a three-person Pro team is $84/mo before any overage.",
"install": "Self-serve REST API at dev.runwayml.com; $10 minimum top-up, credits at $0.01 each."
},
{
"slug": "seedance-and-seedream",
"name": "Seedance and Seedream (ByteDance)",
"url": "https://seed.bytedance.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Low-cost video and image models",
"price": "Volcano Engine API: 480p $0.09/sec, 720p $0.21/sec, roughly $0.14/sec for Seedance 2.0. Dreamina subscriptions about $15/$35/$70 per month. Free about 60-120 credits/day.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "ByteDance's generative line: Seedance 2.5 and 2.0 for video, Seedream 5.0 for image. Distributed globally through Dreamina, in China through Jimeng, and to developers through Volcano Engine. Supports text, image, keyframe and video-to-video modes.",
"why": "Among the strongest quality-per-dollar in video - about $0.09 a second at 480p undercuts every Western model. Seedream 5.0 is now resold as a workhorse image model inside Magnific, Krea and Higgsfield, which is the clearest signal of its quality.",
"warn": "Access is fragmented across Volcano Engine, Dreamina and Jimeng with different terms in each, and commercial rights are poorly documented in English. Video-input modes cost dramatically more, scaling with reference clip length to several dollars per five-second output.",
"install": "Volcano Engine API, plus resale through fal, Replicate and Higgsfield."
},
{
"slug": "suno",
"name": "Suno",
"url": "https://suno.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Text-to-music with vocals",
"price": "Free 50 credits/day, non-commercial. Pro $10/mo ($8 annual, 2,500 credits, about 500 songs), Premier $30 ($24 annual, 10,000 credits). Third-party APIs run about $0.10-$0.25 per song.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The leading AI music generator, currently v5.5, producing complete songs with vocals, lyrics and structure from a text prompt. Premier adds Suno Studio, a browser DAW with stem separation and MIDI export. Warner signed a licensing deal in November 2025; UMG and Sony suits remain pending.",
"why": "First model whose vocals routinely pass as human - natural breath, vibrato and phrasing instead of the vocoder sheen everything else carries. Fast enough to spin out a dozen usable variations on a brief in minutes.",
"warn": "After the Warner deal, Suno's terms shifted from ownership guarantees to language stating users are generally not considered the owner of content created with the service, and free-tier downloads were removed. Do not build a brand asset on it without legal review.",
"install": "No official public API; third-party wrappers resell access at roughly $0.10-$0.25 per song."
},
{
"slug": "topaz-labs",
"name": "Topaz Labs",
"url": "https://www.topazlabs.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Photo and video upscaling suite",
"price": "Subscription-only. Gigapixel $29/mo or $149/yr, Photo $39/mo or $199/yr, Video $59/mo or $299/yr. Studio bundle $69/mo or $399/yr. Astra cloud from $19/mo.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Long-running enhancement specialist covering upscaling, denoise, sharpen, frame interpolation and deinterlacing across desktop apps (Gigapixel, Photo, Video) and cloud tools (Astra, Bloom, Image Web). Adobe agreed to acquire Topaz Labs in June 2026.",
"why": "The professional standard for restoring real footage and photographs rather than inventing new ones - denoising archival video, taking 1080p masters to 4K, rescuing soft scans. Desktop apps render locally, so there is no upload cap or per-image cloud fee.",
"warn": "Perpetual licences were discontinued in September 2025; it is subscription-only now and old keys stop receiving model updates. Standard plans limit commercial use to organisations under $1M annual revenue - full commercial rights require a Pro tier.",
"install": "No public self-serve API; enterprise and custom integrations run through sales."
},
{
"slug": "udio",
"name": "Udio",
"url": "https://www.udio.com",
"cat": "gen",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "AI music, 48kHz stereo output",
"price": "Free 100 credits/mo (10/day). Standard $10/mo ($8 annual, 2,400 credits), Pro $30 ($24 annual, 6,000 credits). Add-on credit packs from $3 per 100.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Music generator known for the cleanest audio fidelity in the category at 48kHz stereo, with fine-grained section editing, extend and remix controls. Settled with Universal Music in October 2025 and with Warner subsequently, making it a licensed platform rather than a defendant.",
"why": "Sharper mixes and better instrument separation than Suno, and section-level editing gives far more structural control than a single prompt-and-pray generation. The choice when the stem quality has to survive a real mixdown.",
"warn": "Downloads are disabled. Post-settlement Udio is a streaming walled garden - you can generate and listen inside the platform but cannot export audio for use anywhere else. Treat the paid tiers' commercial rights as theoretical until export returns.",
"install": "No public developer API."
},
{
"slug": "apify-mcp",
"name": "Apify MCP",
"url": "https://mcp.apify.com",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (web scraping)",
"price": "Free $5/mo platform credit · Starter $29/mo · Scale $199/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Apify's official server at https://mcp.apify.com, authenticated by OAuth or an Apify API token. It exposes thousands of ready-made Actors — scrapers and crawlers for search engines, social platforms, maps and e-commerce — plus storage access and docs lookup, with dynamic tool discovery so agents find new Actors mid-conversation.",
"why": "One connection buys a maintained scraper for almost any site, so you skip writing and babysitting your own. Useful when you need real data to build against instead of placeholder content.",
"warn": "Actor runs consume compute units billed at $0.2 each on free and Starter plans, so a runaway agent burns the $5 free credit fast. Full-permission and rental Actors are deliberately excluded.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http apify https://mcp.apify.com"
},
{
"slug": "browserbase-mcp",
"name": "Browserbase MCP (Stagehand)",
"url": "https://docs.browserbase.com/integrations/mcp/introduction",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (cloud browser)",
"price": "Free 1 browser hour · Developer $20/mo (100 hrs) · Startup $99/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browserbase's official server, hosted at https://mcp.browserbase.com/mcp or self-run via npx @browserbasehq/mcp. Built on Stagehand, it exposes six tools — start, end, navigate, act, observe and extract — driving a cloud browser through plain-English instructions instead of CSS selectors.",
"why": "Natural-language actions survive layout changes that shatter selector-based scripts, and the browser runs in Browserbase's cloud rather than hijacking your desktop. Good for logged-in flows and sites hostile to headless browsers.",
"warn": "Metered in browser hours: the free plan gives one hour total with 15-minute session caps. Self-hosted mode also wants a GEMINI_API_KEY for the Stagehand model, an extra cost.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http browserbase https://mcp.browserbase.com/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "chrome-devtools-mcp",
"name": "Chrome DevTools MCP",
"url": "https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (browser debug)",
"price": "Free, open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Maintained by Google's Chrome DevTools team. It lets a coding agent control and inspect a live Chrome browser with full DevTools access: performance traces and insights, console messages with source-mapped stack traces, network request inspection, screenshots, DOM interaction, Lighthouse audits and memory debugging.",
"why": "Closes the loop where the agent writes frontend code but cannot see the result. It reads the real console error and the real network waterfall instead of asking you to paste a screenshot.",
"warn": "If you attach it to an existing Chrome instance it drives your real profile and logged-in sessions — never point it at anything sensitive. Performance traces return very large payloads.",
"install": "claude mcp add chrome-devtools --scope user npx chrome-devtools-mcp@latest"
},
{
"slug": "cline-mcp-marketplace",
"name": "Cline MCP Marketplace",
"url": "https://github.com/cline/mcp-marketplace",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "One-click MCP installs in Cline",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A curated marketplace built into the Cline VS Code extension. Authors submit a server via GitHub issue with a repo URL and logo; reviewers weigh community adoption, developer credibility, project maturity and security, usually within a couple of days. On install, Cline handles setup and configuration autonomously.",
"why": "Removes the config-file step entirely — pick a server in the sidebar and the agent installs and wires it up. The human review gate makes it far safer than pulling from a 70,000-entry index.",
"warn": "Only useful if you already use Cline, and the curated list is a tiny fraction of what Smithery or Glama index."
},
{
"slug": "composio",
"name": "Composio",
"url": "https://composio.dev",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Managed MCP gateway (1,100+ apps)",
"price": "Free 100K tool calls/mo · Pro $29/mo · overage $0.0003 per call",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An integration platform exposing 1,119+ toolkits and over 20,000 tools behind one managed MCP gateway endpoint. It owns the auth layer, running OAuth flows and storing per-user credentials so your agent never touches raw tokens. The free tier is hard-capped at 100K tool calls and 50K trigger events a month.",
"why": "One endpoint replaces a dozen separate MCP servers and a dozen separate OAuth setups. Reach for it when an agent needs CRM, email and calendar together and you do not want to wire three token flows.",
"warn": "Every tool call is metered and a chatty agent burns the free 100K faster than you expect. Composio-managed app connections also cost $0.10 each on paid plans after the first 1,000."
},
{
"slug": "context7",
"name": "Context7",
"url": "https://context7.com",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "MCP server for up-to-date lib docs",
"price": "Free 1,000 API calls/mo · Pro $10/seat/mo (5,000 calls)",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An Upstash project that pulls version-specific documentation and code examples for any library straight into the prompt. It exposes resolve-library-id and query-docs, and runs remotely at https://mcp.context7.com/mcp with a Bearer API key. Roughly 60.9k GitHub stars.",
"why": "Kills the single most common vibe-coding failure: the model confidently writing an API that was removed two versions ago. Say 'use context7' in a prompt and it fetches the real current docs first.",
"warn": "Now needs a free API key and meters you at 1,000 calls a month. Doc blobs are token-heavy, so pulling three libraries in one session eats a serious slice of context.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http context7 https://mcp.context7.com/mcp --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY'"
},
{
"slug": "docker-mcp-catalog-toolkit",
"name": "Docker MCP Catalog + Toolkit",
"url": "https://hub.docker.com/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Containerised MCP server catalog",
"price": "Free with Docker Desktop · MCP Gateway is invite-only",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "300+ verified MCP servers packaged as container images with versioning, provenance and security updates. The Toolkit inside Docker Desktop discovers and manages them. Each tool runs in its own container capped at 1 CPU and 2 GB, filesystem access is restricted by default, and secret-bearing traffic is blocked.",
"why": "The only mainstream option that sandboxes MCP servers instead of running arbitrary npx code with your full user permissions. Worth the setup the moment you install a server you did not write.",
"warn": "The Toolkit is still marked Beta and the MCP Gateway is invite-only behind a sales contact. Container startup adds noticeable latency versus a plain stdio server."
},
{
"slug": "exa-mcp",
"name": "Exa MCP",
"url": "https://exa.ai/docs/reference/exa-mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (AI web search)",
"price": "Free $20 signup + $10/mo credits · search $7 per 1,000 requests",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Exa's open-source server at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp, or run locally via npm with your API key. Default tools are web_search_exa and web_fetch_exa, which returns pages as markdown; optional tools add agent_run for multi-step research and advanced filtered search. No API key is needed for casual use.",
"why": "Gives the agent embeddings-based search tuned to surface real technical pages rather than SEO filler. The keyless free tier means you can wire it up and test it inside a minute.",
"warn": "Keyless use is rate-limited and not intended for production. Agent research runs cost $0.012 to $1.00 each, and raw search results dumped into context are expensive in tokens.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http exa https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "figma-mcp-server",
"name": "Figma MCP Server",
"url": "https://developers.figma.com/docs/figma-mcp-server/",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (design to code)",
"price": "Free during beta · usage-based paid feature planned",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Figma's official server comes in two forms: a remote endpoint at https://mcp.figma.com/mcp available on all seats and plans, and a desktop server requiring a Dev or Full seat on a paid plan. It returns generated code, design system variables and components, layout context and Code Connect mappings.",
"why": "The agent reads the actual frame — real spacing, real tokens, real component names — instead of eyeballing a screenshot. Code Connect makes it emit your components rather than inventing new ones.",
"warn": "Still beta, and Figma states it will eventually become a usage-based paid feature. Only MCP clients in Figma's approved catalog may connect; anything else joins a waitlist.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http figma https://mcp.figma.com/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "filesystem-mcp",
"name": "Filesystem MCP",
"url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/filesystem",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Reference MCP server (files)",
"price": "Free, MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A maintained reference server for file operations with access controls. Tools include read_text_file, read_media_file, write_file, edit_file, directory_tree, search_files and move_file. Access is confined to directories passed at startup, or set dynamically by the client via the MCP Roots protocol.",
"why": "The way to give a chat client like Claude Desktop genuine file access, or to let an agent reach a folder outside its project — a shared assets directory, say — without handing over the whole disk.",
"warn": "Largely redundant inside Claude Code or Cursor, which already have native file tools; adding it duplicates tools and bloats context for no gain. Always scope the allowed directory narrowly.",
"install": "claude mcp add filesystem npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem /path/to/project"
},
{
"slug": "glama-mcp-directory",
"name": "Glama MCP Directory",
"url": "https://glama.ai/mcp/servers",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "MCP directory with quality scores",
"price": "Free to browse · Glama plans from $9/mo add hosted servers",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Claims the most comprehensive MCP registry, indexing 73,021 servers and refreshed daily. Unlike plain lists it attaches a license, a quality rating, an A-to-F maintenance grade and GitHub activity to each entry, and ships an MCP Inspector for evaluation. Paid plans add hosted MCP servers and chat/API access.",
"why": "The maintenance grade and license column answer the question other directories dodge: is this thing abandoned, and may I legally use it? Sort by grade before installing anything community-built.",
"warn": "The A-to-F grade measures maintenance activity, not security. A diligently maintained server can still read your environment variables and phone home."
},
{
"slug": "linear-mcp",
"name": "Linear MCP",
"url": "https://linear.app/docs/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (issue tracker)",
"price": "Free · your Linear plan applies",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Linear's official, centrally hosted server at https://mcp.linear.app/mcp, with a separate read-only endpoint at /mcp/readonly. Auth is OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration, or a bearer token or API key. Tools find, create and update issues, projects and comments.",
"why": "The agent picks up the ticket, reads the acceptance criteria and closes it with a comment when done. The read-only endpoint is the sane default when you only want it to absorb context.",
"warn": "The default endpoint is read-write, so a confused agent can mutate your team's board. Start on /mcp/readonly and only upgrade when you actually need writes.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http linear https://mcp.linear.app/mcp/readonly"
},
{
"slug": "mcp-registry",
"name": "MCP Registry (official)",
"url": "https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server registry",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The community-driven registry run by the MCP steering group, with a working group including PulseMCP, Stacklok, TeamSpark and Ravenmail. It serves a REST API at /v0/servers plus an mcp-publisher CLI, with GitHub OAuth and DNS-based namespace verification for publishers. Still labelled preview rather than GA.",
"why": "The canonical source other directories sync from. When you want the real package name, namespace and version of a server rather than a marketplace's marketing copy, check here first.",
"warn": "Still in preview — the API froze at v0.1 but data resets and breaking changes remain possible. It stores metadata only, so being listed implies no security review whatsoever.",
"install": "mcp-publisher login github && mcp-publisher publish"
},
{
"slug": "mcp-so",
"name": "mcp.so",
"url": "https://mcp.so",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Community MCP server directory",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A community-driven platform that collects and organises third-party MCP servers, browsable by category, tag, popularity and recency. It has widened past servers to also index MCP clients, CLI tools, reusable workflow 'loops' and agent skills. Servers are submitted through GitHub.",
"why": "A fast, low-friction browse when you want to see what already exists in a category before you build it yourself. The clients section is handy for checking your editor actually supports a given server.",
"warn": "A pure listing site — no security review, quality grading or maintenance signal. Read the underlying repo yourself before you install anything from it."
},
{
"slug": "memory",
"name": "Memory (Knowledge Graph MCP)",
"url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/memory",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Reference MCP server (memory)",
"price": "Free, MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A maintained reference server implementing persistent memory as a local knowledge graph of entities, relations and observations. Data lives in a plain JSONL file whose location you set with MEMORY_FILE_PATH. Eight tools include create_entities, add_observations, search_nodes and read_graph.",
"why": "Lets the agent remember your stack, naming conventions and past decisions across sessions instead of you re-explaining the project every morning. Everything stays in a local file you can open and edit yourself.",
"warn": "The agent will not use memory unless your instructions tell it to write and read. The graph grows unbounded and read_graph dumps the entire thing into context.",
"install": "claude mcp add memory npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-memory"
},
{
"slug": "notion-mcp",
"name": "Notion MCP",
"url": "https://developers.notion.com/docs/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (docs/wiki)",
"price": "Free · your Notion plan applies",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Notion's own hosted remote server at https://mcp.notion.com/mcp, authorised over OAuth against your workspace. It searches content and reads, creates and updates pages and databases. Workspace owners manage connected clients under Settings, and org admins can list or revoke member connections through the Admin API.",
"why": "Turns your Notion workspace into the agent's project brief — it reads the spec, roadmap and meeting notes directly, then writes changelogs and status updates back without you relaying anything.",
"warn": "OAuth grants access at your own permission level, so an agent that can read the product spec can usually read finance and HR pages too. Treat Notion content as untrusted input.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "postgres-mcp-pro",
"name": "Postgres MCP Pro",
"url": "https://github.com/crystaldba/postgres-mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Community MCP server (Postgres)",
"price": "Free, MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source Postgres server from Crystal DBA spanning the full lifecycle: index tuning with industrial-strength search, health checks for buffer cache, connections, index bloat and vacuum, EXPLAIN plans with hypothetical indexes via hypopg, and configurable SQL execution. The steering group's own Postgres reference server is archived.",
"why": "Beyond running queries it tells the agent why a query is slow and which index fixes it. Restricted mode gives read-only transactions with execution time limits, which is what you want near real data.",
"warn": "Unrestricted mode is full read/write — dev databases only. Needs Python 3.12+ or Docker rather than a one-line npx, and it is community-maintained, not first-party Postgres.",
"install": "pipx install postgres-mcp"
},
{
"slug": "pulsemcp",
"name": "PulseMCP",
"url": "https://www.pulsemcp.com",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "MCP directory, news and use cases",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A curated directory tracking MCP servers alongside a matching directory of MCP clients, plus news posts, worked use-case write-ups and a weekly newsletter. PulseMCP is one of the organisations represented on the working group that governs the official MCP Registry.",
"why": "The client directory and use-case posts answer 'what would I actually do with this', not just 'does it exist'. The newsletter is the cheapest way to track an ecosystem that changes weekly.",
"warn": "Curation means narrower coverage than Glama or Smithery — a niche or brand-new server may simply not be listed yet."
},
{
"slug": "ref",
"name": "Ref (Ref Context)",
"url": "https://ref.tools",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Token-efficient docs search MCP",
"price": "$9/mo for 1,000 queries · $10 per additional 1,000 credits",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "An MCP server that searches public and private documentation from any MCP-compatible coding agent, tuned to return the relevant chunk rather than a whole page. Served at https://api.ref.tools/mcp using an x-ref-api-key header or OAuth. Ref also ships Ref Plans, a plan-review workspace sharing the same credit pool.",
"why": "Point it at your own private docs — internal API references, a design system, a team wiki — and the agent stops guessing at in-house conventions. Token efficiency keeps doc lookups from crowding out your actual code.",
"warn": "No meaningful free tier, and credits are shared with Ref Plans, so plan-orchestration usage quietly drains your documentation-search budget.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http Ref https://api.ref.tools/mcp --header 'x-ref-api-key: YOUR_KEY'"
},
{
"slug": "sentry-mcp",
"name": "Sentry MCP",
"url": "https://mcp.sentry.dev",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (error tracking)",
"price": "Free · your Sentry plan applies",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Sentry's official remote server at https://mcp.sentry.dev/mcp, HTTP transport only, with OAuth triggered on first connection. It covers searching errors, analysing performance, triaging issues, reading Sentry documentation and managing projects. Connections can be scoped to a single organisation or project to constrain access.",
"why": "The agent reads the real production stack trace and affected release instead of you pasting a screenshot. It closes the gap between 'users are hitting an error' and a fix in your editor.",
"warn": "Remote-only with no documented stdio option, so it will not work offline. Error payloads routinely contain user data and request bodies you may not want flowing into a model context.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http sentry https://mcp.sentry.dev/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "sequential-thinking-mcp",
"name": "Sequential Thinking MCP",
"url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/sequentialthinking",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Reference MCP server (reasoning)",
"price": "Free, MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "One of only seven reference servers still maintained by the MCP steering group. It gives the model a scratchpad for structured, revisable step-by-step reasoning: thoughts can be revised, branched into alternative paths, and the total step count adjusted mid-problem as the real scope becomes clear.",
"why": "Forces a plan before code on gnarly debugging and architecture calls, where a model's instinct is to start editing files immediately. Cheap to add, and it only fires when the agent chooses to think.",
"warn": "Pure overhead on simple tasks — every thought is another round trip and more tokens. Current reasoning models already do much of this internally, so the gain is smaller than it was in 2024.",
"install": "claude mcp add sequential-thinking npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-sequential-thinking"
},
{
"slug": "slack-mcp-server",
"name": "Slack MCP Server (korotovsky)",
"url": "https://github.com/korotovsky/slack-mcp-server",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Community MCP server (Slack)",
"price": "Free, MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The most widely used Slack MCP server, MIT-licensed and not affiliated with Slack. It supports bot and OAuth tokens plus a 'stealth mode' using browser session tokens that needs no app install or admin approval. It fetches channel and thread history, searches messages, adds reactions, marks read and posts.",
"why": "The realistic way to give an agent Slack context when you are not a workspace admin and cannot get an app approved. Message posting is off by default, so read-only triage works safely out of the box.",
"warn": "Stealth mode hands long-lived browser session cookies to a community binary and may breach your workspace policy. The MCP steering group's Slack reference server is archived, so every option here is community-maintained."
},
{
"slug": "smithery",
"name": "Smithery",
"url": "https://smithery.ai",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "MCP registry + hosting platform",
"price": "Free to browse and install · paid tiers for hosted servers and managed connections",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The largest MCP marketplace, advertising 15,190+ servers with generated config for Claude Code, Cursor and other clients. It is also a host: you can deploy servers to Smithery over streamable HTTP, and it manages auth, credentials and sessions for you. Its homepage states Smithery is now part of Arcade.dev.",
"why": "The fastest path from 'I need a Notion tool' to a working config. It generates the client snippet and runs the OAuth handshake so you never hand-edit a JSON config file.",
"warn": "Listing volume is not curation — most of those 15,000 entries are unvetted community code. Using hosted connections also means your access tokens live in a third party's vault.",
"install": "npx smithery auth login, then copy the generated config from the server's page"
},
{
"slug": "stripe-mcp",
"name": "Stripe MCP",
"url": "https://docs.stripe.com/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (payments)",
"price": "Free · normal Stripe transaction fees apply",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Stripe's official remote server at https://mcp.stripe.com, connected over OAuth with per-client consent and revocable sessions in the Dashboard. Instead of one tool per endpoint it exposes stripe_api_search, stripe_api_read and stripe_api_write, plus docs search and an implementation planner, keeping the tool list small.",
"why": "The agent looks up the correct Stripe call, then creates the product, price and payment link itself — no clicking through the Dashboard while it guesses at parameter names.",
"warn": "stripe_api_write reaches POST, PATCH, PUT and DELETE on a live account. Stripe itself recommends human confirmation of tools; use a sandbox and restricted API keys, never a secret key in a config file.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http stripe https://mcp.stripe.com/"
},
{
"slug": "supabase-mcp",
"name": "Supabase MCP",
"url": "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (Postgres BaaS)",
"price": "Free · your Supabase plan applies",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Supabase's official server, remote at https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp or local through the Supabase CLI. Current versions use browser-based OAuth with dynamic client registration rather than personal access tokens. Tools cover queries, migrations, logs, advisors, Edge Functions, API keys, TypeScript type generation and docs search.",
"why": "The agent inspects your live schema, writes and applies a migration, then reads the error logs when it breaks — the whole backend loop without leaving the editor.",
"warn": "Supabase explicitly flags prompt injection: rows in your own tables can carry instructions. Use read_only=true, scope with project_ref, enable manual tool approval, and keep it off production data.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http supabase https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp"
},
{
"slug": "vercel-mcp",
"name": "Vercel MCP",
"url": "https://vercel.com/docs/agent-resources/vercel-mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official MCP server (deploys)",
"price": "Free · your Vercel plan applies",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vercel's official remote server at https://mcp.vercel.com, implementing the current MCP authorization and streamable HTTP specs over OAuth. Tools cover documentation search, project and deployment management, deployment log analysis, and Web Analytics queries. Public docs tools work unauthenticated; everything else needs a Vercel login.",
"why": "When a build fails, the agent pulls the actual deployment log and fixes it rather than asking you to copy-paste the error. Docs search also stops it inventing vercel.json options.",
"warn": "Vercel only permits clients it has reviewed to connect, and connecting grants the AI the same access as your own account. Always keep human confirmation on for deployment changes.",
"install": "claude mcp add --transport http vercel https://mcp.vercel.com"
},
{
"slug": "zapier-mcp",
"name": "Zapier MCP",
"url": "https://zapier.com/mcp",
"cat": "mcp",
"group": "ai",
"tagline": "Official managed MCP (9,000+ apps)",
"price": "Included in Zapier plans · each MCP call consumes two tasks",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Zapier's hosted MCP endpoint at mcp.zapier.com, exposing 9,000+ apps and 30,000+ actions through the app connections you already authorised. Setup is browser-based with no terminal step, you choose exactly which apps and actions the AI may reach, and all activity is logged.",
"why": "The widest app coverage of any single MCP endpoint, reusing OAuth you set up years ago. Best for the long tail — the CRM or accounting tool nobody has written a dedicated MCP server for.",
"warn": "Each MCP call burns two tasks from your monthly quota, making it far pricier per action than a direct API server. Exposing too many actions floods the tool list and bloats every request's context."
},
{
"slug": "aikido-security",
"name": "Aikido Security",
"url": "https://www.aikido.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "All-in-one AppSec scanner",
"price": "Developer free forever: 2 users, 10 repos, 2 container images, 1 domain, 250k protected requests/mo, 10 AI autofixes/mo; Basic $300/mo base for 10 users and 100 repos; Pro $600/mo for 200 repos; Advanced $600/mo for 500 repos; Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Bundles SCA, SAST, secret detection across IDE, CI and git, IaC scanning, container image scanning, DAST and cloud posture management behind one dashboard, with aggressive deduplication and auto-triage to suppress irrelevant findings. It also opens AI autofix pull requests and offers an in-app firewall for runtime protection.",
"why": "One install covers the whole checklist a solo builder would otherwise assemble from six separate tools, and the free tier's 10 repositories is enough for a real side project rather than a demo.",
"warn": "The jump from free to Basic is $300/mo with a 10-user floor. There is no cheap single-developer paid tier in between."
},
{
"slug": "arcjet",
"name": "Arcjet",
"url": "https://arcjet.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "In-app rate limiting and bot defence",
"price": "No free plan as of 2026; Individual $25/app/mo; Startup $299/app/mo; Growth $799/app/mo; usage fees on top at $5 per 1M requests plus per-feature rates such as $0.50 per 1M for bot detection; 15-day trial",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Security SDK that runs inside your application rather than at the edge, with adapters for Next.js, Node, Bun, Deno, SvelteKit, Remix, Astro, Fastify and NestJS. It provides rate limiting, bot detection, a shield WAF, email validation, PII redaction and prompt-injection detection, invoked per route as ordinary code.",
"why": "AI-generated API routes almost never carry rate limits, leaving a signup or LLM-proxy endpoint open to abuse and a surprise bill. A few lines per route caps it and blocks disposable-email signups.",
"warn": "Priced per app plus per-request usage, and the free tier is gone as of 2026, so a multi-service project pays $25/mo for every service it protects.",
"install": "npm install @arcjet/next"
},
{
"slug": "bito",
"name": "Bito",
"url": "https://bito.ai",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI PR review agent",
"price": "Team $12/seat/mo annually or $15 monthly; Professional $20/seat/mo annually or $25 monthly; both include 5,000 lines reviewed per seat per month, overage $5 per 1,000 lines; Enterprise custom; 14-day trial",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "AI review agent for GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket that posts inline pull request feedback and layers in static analysis and secret scanning results. Billing is metered by lines of code reviewed rather than by pull request count. A separate IDE assistant covers in-editor generation and explanation.",
"why": "Cheapest per-seat entry point among the mainstream PR bots, so a small team can get automated review coverage on private repos for $12 a head instead of $24 to $30.",
"warn": "The 5,000 lines per seat allowance is small for AI-generated diffs; one large agent-written feature can eat a month of quota, and overage runs $5 per 1,000 lines."
},
{
"slug": "browserbase",
"name": "Browserbase",
"url": "https://www.browserbase.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Hosted headless browser cloud",
"price": "Free: 1 browser hour/mo; Developer $20/mo with 100 browser hours then $0.12/hr; Startup $99/mo with 500 hours then $0.10/hr; Scale custom with 250+ concurrent browsers",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Managed headless browser infrastructure driven over CDP by Playwright, Puppeteer or Stagehand, with stealth mode, proxies, captcha handling and full session recording and replay. It handles concurrency so you never operate a browser fleet yourself. Browserbase also publishes and maintains Stagehand as its open-source automation layer.",
"why": "Gives CI and your agents a real browser without maintaining one, so end-to-end checks of AI-built flows run on every pull request rather than only on the laptop where they happened to work.",
"warn": "The free tier is one browser hour per month, which is a handful of test runs. Budget for the $20 Developer plan almost immediately."
},
{
"slug": "codacy",
"name": "Codacy",
"url": "https://www.codacy.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Quality and security platform",
"price": "Developer IDE plugin free forever; free forever for open source projects; Team $18/dev/mo billed annually or $21 monthly, up to 30 devs; Business custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Combines static analysis across 49 languages with SAST, hardcoded-secret detection, dependency SCA, malicious-package checks and IaC scanning, plus test coverage tracking with merge gates. It runs as a hosted service over repository webhooks, so it needs no CI pipeline changes, and ships plugins for VS Code, JetBrains and Cursor.",
"why": "The coverage merge gate is the useful lever: it blocks a pull request when AI-written code arrives with no tests attached, which is the default state of nearly every vibe-coded feature.",
"warn": "Enabling all default rule sets at once produces a huge first-run backlog of findings. Configure the rule set before inviting the rest of the team."
},
{
"slug": "coderabbit",
"name": "CodeRabbit",
"url": "https://www.coderabbit.ai",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI PR reviewer",
"price": "Free for open source and public repos; Pro $24/dev/mo billed annually; Pro+ $48/dev/mo; CodeRabbit Security add-on $40/user/mo; 14-day trial, no card",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Line-by-line AI review bot that comments on every pull request with a summary, a change walkthrough and inline suggestions carrying one-click fixes. It runs linters and SAST engines underneath, supports agentic chat in the PR thread, and adds pre-merge checks. Also ships a CLI and IDE extension.",
"why": "It reads the whole diff before you merge agent-written code, catching the null deref, the swallowed error and the hardcoded credential an AI confidently produced. Free on public repos means there is no excuse to skip review.",
"warn": "Comment volume is high by default on large diffs. Tune path filters and set the review profile to 'chill' in .coderabbit.yaml or the noise trains you to ignore it.",
"install": "Install the CodeRabbit GitHub App from the marketplace, no CI config required"
},
{
"slug": "cypress",
"name": "Cypress",
"url": "https://www.cypress.io",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "E2E test runner and cloud",
"price": "Test runner free under MIT; Cypress Cloud Starter free with 500 test results/mo; Team $67/mo or $799/yr with 120k results/yr; Business $267/mo or $3,199/yr; Enterprise custom; OSS plan up to 100k test results/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browser test runner with an interactive time-travel debugger that shows DOM state at every command. The app itself is MIT licensed and free to run locally or in CI; the paid Cloud adds recorded runs, parallelisation, flake detection and analytics. Qualifying open-source projects get a dedicated free OSS plan.",
"why": "The visual runner shows exactly which step of an AI-written flow broke and what the page looked like at that moment, without you reconstructing it from a stack trace.",
"warn": "Cloud billing counts individual test results, not runs. A 200-test suite across 20 pull requests a day exhausts the 500-result free tier in well under a week.",
"install": "npm install -D cypress"
},
{
"slug": "dependabot",
"name": "Dependabot",
"url": "https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Dependency update PR bot",
"price": "$0 on all GitHub repositories, public and private, including private repos on the free GitHub plan",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "GitHub-native bot with three jobs: alerts for vulnerable dependencies drawn from the GitHub Advisory Database, security updates that automatically open pull requests bumping to a patched version, and scheduled version updates configured in .github/dependabot.yml. Grouped updates and auto-merge rules keep pull request volume manageable.",
"why": "Zero-cost, near-zero-config baseline. The package.json your agent wrote will drift into known-CVE territory within months, and this is the one tool that quietly fixes it while you sleep.",
"warn": "It only knows advisories already published to GitHub's database, so brand-new malicious packages slip through; pair it with Socket. It also skips archived repos, and ungrouped updates get spammy fast.",
"install": "Enable under repo Settings > Code security, then add .github/dependabot.yml"
},
{
"slug": "ellipsis",
"name": "Ellipsis",
"url": "https://www.ellipsis.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Usage-priced AI review agent",
"price": "No per-seat fee; usage-based at Claude token rates plus a 40% platform fee, $0.142/vCPU-hour and $0.024/GB-hour on managed SaaS; $100 one-time credit for orgs, $10 for individuals; free for open source on request",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Agentic code review and bug-fixing bot for GitHub. It reviews pull requests, answers questions in threads, and can be told to write and push the fix itself. Priced purely on compute and tokens consumed rather than per developer, with optional support packages starting at $5,000/month.",
"why": "The no-seat-fee model fits a solo builder or two-person team shipping high volumes of AI-written code, where per-seat reviewers charge for headcount instead of for review work actually performed.",
"warn": "Usage pricing makes spend hard to forecast; a runaway agent loop on a large monorepo can burn the $100 starter credit in a day."
},
{
"slug": "gitguardian",
"name": "GitGuardian",
"url": "https://www.gitguardian.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Hosted secret detection and rotation",
"price": "Starter free for up to 25 developers: unlimited real-time scanning, up to 500 historical detections, 10,000 API calls/mo, 1 GB of git history; Growth and Enterprise quoted by sales; free for repos under your GitHub organisation",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted secrets platform that scans commits in real time across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps using several hundred detectors. It validates whether a discovered credential is still live and tracks each incident through to remediation. Paid tiers extend scanning to CI logs, container registries and collaboration tools.",
"why": "Real-time alerts mean you hear about a leaked key within seconds of the push rather than at the next nightly scan, and the validity check tells you whether to rotate immediately or stand down.",
"warn": "The free Starter tier caps historical scanning at 500 detections and 1 GB of git history, so a large legacy repository will never be fully backfilled."
},
{
"slug": "gitleaks",
"name": "Gitleaks",
"url": "https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Secret scanning in git history",
"price": "$0 forever, MIT open source; the official GitHub Action needs a free license key for organisation-owned repos, none for personal accounts",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Scans git repositories, loose files and stdin for passwords, API keys and tokens. It walks full commit history using git log -p, so it finds credentials in old commits that were later deleted from the working tree. Runs as a CLI, pre-commit hook, Docker image or GitHub Action.",
"why": "The highest-value five-minute install on this list. An assistant pasting a live OPENAI_API_KEY or database URL into a committed config file is routine, and once pushed only history rewriting removes it.",
"warn": "Entropy-based detection false-positives on hashes, lockfiles and test fixtures, so budget time for a .gitleaksignore baseline. The maintainer has declared it feature complete, security patches only.",
"install": "brew install gitleaks && gitleaks detect --source ."
},
{
"slug": "graphite-diamond",
"name": "Graphite Diamond",
"url": "https://graphite.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI reviewer + stacked PRs",
"price": "Hobby free with limited AI reviews; Starter $20/user/mo annually; Team $40/user/mo annually with unlimited AI reviews; Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Diamond is Graphite's AI reviewer, bundled with a stacked pull request workflow and a merge queue. It flags logic bugs, edge cases, performance problems, documentation gaps, security issues and accidentally committed code, and is deliberately tuned to comment only when it believes a finding is real.",
"why": "Low comment volume is the point, so the one thing it does flag gets read. Useful when an agent ships ten small PRs an hour and you need the stray debug statement or leftover TODO caught before merge.",
"warn": "The reviewer is entangled with Graphite's stacking CLI and workflow, so you get full value only by adopting the whole tool, and unlimited reviews require the $40/user Team tier."
},
{
"slug": "greptile",
"name": "Greptile",
"url": "https://www.greptile.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Codebase-aware AI reviewer",
"price": "Free Starter: 50 credits/mo, 1 active dev; Pro $30/seat/mo with 50 credits per seat, extra credits $1 each; free for MIT/Apache open source; 50% off startups under $2M revenue",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "AI reviewer that indexes your entire repository, so its pull request comments can reference code well outside the diff. A standard review costs 1 credit and a deeper TREX review costs 3. Supports unlimited repos on every tier, custom rules, and self-hosting plus SSO on Enterprise.",
"why": "Catches the bug class a diff-only reviewer structurally cannot see: your agent added a new call site but missed the three other places needing the same auth check or the same schema migration.",
"warn": "Credit-metered rather than flat per-seat, so a busy repo burns 50 credits fast and every review past that is $1."
},
{
"slug": "playwright",
"name": "Playwright",
"url": "https://playwright.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cross-browser E2E testing",
"price": "$0 forever, Apache 2.0 open source, maintained by Microsoft",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "End-to-end test framework covering Chromium, WebKit and Firefox on Windows, Linux and macOS, bundling a runner, assertions, test isolation and parallelisation. Auto-waiting eliminates most flaky timing failures. It ships a trace viewer for post-mortem debugging, codegen for recording tests, and an MCP server for agent-driven browser control.",
"why": "The only layer that proves the app actually works end to end. AI-written code routinely type-checks and passes unit tests while the real login or checkout flow is broken; a browser test is what catches that.",
"install": "npm init playwright@latest"
},
{
"slug": "qodo-merge",
"name": "Qodo Merge",
"url": "https://www.qodo.ai",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Multi-agent PR reviewer",
"price": "Free for open source projects; 14-day unlimited trial; Pro Team credits at $0.012 each pooled team-wide, roughly $30 for 2,500 credits (~18 reviews/mo) up to $240 for 20,000 credits (~144 reviews/mo); Enterprise custom above 30 users",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Runs several specialist agents in parallel over a pull request, scoring correctness, standards compliance, architecture and risk, then ranks findings by severity. It flags specification gaps against linked tickets, design drift from linked Figma files, and breaking changes in related repositories. It also generates unit tests.",
"why": "The specification-gap check is the one that matters most for vibe coding: it compares what the AI actually built against the requirement you wrote down, surfacing the silently dropped validation or permission check.",
"warn": "Credits are pooled across the whole team, so one noisy repo starves everyone else, and the smallest pack is only about 18 reviews per month."
},
{
"slug": "semgrep",
"name": "Semgrep",
"url": "https://semgrep.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "SAST with custom rules",
"price": "Semgrep Community Edition free under LGPL-2.1; hosted Free tier up to 10 contributors; Teams from $30/contributor/mo for Code or Supply Chain and $15 for Secrets; Enterprise custom",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Fast semantic static analysis across 30+ languages that matches patterns by code meaning rather than raw text, backed by a large community rule registry. The CLI is open source and runs locally or in CI with no account. Paid tiers add cross-file dataflow, reachability-aware SCA and validated secret detection.",
"why": "Rules look like the code they match, so in five lines you can enforce whatever your AI keeps forgetting: every query goes through the parameterised helper, every route calls the auth middleware.",
"warn": "Cross-file dataflow analysis, which finds most real injection paths, is a paid Pro rules feature. The free Community engine is largely single-file, so it misses taint that crosses modules.",
"install": "brew install semgrep && semgrep scan --config auto"
},
{
"slug": "snyk",
"name": "Snyk",
"url": "https://snyk.io",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "SCA and SAST developer security",
"price": "Free $0 with capped monthly tests; Team $25/mo per contributing developer; Ignite $1,260/yr per contributing developer; Enterprise custom; separate free program for open-source maintainers",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Developer security platform spanning Snyk Open Source for dependency SCA, Snyk Code for SAST, plus IaC and container scanning. It opens fix pull requests that bump vulnerable transitive dependencies to patched versions, and scans from the IDE, CLI and CI. Billing is per contributing developer, not per repository.",
"why": "AI agents install whatever package name sounds plausible, including abandoned and vulnerable ones. Snyk names the exact vulnerable transitive dependency and opens the upgrade pull request for you.",
"warn": "Billing counts contributing developers across every connected repo, so cost climbs with contributor count even when only one project is scanned, and free-tier test caps are low.",
"install": "npm install -g snyk && snyk test"
},
{
"slug": "socket-dev",
"name": "Socket.dev",
"url": "https://socket.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Supply chain malware detection",
"price": "Free $0: 1,000 scans/mo, 3 members, 1 repository label; Team $25/dev/mo with a 5-developer minimum; Business $50/dev/mo with a 20-developer minimum; Enterprise custom; free Team accounts for open source on request",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Inspects what a package actually does rather than only matching published CVEs, detecting 70+ risk types including install scripts, unexpected network or filesystem access, obfuscated code, typosquats and outright malware. It comments on the pull request when a dependency change introduces new capabilities. Higher tiers add reachability analysis to cut CVE noise.",
"why": "This is the direct answer to AI package hallucination and slopsquatting. When your agent adds a convincing-sounding package published last week that phones home on install, Socket blocks the pull request.",
"warn": "Team carries a 5-developer minimum, a $125/mo floor, and Business a 20-developer minimum, so small teams pay for seats that do not exist.",
"install": "Install the Socket GitHub App for PR comments, or run npx socket in CI"
},
{
"slug": "stagehand",
"name": "Stagehand",
"url": "https://stagehand.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI browser automation SDK",
"price": "$0 forever, MIT open source; runs locally free, or against Browserbase from $20/mo",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Browser agent SDK from Browserbase built on Playwright, adding natural-language primitives: act to perform a step, observe to find actionable elements and extract to pull schema-validated data. Actions self-heal across markup changes, and you can drop back to plain Playwright code whenever determinism matters.",
"why": "Selector-based tests shatter every time an AI rewrites your markup. Describing the step in English instead of pinning a DOM node keeps flows passing across cosmetic refactors you never asked for.",
"warn": "Every natural-language step is an LLM call, so runs are slower, cost tokens and are less deterministic than plain Playwright. Cache resolved actions once a flow stabilises.",
"install": "npm install @browserbasehq/stagehand"
},
{
"slug": "storybook-test-runner",
"name": "Storybook test runner",
"url": "https://storybook.js.org/docs/writing-tests/test-runner",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Component story test runner",
"price": "$0 forever, MIT open source; runs on your own CI at no cost",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Turns every Storybook story into an executable test, powered by Jest and Playwright. It renders each story in a real browser and fails on render errors or thrown exceptions, then executes any play function as an interaction test. Runs headless in CI with sharding and worker controls.",
"why": "Free smoke-test coverage for every component an AI generated. If a story throws on render because of a missing required prop or a bad default, CI fails before the page does in production.",
"warn": "It needs a running or pre-built Storybook in CI, which adds a build step and meaningful pipeline time on large component libraries.",
"install": "npm install -D @storybook/test-runner"
},
{
"slug": "testing-library",
"name": "Testing Library",
"url": "https://testing-library.com",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "User-centric UI test utilities",
"price": "$0 forever, MIT open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Family of packages for querying UI the way a user perceives it, by accessible role, label and visible text rather than by CSS class or component internals. Includes DOM Testing Library plus React, Vue, Angular and React Native bindings, and user-event for realistic keyboard and pointer simulation.",
"why": "Because queries go through accessible roles, a test fails when the AI ships a div with an onClick instead of a real button, catching keyboard and screen-reader breakage as a free side effect.",
"install": "npm install -D @testing-library/react @testing-library/user-event"
},
{
"slug": "trivy",
"name": "Trivy",
"url": "https://trivy.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Container and IaC vulnerability scanner",
"price": "$0 forever, Apache 2.0 open source, maintained by Aqua Security",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Single-binary scanner covering container images, filesystems, git repositories, Kubernetes clusters and binary artifacts. It finds OS and language-package CVEs, misconfigurations in Terraform, Dockerfiles and Kubernetes manifests, and hardcoded secrets, and it can both generate and scan SBOMs. Available as CLI, GitHub Action, Kubernetes operator and VS Code extension.",
"why": "The Dockerfile your AI wrote almost certainly runs as root on a stale base image carrying dozens of known CVEs. One command in CI catches that plus any secret baked into an image layer.",
"warn": "Default output lists every CVE including ones with no fix available. Use --ignore-unfixed and --severity HIGH,CRITICAL or the report is unreadable.",
"install": "brew install trivy && trivy image myapp:latest"
},
{
"slug": "vitest",
"name": "Vitest",
"url": "https://vitest.dev",
"cat": "review",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Unit test runner",
"price": "$0 forever, MIT open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vite-native test framework with a Jest-compatible API, so most existing suites and matchers port over unchanged. It reuses your existing vite.config, and supports mocking, snapshots, coverage reporting and a browser mode that runs component tests in a real browser. Needs Vite 6+ and Node 20+.",
"why": "Fast enough to run on every agent-generated change, which is the only reliable way to notice that a confident AI refactor quietly broke an unrelated module three directories away.",
"install": "npm install -D vitest"
},
{
"slug": "amazon-ses",
"name": "Amazon SES",
"url": "https://aws.amazon.com/ses/",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cheapest bulk email (AWS)",
"price": "A la carte $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Essentials plan $0.16 per 1,000. Outbound attachment data $0.12/GB, managed dedicated IPs $15/mo. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Amazon's raw email-sending service and the cheapest way to push real volume. You get an API and SMTP endpoint, configuration sets, event publishing to SNS and CloudWatch, dedicated IPs and a Virtual Deliverability Manager. Templates, analytics and any usable dashboard you build yourself.",
"why": "At 100,000 emails a month SES costs about ten dollars where Resend costs ninety. Worth the ergonomics hit once volume is real and you already run on AWS.",
"warn": "New accounts start in a sandbox — you can only mail verified addresses until AWS approves production access, which takes hours to days. The old 62,000-free-from-EC2 tier is gone; only $200 of general Free Tier credit remains.",
"install": "npm i @aws-sdk/client-sesv2"
},
{
"slug": "basin",
"name": "Basin",
"url": "https://usebasin.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Form backend with spam blocking",
"price": "Free: 50 submissions/mo, 1 form, 30-day retention. Starter $12.50/mo (250), Growth $24.17/mo (1,000, unlimited forms), Pro $30.62/mo (5,000), Agency $81.25/mo (25,000), billed yearly.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Form backend in the same slot as Formspree: POST a form to a Basin endpoint and get email notifications, a submission dashboard, file storage and integrations. Emphasises layered spam filtering with honeypot, Akismet and custom rules. Paid plans include a 14-day trial and a money-back guarantee.",
"why": "Cheaper per submission than Formspree at mid volume, with unlimited form endpoints from the $24/mo tier — useful if you run several client sites off one account.",
"warn": "The free plan is one endpoint, 50 submissions and 30-day retention, so older submissions disappear. Advertised prices assume annual billing; monthly costs noticeably more."
},
{
"slug": "courier",
"name": "Courier",
"url": "https://www.courier.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Multi-channel notification API",
"price": "Free Developer: 10,000 sends/mo. Business is usage-based at $0.005 per send beyond that. Enterprise is custom with volume discounts.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Notification API that routes one logical message across email, SMS, push, chat and in-app channels, with automatic fallback when a channel fails or goes unread. Includes a drag-and-drop template designer non-developers can edit, preference management and an inbox component. Connects to your existing providers rather than replacing them.",
"why": "The template studio means a founder or designer edits notification copy without a deploy. Channel fallback — try push, fall back to email if unopened — is a single toggle here.",
"warn": "Pure per-send pricing with no bundled volume tiers gets expensive next to Novu at scale. The free tier is generous, but the designer-friendly workflow is what you are really paying for."
},
{
"slug": "discord-webhooks",
"name": "Discord Webhooks",
"url": "https://docs.discord.com/developers/resources/webhook",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Community alerts via webhook",
"price": "Free. No bot user, OAuth or authentication required; standard Discord API rate limits apply per webhook.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Discord webhooks post messages into a channel without a bot user or authentication. Create one in channel settings or via the API, then POST to /webhooks/{id}/{token} with content, embeds, files, components or polls. You can override the display username and avatar per message.",
"why": "The cheapest notification channel for indie projects that already run a Discord — deploy notices, changelog posts, error alerts. Copy a URL out of channel settings and you are shipping.",
"warn": "The URL is a credential — anyone holding it can post as your webhook, so keep it server-side. Rate limits are per webhook and loops get 429s fast; batch into embeds instead of firing one call per item."
},
{
"slug": "fillout",
"name": "Fillout",
"url": "https://www.fillout.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Form builder with rich logic",
"price": "Free: 1,000 responses/mo, unlimited forms and seats. Starter $15/mo (2,000 responses), Pro $40/mo (5,000, removes branding, custom domain), Business $75/mo (unlimited responses).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Form and survey builder with an unusually large free tier — 1,000 responses a month plus unlimited forms and unlimited seats. Supports multi-page forms, conditional logic, payments, file uploads, scheduling, login-gated forms and embedding, with native two-way sync to Airtable, Notion and databases.",
"why": "Best free response allowance of the hosted builders, so a waitlist or application form can run for months at zero cost. The Airtable and Notion write-back saves real glue code.",
"warn": "Removing Fillout branding and using a custom domain both require the $40/mo Pro plan, where Tally does it at $24/mo. Listed prices are annual; monthly billing is higher."
},
{
"slug": "formik",
"name": "Formik",
"url": "https://formik.org",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "React form library (legacy)",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. No paid tier.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Long-established React form library using controlled components, exposing useFormik, a render-prop Formik component and Field plus ErrorMessage helpers. Manages values, touched state, errors, Yup validation and the submission lifecycle. Roughly 34k GitHub stars, latest release 2.4.9, with slow maintenance activity.",
"why": "Still the right call when maintaining an existing Formik codebase or when you prefer the explicit controlled-input model. Years of tutorials and Stack Overflow answers exist for every edge case.",
"warn": "Maintenance has been minimal for years and controlled inputs re-render the whole form on every keystroke. For anything new, React Hook Form is the better default.",
"install": "npm i formik yup"
},
{
"slug": "formspree",
"name": "Formspree",
"url": "https://formspree.io",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Form backend for static sites",
"price": "Free: 50 submissions/mo with Formspree branding. Paid plans start at $10/mo, with higher tiers adding thousands of submissions, more forms and team seats.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Backend endpoint for HTML forms on static sites — point the form action at a Formspree URL and submissions arrive by email and in a dashboard. Adds spam filtering (honeypot, reCAPTCHA, Akismet), file uploads, autoresponders, webhooks and integrations with Slack, Google Sheets and Linear.",
"why": "Lets a plain HTML page or a static Next.js export accept contact forms with zero server code. The React package gives you useForm with validation and submission state built in.",
"warn": "50 free submissions vanish fast once bots find your endpoint — enable spam filtering on day one. Notification emails come from Formspree's domain, so they can land in spam until you allowlist them.",
"install": "npm i @formspree/react"
},
{
"slug": "knock",
"name": "Knock",
"url": "https://knock.app",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Notification infrastructure API",
"price": "Free Developer: 10,000 messages/mo plus 500 guide active users. Starter $250/mo for 50,000 messages, $0.005 per message over. Enterprise is custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted notification infrastructure: define a workflow once and Knock fans it out to email, in-app feed, push, SMS and Slack. Handles batching, throttling, digests, per-user preferences, quiet hours and localisation. Ships prebuilt React components for an in-app inbox and a preference centre.",
"why": "The in-app notification feed and preference centre are exactly the parts everyone underestimates. Knock hands you both as drop-in React components instead of three weeks of schema design.",
"warn": "The pricing gap is brutal — $0 to $250/mo with nothing in between. A message counts per user per channel, so one workflow hitting email plus in-app burns two.",
"install": "npm i @knocklabs/node"
},
{
"slug": "loops",
"name": "Loops",
"url": "https://loops.so",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Email for SaaS: marketing + txn",
"price": "Free: 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends/mo with Loops branding. Paid from $49/mo up to 5,000 contacts, $99/mo at 10,000, $199/mo at 25,000, $399/mo at 100,000. Sends unlimited on paid.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Email platform aimed at SaaS products, combining transactional sends, lifecycle sequences and marketing campaigns in one dashboard. Billing is per stored contact, not per send — paid plans include unlimited sending at up to 1,000 emails per second. Includes a visual editor, events API and segmentation.",
"why": "One tool for the welcome email, the onboarding drip and the password reset, so you are not stitching Resend plus Mailchimp together. The UI is clean enough that a non-technical cofounder can edit copy.",
"warn": "Per-contact billing means a big dormant list costs money even if you never email it. The jump from free straight to $49/mo is steep for a pre-revenue project."
},
{
"slug": "mailgun",
"name": "Mailgun",
"url": "https://www.mailgun.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Email API with routing + parsing",
"price": "Free: 100 emails/day, 1 domain. Basic from $15/mo for 10,000 emails, Foundation $35/mo for 50,000, Scale $90/mo for 100,000 with dedicated IP pools. Overages $1.10-$1.80 per 1,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Developer-focused email API, unusually strong on inbound routing, message parsing and email address validation. Provides SMTP relay, a template builder, log retention, deliverability tooling and dedicated IP pools on higher plans. Now sits alongside Mailjet under the Sinch umbrella.",
"why": "Pick it when you need to receive and parse email, not just send it — inbound routes turn replies into webhooks your app can act on. The validation API cleans lists before bounces burn your reputation.",
"warn": "Log retention is short on cheap plans (5 days on Foundation), which makes debugging an old send painful. Free tier is a hard 100/day with a single custom domain."
},
{
"slug": "mailtrap",
"name": "Mailtrap",
"url": "https://mailtrap.io",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Email sandbox + sending API",
"price": "Testing free: 50 test emails/mo, 1 inbox; Basic from $14/mo for 500. Sending free: 4,000 emails/mo capped at 150/day; Basic $15/mo for 10,000 or $20/mo for 50,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two products under one account: an email sandbox that captures outgoing mail from staging so nothing reaches real users, and a production sending API and SMTP relay with deliverability analytics. Sandbox inboxes show HTML preview, spam score, blacklist checks and raw message source.",
"why": "Point your dev SMTP at Mailtrap and stop worrying about a seed script emailing your entire user table. The 4,000/mo production sending free tier is a genuine bonus on top.",
"warn": "Testing and Sending are billed as separate products — a testing plan includes zero production sends. Free sending is capped at 150 emails/day with only 3 days of logs."
},
{
"slug": "novu",
"name": "Novu",
"url": "https://novu.co",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source notification infra",
"price": "Free: 10,000 workflow runs/mo, 3 team members, 2 environments. Pro from $30/mo for 30,000+ runs. Team from $250/mo. Self-hosted community edition is free.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source notification platform with a workflow engine, provider abstraction and a hosted in-app inbox component. A single API call triggers email, SMS, push, chat and in-app steps with digests, delays and per-user preferences. Runs as Novu Cloud or self-hosted via Docker.",
"why": "Same job as Knock but with a real $30/mo tier and an escape hatch to self-hosting if pricing ever moves. Provider-agnostic, so swapping Resend for SES never touches workflow code.",
"warn": "Self-hosting is not one container — you run MongoDB, Redis and several services. Some capabilities remain cloud-only or enterprise-gated despite the open-source label.",
"install": "npm i @novu/api"
},
{
"slug": "onesignal",
"name": "OneSignal",
"url": "https://onesignal.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Push notifications (web + mobile)",
"price": "Free: unlimited mobile push, web push to 10,000 subscribers, 10,000 email sends/mo. Growth from $19/mo plus usage — $0.012 per mobile MAU, $0.004 per web subscriber, email $1.50 per 1,000 after 20,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Push notification platform covering iOS, Android, web push, in-app messages, email and SMS from one dashboard. Handles APNs and FCM credentials, audience segmentation, A/B tests, scheduled sends and journeys. SDKs for React Native, Flutter, Expo, Unity, native platforms and plain JavaScript.",
"why": "Mobile push is genuinely unlimited on the free plan, which nobody else offers. It also spares you the misery of managing APNs certificates and FCM server keys by hand.",
"warn": "Growth billing switches to per monthly-active-user, so cost scales with app installs rather than messages sent. The free plan limits journeys and segments, and web push counts subscribers, not sends.",
"install": "npm i react-onesignal"
},
{
"slug": "plunk",
"name": "Plunk",
"url": "https://www.useplunk.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source email for SaaS",
"price": "Free: 1,000 emails/mo with Plunk branding and unlimited contacts. Paid at $0.001 per email (about $10 per 10,000) with an optional monthly spend cap. Self-hosting is free.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source email platform that wraps Amazon SES with transactional sending, automation workflows, campaign broadcasts and contact tracking. Every feature is available on every plan — nothing is gated. Run it as a managed cloud service or self-host it against your own SES account.",
"why": "The cheapest honest per-email pricing here and no per-contact tax. Good when you want Loops-style automations without a $49/mo floor, or want to own the whole stack.",
"warn": "Small team and a much smaller ecosystem than Resend or Postmark. The free tier stamps Plunk branding on outgoing mail, and self-hosting means you personally own SES warm-up and reputation."
},
{
"slug": "postmark",
"name": "Postmark",
"url": "https://postmarkapp.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Transactional email, top delivery",
"price": "Free: 100 emails/mo forever. Basic $15/mo for 10,000 emails ($1.80 per 1,000 over), Pro $16.50/mo ($1.30 over), Platform $18/mo ($1.20 over).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Transactional-only email provider with a long-standing reputation for inbox placement and fast delivery times. Keeps transactional and broadcast traffic on separate message streams and IP pools so marketing blasts cannot poison your receipts. Offers 45-day message history, event webhooks, inbound parsing and templates.",
"why": "When the email absolutely must land — password resets, receipts, 2FA codes — Postmark is the safe default. Separate message streams keep bulk sends from dragging down critical mail.",
"warn": "The free tier is only 100 emails/mo, so treat it as testing, not production. Postmark actively polices list quality and will suspend accounts that push marketing through a transactional stream."
},
{
"slug": "pusher-beams",
"name": "Pusher Beams",
"url": "https://pusher.com/beams/",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Hosted push notification service",
"price": "Free Sandbox: 1,000 monthly active subscribers. Startup $29/mo for 10,000, Pro $99/mo for 50,000, Business $199/mo for 115,000, Premium $399/mo for 250,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Managed push notification API that fans a single publish call out to both APNs and FCM. Devices subscribe to named interests, or you authenticate per-user for targeted delivery. Part of the Pusher family alongside Channels for realtime websockets, with SDKs for iOS, Android, web and Node.",
"why": "Dead simple interest model: subscribe a device to orders-42 and publish to that interest. Natural pairing if you already run Pusher Channels for realtime updates.",
"warn": "Billing counts monthly active subscribers, so idle installed devices still consume quota. Product development is quieter than OneSignal or Novu — check recent SDK commit activity before committing.",
"install": "npm i @pusher/push-notifications-server"
},
{
"slug": "react-email",
"name": "React Email",
"url": "https://react.email",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "React email template components",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. No paid tier — you pay only whatever sending provider you point it at.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source component library for building HTML emails in React and TypeScript, maintained by Resend. Ships unstyled primitives (Html, Button, Container, Section, Tailwind) plus a local preview server, link linter, spam-score check and client compatibility checker. Renders to HTML or plain text for any provider.",
"why": "Stops you hand-writing nested-table email HTML in 2026. Write JSX, preview it at localhost:3000, then render() to HTML and hand it to Resend, Postmark or SES.",
"warn": "Renders cleanly in Gmail and Apple Mail, but Outlook on Windows still uses the Word rendering engine — preview there before shipping anything with fancy layout.",
"install": "npx create-email@latest"
},
{
"slug": "react-hook-form",
"name": "React Hook Form",
"url": "https://react-hook-form.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "React form state library",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed. No paid tier, no hosted service.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Client-side form library for React built on uncontrolled inputs and refs, so typing in one field does not re-render the entire form. Zero dependencies and a small bundle. Pairs with resolvers for Zod, Yup and Valibot so one validation schema is shared between client and server.",
"why": "The default for any non-trivial React form in 2026 — shadcn/ui form components are built on it. useForm plus a Zod resolver gives typed values and per-field errors in a dozen lines.",
"warn": "Controlled component libraries such as MUI and many date pickers need the Controller wrapper, which trips people up. It manages form state only — you still need a backend or a service like Formspree.",
"install": "npm i react-hook-form @hookform/resolvers zod"
},
{
"slug": "resend",
"name": "Resend",
"url": "https://resend.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Transactional email API",
"price": "Free: 3,000 emails/mo, 100/day, 1 domain. Pro $20/mo for 50,000 emails and 10 domains. Scale $90/mo for 100,000. Overage $0.90 per 1,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Developer-first transactional email API from the team behind React Email. Send via REST, SMTP, or SDKs for Node, Python, Go, Rust and PHP. Handles domain auth (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), event webhooks, inbound receiving, and a broadcast plus audience feature for simple newsletters.",
"why": "The fastest path from npm i resend to a working signup email — one API key, one function call, JSX templates. The free tier covers most side projects outright.",
"warn": "Free plan caps at 100 emails/day and 1 verified domain, and an unverified domain can only send to your own address. Shared IPs mean your deliverability rides on your neighbors until you earn volume.",
"install": "npm i resend"
},
{
"slug": "sendgrid",
"name": "SendGrid",
"url": "https://sendgrid.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Email API at scale (Twilio)",
"price": "Free: 100 emails/day, permanent after a 60-day trial. Essentials from $19.95/mo for 50,000-100,000 emails. Pro $89.95/mo adds dedicated IPs and subusers. Premier is custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Long-running email API and marketing platform, now part of Twilio, delivering over 200 billion messages a month. Covers transactional API, SMTP relay, dynamic templates, event webhooks, subuser management, dedicated IPs and email validation, with SDKs and integrations for essentially every language and CMS.",
"why": "The incumbent that every framework, plugin and tutorial already integrates with. Reach for it when one vendor needs to cover both product email and marketing campaigns at serious volume.",
"warn": "Shared-IP deliverability is inconsistent next to Postmark, and low-tier support is slow. Abrupt account reviews and suspensions are a common complaint — warm a dedicated IP before any large send.",
"install": "npm i @sendgrid/mail"
},
{
"slug": "slack-incoming-webhooks",
"name": "Slack Incoming Webhooks",
"url": "https://docs.slack.dev/messaging/sending-messages-using-incoming-webhooks/",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Team alerts via Slack webhook",
"price": "Free — nothing beyond your existing Slack workspace plan. Practical throughput is about one message per second per webhook.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Incoming webhooks give your app a secret URL that posts JSON messages into one chosen Slack channel. Create a Slack app, enable incoming webhooks, add one to the workspace, then POST to the URL. Supports Block Kit for rich layouts, buttons and formatted attachments.",
"why": "The zero-effort way to put product events — new signup, failed payment, error spike — in front of you and your team. One fetch POST, no SDK, no OAuth flow.",
"warn": "The webhook URL is a bearer secret; leak it in client-side code and anyone can post to your channel. Webhooks cannot edit or delete messages and cannot override their bound channel."
},
{
"slug": "tally",
"name": "Tally",
"url": "https://tally.so",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Notion-style free form builder",
"price": "Free: unlimited forms and submissions under fair use, including payments, uploads, logic and integrations. Pro $24/mo removes branding and adds custom domains. Business $74/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Form builder with a Notion-like typing interface instead of a drag-and-drop grid. The free plan is unusually complete: unlimited forms and submissions, conditional logic, file uploads, signatures, Stripe payments, and integrations with Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make and raw webhooks.",
"why": "The waitlist, the feedback form and the beta signup — all live in five minutes, all free forever. Webhook output means submissions can flow straight into your own backend.",
"warn": "Free forms carry Tally branding and cannot use a custom domain, so they read as third-party on a polished landing page. Unlimited is fair use, not a contractual guarantee."
},
{
"slug": "twilio",
"name": "Twilio",
"url": "https://www.twilio.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "SMS, voice and WhatsApp API",
"price": "Pay as you go: US SMS from $0.0083 per message plus carrier fees of $0.0025-$0.0045. Long-code number $1.15/mo, toll-free $2.15/mo, MMS $0.022 outbound. New accounts get trial credit.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default programmable communications API for SMS, MMS, voice, WhatsApp and RCS. Provides phone number provisioning, two-way messaging webhooks, Verify for one-time passcodes, and Messaging Services with automatic number pooling and compliance handling. Also owns SendGrid and Segment.",
"why": "When you need an SMS one-time code or an alert that reaches a phone, Twilio is three lines and works in almost every country. Verify handles the whole OTP flow including rate limiting and fraud checks.",
"warn": "US A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration is mandatory before sending to US numbers — expect registration fees plus days of carrier review. Carrier surcharges are billed on top of the quoted per-message rate.",
"install": "npm i twilio"
},
{
"slug": "typeform",
"name": "Typeform",
"url": "https://www.typeform.com",
"cat": "comms",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Conversational form builder",
"price": "Free: 100 responses/mo, 1 user. Basic $29/mo (100 responses), Plus $59/mo (1,000), Business $99/mo (10,000). Annual billing saves roughly 15 percent.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "One-question-at-a-time form builder known for polished conversational surveys and high completion rates. Supports logic jumps, hidden fields, calculated scores, video questions, payments and a very large integration catalog. Pricing is driven by monthly response volume rather than number of forms.",
"why": "Reach for it when the form itself is the brand impression — customer research, onboarding quizzes, a waitlist you actually want people to finish.",
"warn": "Response caps are the trap: the $29/mo Basic plan still includes only 100 responses a month, and exceeding it forces a plan upgrade rather than a small overage charge."
},
{
"slug": "amplitude",
"name": "Amplitude",
"url": "https://amplitude.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Product analytics + experimentation",
"price": "Free Starter: 2M events/mo forever, no card required. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free, then usage-based; Growth and Enterprise are sales-quoted.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A behavioural analytics platform covering funnels, retention, journeys, cohorts and experimentation. Its 2M events per month is the largest permanently free allowance among the enterprise-grade analytics tools. Cloud-only with no self-hosted build; EU data residency is available on paid plans.",
"why": "Two million free events per month goes a long way for a pre-revenue product, and the depth of analysis is much closer to Mixpanel than to a simple pageview counter.",
"warn": "Free Starter caps charts, cohorts and lookback windows, and the genuinely differentiating pieces (experimentation, Guides, the CDP) sit behind sales-quoted plans with unpublished pricing.",
"install": "npm i @amplitude/analytics-browser"
},
{
"slug": "fathom-analytics",
"name": "Fathom Analytics",
"url": "https://usefathom.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Privacy-first simple analytics",
"price": "Starter $15/mo for 100K pageviews and 10 sites. Growth $34/mo for 500K, Pro $74/mo for 2M. 30-day trial, annual billing saves 2 months.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A hosted cookieless analytics service with a deliberately small feature set: one dashboard, almost no configuration, and EU isolation for European visitors. It processes no personal data and requires no cookie banner under GDPR. Every plan covers at least ten sites.",
"why": "Buy it once and stop thinking about analytics. The flat per-pageview price plus a generous site allowance suits someone running a handful of small sites or client projects.",
"warn": "No free tier and no self-hosting option at all. The pageview cap is account-wide across every site you track, so one viral post can push the whole account into the next price tier."
},
{
"slug": "google-analytics-4",
"name": "Google Analytics 4",
"url": "https://analytics.google.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Free full-funnel web analytics",
"price": "Free for standard properties at essentially any volume. GA4 360 historically starts around $50,000/yr.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Google's event-based analytics platform, free for standard properties, with audiences, attribution modelling, Search Console linking and a daily BigQuery export capped at 1M events. Standard properties allow 50 event-scoped custom dimensions and 30 key events. Cloud-only, with no self-hosted equivalent.",
"why": "It costs nothing at any traffic level and it is still what advertisers, SEO tools and clients expect to see, so it often ends up running alongside a nicer tool rather than instead of one.",
"warn": "Retention maxes at 14 months (default 2) and explorations sample above 10M events per query. EU traffic needs a consent banner plus Consent Mode v2, and several EU regulators have ruled plain GA deployments unlawful without extra safeguards.",
"install": "npm i @next/third-parties"
},
{
"slug": "microsoft-clarity",
"name": "Microsoft Clarity",
"url": "https://clarity.microsoft.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Free heatmaps + session replay",
"price": "Free forever with no traffic limits and no paid tier.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Microsoft's free behavioural analytics tool offering unlimited session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, rage-click and dead-click detection, and AI summaries of sessions. There are no traffic caps and no paid upgrade path. Cloud-only, with an optional Google Analytics integration.",
"why": "Unlimited free session replay is unmatched at any price. Watching ten real people fumble your onboarding teaches you more in an hour than a month of staring at funnel charts.",
"warn": "It sets the _clck and _clsk cookies, and since 31 October 2025 Clarity requires a valid consent signal for EEA, UK and Swiss visitors, so without a CMP those sessions will not record. Recordings can capture PII unless you mask fields.",
"install": "npm i @microsoft/clarity"
},
{
"slug": "mixpanel",
"name": "Mixpanel",
"url": "https://mixpanel.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Event-based product analytics",
"price": "Free: 1M events/mo plus 10K session replays, unlimited seats. Growth: $0.28 per 1K events above the free 1M, so 5M events lands near $1,120/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A mature product-analytics tool built around funnels, retention curves, cohorts and user flows rather than pageviews. The free plan covers 1M monthly events with unlimited seats and 10K session replays. There is no self-hosted version; EU data residency is an account setting.",
"why": "When the question is 'where in the signup flow do people drop off', Mixpanel's funnel and retention reports are still sharper than anything a privacy-first pageview counter can show you.",
"warn": "The per-event price is a cliff rather than a slope: about $1,120/mo at 5M events and about $2,520/mo at 10M. Instrument sparingly, and check the Startup Program for a free first year if you qualify.",
"install": "npm i mixpanel-browser"
},
{
"slug": "openpanel",
"name": "OpenPanel",
"url": "https://openpanel.dev",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source Mixpanel/Plausible mix",
"price": "Cloud from $2.50/mo for 5K events, $20/mo for 100K, $90/mo for 1M. 30-day trial, no permanent free tier. Self-hosting free with unlimited events.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A young open-source analytics project that merges simple web analytics with product-analytics features like funnels, retention and user profiles. Cloud pricing is a single slider on monthly event volume, with sites, dashboards, charts and team members all unlimited. Self-hosting is free and uncapped.",
"why": "It is the cheapest route to Mixpanel-style event analysis without a Mixpanel bill, and the self-hosted build has no event ceiling at all if you already run a VPS.",
"warn": "No permanently free cloud tier, just a 30-day trial. It is a small project with a far smaller ecosystem, integration list and support surface than PostHog or Plausible.",
"install": "npm i @openpanel/nextjs"
},
{
"slug": "plausible-analytics",
"name": "Plausible Analytics",
"url": "https://plausible.io",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cookieless web analytics",
"price": "Starter $9/mo for 10K pageviews, Growth about $14/mo, Business about $19/mo. 30-day trial, no free plan. Community Edition self-host is free.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A lightweight open-source analytics script under 1KB that reports visitors, sources, pages and goals on one dashboard. It sets no cookies and stores no personal data or persistent identifiers, so EU sites need no consent banner. Community Edition is AGPLv3 and self-hostable.",
"why": "The fastest way to get a clean traffic dashboard on a blog or marketing site without adding a cookie banner or having a conversation with a lawyer.",
"warn": "No permanent free cloud plan, only a 30-day trial. Community Edition ships just twice a year and omits funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API.",
"install": "npm i next-plausible"
},
{
"slug": "posthog",
"name": "PostHog",
"url": "https://posthog.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Product analytics + replay suite",
"price": "Free: 1M events, 5K session replays, 100K exceptions/mo, 1-year retention. Then usage-based from $0.00005/event and $0.005/replay.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An all-in-one suite bundling product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B tests, surveys and error tracking behind one SDK. Each product carries its own monthly free allowance rather than sharing one pool. The MIT-licensed code can be self-hosted, but PostHog officially does not support self-hosted deployments.",
"why": "One npm install gives a solo builder analytics, flags, replay and error tracking at once, and the free allowances are large enough that most side projects never pay anything.",
"warn": "Identified events cost up to 4x more than anonymous ones. Set person_profiles: 'identified_only' or a 5M-event month jumps from roughly $153 to $610. Self-hosted instances get free-tier features only and zero support.",
"install": "npm i posthog-js"
},
{
"slug": "simple-analytics",
"name": "Simple Analytics",
"url": "https://www.simpleanalytics.com",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cookie-free EU-hosted analytics",
"price": "Starter $19/mo billed annually up to 100K pageviews, Business $59/mo up to 1M. Monthly billing is roughly 20% higher. 14-day trial.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A minimal cookie-free analytics service that collects no personal data and keeps everything on servers in the Netherlands and Germany, so data never leaves the EU. No consent banner is needed under GDPR or the ePrivacy Directive. Newer versions add AI-generated insights over the dashboard.",
"why": "For an EU publication or a client with a nervous legal team, Dutch hosting plus a no-personal-data stance is the easiest compliance story to defend in a single sentence.",
"warn": "No permanent free plan and no self-hosting. The pageview allowance is account-wide across all your sites rather than per site, and paying monthly instead of annually costs about 20% more."
},
{
"slug": "umami",
"name": "Umami",
"url": "https://umami.is",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source privacy analytics",
"price": "Free Hobby: 100K events/mo, 3 sites, 6-month retention. Pro $20/mo for 1M events and 20 sites. Business $200/mo for 10M. Self-hosting free.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "An MIT-licensed cookieless analytics app you can run on your own Postgres or MySQL server, or use as a hosted cloud service. It tracks pageviews, referrers, custom events and simple funnels. Because it stores no personal data and sets no cookies, no consent banner is required.",
"why": "The most permissively licensed option on this list. MIT means you can fork it, rebrand it and run it on a $5 VPS forever, and the cloud free tier is genuinely usable.",
"warn": "Self-hosting means you own upgrades, backups and a Postgres table that grows fast with event volume. Cloud Hobby retention is only 6 months and the next step up is a $20/mo jump.",
"install": "docker run -d -p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/umami-software/umami:postgresql-latest"
},
{
"slug": "vercel-web-analytics",
"name": "Vercel Web Analytics",
"url": "https://vercel.com/docs/analytics",
"cat": "data",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Built-in analytics for Vercel apps",
"price": "Hobby free: 50K events/mo, 1-month reporting window. Pro: $0.03 per 1K events, 12-month window. Web Analytics Plus add-on $10/mo per team for 24 months and UTMs.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "First-party pageview and custom-event analytics wired directly into the Vercel dashboard. Visitors are identified by a daily-rotating hash of the incoming request rather than a cookie, so it is cookieless and needs no consent banner. Bot traffic is filtered out by user agent.",
"why": "If the app already lives on Vercel this is a one-component install with no extra vendor, no extra DNS and nothing for ad blockers to recognise; 50K events covers a small site.",
"warn": "On Hobby, collection pauses three days after you hit 50K events and only resumes after seven days or a Pro upgrade. Events pool across every project on the account, and custom events need Pro.",
"install": "npm i @vercel/analytics"
},
{
"slug": "axiom",
"name": "Axiom",
"url": "https://axiom.co",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Log and event data platform",
"price": "Free Personal: 500GB ingest/mo, 25GB storage, 30-day retention, 10 GB-hours query. Axiom Cloud $25/mo platform fee including 1TB ingest, 100GB storage and 100 GB-hours.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A serverless log and event store built on object storage and queried with the APL language, with dashboards, monitors and native OpenTelemetry ingest. The permanently free Personal plan allows 500GB of ingest per month, which is enormous for a solo project. Cloud-only, no self-hosted build.",
"why": "500GB a month free is more log volume than a side project will ever generate, and the Vercel and Cloudflare integrations mean you can ship logs without writing a shipper.",
"warn": "Free retention is fixed at 30 days and query compute is capped at 10 GB-hours per month, so busy dashboards hit that ceiling long before ingest becomes the constraint. No self-hosting option exists.",
"install": "npm i @axiomhq/js"
},
{
"slug": "better-stack",
"name": "Better Stack",
"url": "https://betterstack.com",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Uptime, logs and on-call",
"price": "Free: 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, 3GB logs and 3GB traces at 3-day retention, 30GB metrics. Paid from $25/mo annual for 50 extra monitors or the Nano telemetry bundle.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A combined uptime monitoring, status page, incident management and log platform. The free tier covers ten HTTP or heartbeat monitors, a hosted status page and Slack plus email alerts, along with a small telemetry allowance. Paid bundles raise log, trace and metric volume and extend retention to 30 days.",
"why": "It collapses three separate free tiers, uptime pings, a public status page and cron heartbeats, into one account, and ten free monitors covers a solo builder's whole portfolio.",
"warn": "Free log and trace retention is only three days and free checks run at three-minute intervals. Phone and SMS alerting, 30-second checks and longer retention all require a paid plan."
},
{
"slug": "bugsnag",
"name": "BugSnag (Insight Hub)",
"url": "https://www.bugsnag.com",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Error monitoring + stability scores",
"price": "Free: 7,500 events and 1M spans/mo, 7-day retention, 1 user. Select from about $20/mo covering 50K to 3M events with 60-day retention.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Error monitoring from SmartBear, now sold as Insight Hub, with strong mobile SDK coverage and a stability-score model that tracks the share of crash-free sessions per release. It supports release-health gating for deploy decisions and offers on-premise deployment for enterprise accounts.",
"why": "The crash-free-sessions stability score is a better ship or roll-back signal than a raw error count, and its mobile SDKs are more polished than most web-first competitors.",
"warn": "The 7,500-event monthly free budget is the tightest on this list and a single crash loop eats it in an afternoon. Free retention is only 7 days with one user seat."
},
{
"slug": "checkly",
"name": "Checkly",
"url": "https://www.checklyhq.com",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Playwright synthetic monitoring",
"price": "Free Hobby: 10K API and 1K browser check runs/mo, 7-day raw retention. Starter $24/mo. Team $64/mo ($51.20 annual) with 100K API and 12K browser runs.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Synthetic monitoring defined as code: you write real Playwright scripts and API checks, keep them in the repo beside your app, and Checkly runs them on a schedule from global locations. Failures produce screenshots, traces and alerts. Configuration lives in a TypeScript file managed by the Checkly CLI.",
"why": "It catches the failures a plain uptime ping misses, like checkout still returning 200 while the button no longer works, and if you already write Playwright tests the monitors are nearly free to author.",
"warn": "Browser checks are the ones you actually want and they burn quota far faster than API checks, with only 1K per month free. Free raw result retention is 7 days, and there is no self-hosted option.",
"install": "npm create checkly@latest"
},
{
"slug": "cronitor",
"name": "Cronitor",
"url": "https://cronitor.io",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cron job and uptime monitoring",
"price": "Free Hacker: 5 monitors, 5-minute checks, 1 status page, 1 user. Business $2/mo per monitor plus $5/mo per extra user, 12-month retention. 14-day trial.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Monitoring for the things that fail silently: cron jobs, background workers, queues and scheduled tasks, alongside conventional uptime and API checks. Jobs ping a URL on start and finish, and Cronitor alerts when a run is late, fails or takes too long. Cloud-only.",
"why": "Nothing else here tells you the nightly backup script quietly stopped running three weeks ago, and a one-line curl in the crontab is the entire integration.",
"warn": "The free plan is 5 monitors at 5-minute resolution with email and Slack alerts only. SMS, 30-second checks and PagerDuty or Opsgenie integrations all start at the paid tier.",
"install": "pip install cronitor"
},
{
"slug": "datadog",
"name": "Datadog",
"url": "https://www.datadoghq.com",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Full-stack enterprise observability",
"price": "Free: 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention. Pro $15/host/mo annual ($18 on-demand). Logs $0.10/GB ingested plus $1.70 per 1M indexed events. RUM from $0.15 per 1K sessions.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "The enterprise observability platform: infrastructure metrics, APM, logs, RUM, session replay, synthetics and security in one product with hundreds of integrations. The free tier is capped at five hosts with one-day metric retention, which makes it an evaluation tier rather than a production one. Cloud-only.",
"why": "Rarely the right first tool for a solo builder, but if the day job already runs on Datadog you know the query language and dashboards, which is worth real time.",
"warn": "Bills are famously spiky. Custom metrics cost $5 per 100 beyond the per-host allowance and one high-cardinality tag can create thousands of them. Logs are charged twice, once to ingest at $0.10/GB and again to index at $1.70 per million events."
},
{
"slug": "grafana-cloud",
"name": "Grafana Cloud",
"url": "https://grafana.com/products/cloud/",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Managed Prometheus, Loki and Tempo",
"price": "Free: 10K metric series, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 50GB profiles, 14-day retention, 3 users. Pro $19/mo platform fee plus $6.50 per 1K series and $8 per active user.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope with Grafana dashboards, synthetic monitoring and alerting on top. The free tier is unusually generous on volume at 50GB each of logs and traces per month. The same components are open source, so you can migrate to a fully self-hosted stack later.",
"why": "Fifty free gigabytes of logs plus a credible self-hosted escape hatch means you are never locked in on price, and OpenTelemetry ingest works out of the box.",
"warn": "The free tier caps you at 3 active users and 14-day retention. Metrics bill by active series, so high-cardinality Prometheus labels inflate the bill the same way they do on Datadog.",
"install": "docker run -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana"
},
{
"slug": "highlight-io",
"name": "Highlight.io",
"url": "https://www.highlight.io",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source replay + errors, self-host",
"price": "Self-hosting is free under Apache 2.0. The hosted cloud ended 28 February 2026 and existing users were migrated to LaunchDarkly Observability.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "An open-source full-stack monitoring app combining session replay, error monitoring, logging and OpenTelemetry tracing in one self-hostable Docker stack. LaunchDarkly acquired it and folded the features into LaunchDarkly Observability. The GitHub repo remains public and actively committed to, but the hosted app.highlight.io service has shut down.",
"why": "It is now purely a self-host play: if you want replay plus errors plus traces on your own hardware with no per-event bill, this is one of very few Apache-2.0 options.",
"warn": "Do not plan around the cloud product. It ended on 28 February 2026 and SDK snippets had to be repointed at LaunchDarkly before 1 March 2026. Self-hosting means operating ClickHouse, Kafka and Postgres yourself.",
"install": "git clone https://github.com/highlight/highlight && docker compose up"
},
{
"slug": "logrocket",
"name": "LogRocket",
"url": "https://logrocket.com",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Session replay + frontend logs",
"price": "No advertised free plan as of August 2026. Usage-based on captured sessions, starting around $176/mo for roughly 25K sessions. 14-day trial.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Frontend monitoring that pairs pixel-accurate session replay with console logs, network requests, Redux or state changes and error traces on a single timeline. Billing is per captured session while analytics, log and error events stay unlimited. Effectively cloud-only for anyone below enterprise.",
"why": "When a bug only reproduces for one specific user, replaying their exact session with the network waterfall and console output attached beats any amount of log grepping.",
"warn": "The old 1K-sessions-per-month free tier is gone and current pricing is sales-quoted, so get a number before instrumenting. Replaying logged-in users records PII unless you configure input masking and privacy rules.",
"install": "npm i logrocket"
},
{
"slug": "sentry",
"name": "Sentry",
"url": "https://sentry.io",
"cat": "watch",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Error tracking + tracing",
"price": "Free Developer: 5K errors, 5M spans, 50 replays, 5GB logs/mo, 30-day retention, 1 user. Team $26/mo with 50K errors. Business $80/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The default error-monitoring tool for web and mobile, capturing exceptions with full stack traces, source maps, release tagging and breadcrumbs, plus tracing, logs and session replay. It is licensed under the Functional Source License, which converts to Apache 2.0 after two years, and is self-hostable via Docker Compose.",
"why": "One wizard command wires it into a Next.js app and you stop learning about production breakage from angry users; the source-mapped stack trace usually points straight at the offending line.",
"warn": "5K errors/month sounds generous until one crash loop burns it in an hour, so turn on spike protection and inbound filters early. Self-hosting needs 4 CPUs and 16GB RAM plus 16GB swap, and loses spike protection and the Seer AI features.",
"install": "npx @sentry/wizard@latest -i nextjs"
},
{
"slug": "activepieces",
"name": "Activepieces",
"url": "https://www.activepieces.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "MIT-licensed open-source automation",
"price": "Community edition free under MIT with no cap on runs, users or flows. Cloud Free: daily refreshing credits. Plus $16/mo (up to 5 users), Team $166/mo (25 users). Overage $0.007/credit.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source Zapier alternative under a true MIT licence. One credit per flow run regardless of how many steps it contains, which makes long workflows cheap. Ships Flows, Agents, Chat, Tables and MCP servers on every tier, and pieces are TypeScript so you can write your own.",
"why": "The pick when licence purity matters: MIT lets you embed and resell it, which n8n's fair-code licence forbids. Per-run rather than per-step billing rewards big workflows, and self-hosting has no artificial run cap.",
"warn": "The open-source build excludes Agents, Chat, Projects, API access, SSO and audit logs, so 'MIT licensed' does not mean feature parity with cloud. AI model steps cost 2 to 20 credits unless you bring your own key.",
"install": "docker run -p 8080:80 activepieces/activepieces"
},
{
"slug": "bullmq",
"name": "BullMQ",
"url": "https://bullmq.io",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Redis-backed Node.js job queue",
"price": "Core library free and MIT. BullMQ Pro $139/mo or $1,395/year per deployment for orgs under 100 employees; Enterprise and Embedded custom. You supply and pay for your own Redis.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The de facto Node.js queue library, MIT-licensed and built on Redis. Priorities, delayed and repeatable jobs, rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff, parent-child flows and sandboxed processors. Bull Board or Taskforce.sh add a dashboard. Pro adds groups, batches and observables.",
"why": "Zero vendor lock-in and zero per-execution billing: if you already run Redis, background jobs cost nothing but the code you write. The default pick for a long-lived Node service on a VPS, Fly.io or Railway.",
"warn": "You own the operations: Redis persistence, memory limits, stalled-job recovery and worker deployment are all yours. It does not suit serverless, because workers must be long-running processes.",
"install": "npm install bullmq"
},
{
"slug": "cloudflare-queues-cron-triggers",
"name": "Cloudflare Queues + Cron Triggers",
"url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/queues/",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Edge queues plus scheduled Workers",
"price": "Workers Free: 100,000 requests/day, 10,000 queue operations/day, Cron Triggers included. Workers Paid $5/mo: 10M requests and 1M queue operations included, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.40 per million operations.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Cron Triggers run a Worker on a schedule; Queues provides producer and consumer message passing with batching, retries, configurable delays and dead-letter queues. Consumers get up to 15 minutes of CPU time per invocation. Cloudflare Workflows layers multi-step durable execution on top.",
"why": "If your app already runs on Workers this is the cheapest background stack available: $5/mo covers a million queue operations and unlimited cron schedules, with no cold starts and no separate vendor.",
"warn": "An operation is counted per 64KB written, read or deleted, so one message typically costs three operations. Workers still cap wall-clock and memory, so heavy or long compute belongs somewhere else.",
"install": "npx wrangler queues create my-queue"
},
{
"slug": "defer",
"name": "Defer",
"url": "https://defer.run",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Discontinued, redirects away",
"price": "Discontinued, no pricing. The domain now 302-redirects to an unrelated product at digger.tools.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "A zero-infrastructure background jobs platform for Node and TypeScript, pitched as a hosted replacement for BullMQ with cron, retries and a dashboard. It is no longer operating: defer.run redirects elsewhere and the SDKs are unmaintained.",
"why": "Included so you skip it. Everything Defer was for is now better served by Trigger.dev, Inngest or Hatchet, all of which have live free tiers and self-hosting.",
"warn": "Dead product. Do not start anything new on it, and treat any blog post or tutorial recommending Defer as out of date."
},
{
"slug": "gumloop",
"name": "Gumloop",
"url": "https://www.gumloop.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI-agent-first visual automation",
"price": "No free plan, 14-day trial only. Pro $37/mo for 20,000 credits, unlimited seats, unlimited agents, 1 hosted MCP server. Plus an 8% orchestration fee. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Visual builder designed around AI steps rather than bolted onto a classic automation tool. 300+ connectors, 35+ models including Claude, Gemini and GPT, bring-your-own API keys. Hosts and proxies MCP servers, traces MCP client and server tool calls, and agents self-tune from past runs.",
"why": "Best fit when the workflow is mostly LLM work such as scraping, extraction, enrichment and summarising, and the API calls are incidental. Unlimited seats on the $37 plan makes it cheap to hand to a whole team.",
"warn": "An 8% orchestration fee sits on top of model costs even when you bring your own keys, and the old free plan is gone: you now start on a 14-day trial."
},
{
"slug": "hatchet",
"name": "Hatchet",
"url": "https://hatchet.run",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Postgres-backed task orchestration",
"price": "Self-hosting free and open source. Cloud developer tier: first 100,000 task runs/mo free, then $10 per 1M runs. Team $500/mo (10 users, 500 RPS, 3-day retention); Scale $1,000/mo; Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A distributed task queue and orchestrator built on Postgres rather than Redis or Kafka, so durability comes from a database you already run. DAG workflows, durable tasks, fairness and concurrency controls, rate limiting, and Python, TypeScript and Go SDKs.",
"why": "Best of both worlds if you like Temporal's guarantees but not its operational weight: one Postgres, one engine, a real dashboard, and 100,000 free runs a month before anything bills.",
"warn": "Cloud pricing has a cliff: the usage-based developer tier jumps straight to $500/mo for the Team plan that carries retention and throughput guarantees. Self-hosting means running and upgrading the engine yourself.",
"install": "docker compose up -d # hatchet-dev/hatchet quickstart"
},
{
"slug": "inngest",
"name": "Inngest",
"url": "https://www.inngest.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Event-driven durable functions",
"price": "Hobby free: 50,000 executions/mo, 5 concurrent steps, 500K events ingested, 3 users. Pro from $99/mo for 1M executions and 100 concurrent steps, pay-as-you-go to 20M. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Durable step functions triggered by events, with flow control, fan-out, concurrency keys, throttling and debouncing built in rather than bolted on. Each step.run checkpoints so retries resume where they failed. AgentKit adds an agent framework, and self-hosting is supported.",
"why": "The concurrency and rate-limit primitives are the real reason to pick it: per-user concurrency keys and throttling are miserable to build on a raw queue. Deploys as an HTTP endpoint inside your existing app, so there is no separate worker to operate.",
"warn": "The server and CLI are under the SSPL with delayed Apache-2.0 release, not standard open source; only the SDKs are Apache-2.0. The jump from the free tier to Pro is $99/mo with nothing in between.",
"install": "npx inngest-cli@latest dev"
},
{
"slug": "lindy",
"name": "Lindy",
"url": "https://www.lindy.ai",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Conversational AI agent builder",
"price": "No standing free plan; 7-day trial via Slack invite. Plus $29.99/user/mo for 3,000 credits, Pro $99.99 for 15,000, Max $199.99 for 35,000. Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "You describe an assistant in plain English and Lindy builds the automation: email triage, meeting notes, CRM updates, outbound phone calls. MCP support on every tier connects arbitrary tools. Credits scale with task depth, from 2-250 for everyday tasks up to 2,500 for big builds.",
"why": "The least technical entry point on this list: no canvas, no nodes, just a conversation. Reach for it when the job is an ongoing assistant watching an inbox or calendar rather than a deterministic pipeline.",
"warn": "Billing is per seat and per credit, and credit costs are hard to predict: one 'big build' can consume 2,500 credits, most of a Plus seat's monthly 3,000 allowance."
},
{
"slug": "make",
"name": "Make",
"url": "https://www.make.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Visual canvas automation, cheap ops",
"price": "Free: 1,000 credits/mo, 2 active scenarios, 15-minute minimum interval. Core $12/mo for 10,000 credits; Pro $21/mo; Teams $38/mo; Enterprise custom.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Drag-and-drop scenario builder on a spatial canvas with routers, iterators, aggregators and error handlers, genuinely better at branching and data reshaping than Zapier. 3,000+ apps. Maia builds automations from natural language and Make AI Agents is in beta across all plans.",
"why": "Cheapest per operation of the hosted no-code tools, and the canvas makes complex branching legible. Good when the workflow has real logic (loops, arrays, retries) and you do not want to run any infrastructure.",
"warn": "Every module action counts as a credit, so a 12-module scenario burns 12 credits per run. The free tier's 15-minute minimum polling interval rules out anything near-realtime."
},
{
"slug": "n8n",
"name": "n8n",
"url": "https://n8n.io",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Self-hostable visual automation",
"price": "Self-hosted Community edition free. Cloud Starter EUR 20/mo for 2,500 executions; Pro EUR 50/mo for 10,000; Business EUR 667/mo for 40,000.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Node-based visual workflow builder with 400+ integrations plus a full JavaScript and Python code node. Ships an AI Agent node, LangChain-style chains, an MCP Client Tool node, and an MCP Server Trigger that turns any workflow into an MCP server. Self-host free on your own box.",
"why": "The escape hatch when Zapier gets expensive or too rigid: you are billed per workflow execution rather than per step, you can drop into code whenever the visual nodes run out, and self-hosting costs nothing.",
"warn": "Licence is the Sustainable Use License (fair-code), not OSI open source: internal business use is fine, but reselling n8n as a service needs a commercial licence. Cloud bills per execution, and one execution can contain hundreds of nodes.",
"install": "docker run -it --rm -p 5678:5678 -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n"
},
{
"slug": "pg-boss",
"name": "pg-boss",
"url": "https://github.com/timgit/pg-boss",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Postgres job queue for Node",
"price": "Free and MIT-licensed, no hosted tier and no per-job billing. Your only cost is whatever your Postgres instance already costs.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A Node.js job queue that uses Postgres SKIP LOCKED for concurrency instead of Redis. Provides cron-scheduled jobs, deferred and throttled jobs, retries with exponential backoff, job dependencies via completion callbacks, and automatic archiving and pruning of finished jobs.",
"why": "The zero-new-infrastructure option: if you have Postgres you already have a queue, and jobs can commit in the same transaction as your data, which kills the dual-write bug where the row saves but the job vanishes.",
"warn": "Needs a long-running Node process, so it does not work on serverless. Throughput ceiling is your database: fine for thousands of jobs a minute, not hundreds of thousands.",
"install": "npm install pg-boss"
},
{
"slug": "pipedream",
"name": "Pipedream",
"url": "https://pipedream.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Code-in-the-browser workflow glue",
"price": "Free: daily credit allowance, limited active workflows, 300-second max run, 30 min/day test runtime. Paid plans from roughly $29/mo. One credit = 30 seconds of compute at 256MB.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hosted workflows where each step is either a prebuilt component or arbitrary Node, Python, Go or Bash. 2,700+ apps with managed OAuth. Pipedream Connect embeds that auth and tool-calling into your own product or agent, and serves hosted MCP servers per app.",
"why": "The middle ground: visual trigger-and-step structure with real code in every step, so you never hit a no-code ceiling. Managed OAuth alone saves days when your agent needs live tokens for a dozen SaaS APIs.",
"warn": "Credits meter compute time, not runs, so a slow third-party API call costs as much as heavy computation. Raising memory above 256MB multiplies credit burn proportionally. Connect is billed separately on API usage plus end users."
},
{
"slug": "relay-app",
"name": "Relay.app",
"url": "https://www.relay.app",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Shut down August 2026",
"price": "Discontinued. Was Professional $9/mo for 10K steps and Team $59/mo for 25K steps, billed annually.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Human-in-the-loop automation tool known for clean UX and approval steps mid-workflow. The service is winding down: new signups stopped 16 July 2026, free accounts lost access after 15 August 2026, and paying customers keep access only through 14 September 2026.",
"why": "Listed so you do not waste an evening evaluating it. If you already have Relay workflows, export them as JSON and CSV now; n8n or Make are the closest rebuild targets for its approval-step pattern.",
"warn": "Fully sunsetting. Export everything before 14 September 2026, after which workflows stop running. Any tutorial recommending Relay.app is now stale."
},
{
"slug": "restate",
"name": "Restate",
"url": "https://restate.dev",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Lightweight durable execution engine",
"price": "Self-hosting free under Business Source License 1.1 (converts to Apache 2.0 after 4 years). Cloud free tier: 50,000 durable actions/mo, no credit card. Paid usage-based plans from $75/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A single Rust binary that gives ordinary functions durable execution, exactly-once handlers, durable promises, virtual objects with per-key serialised state, and a built-in workflow API. SDKs for TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Go, Python and Rust. Far lighter to operate than Temporal.",
"why": "One binary, no Cassandra and no Elasticsearch, so you get durability guarantees running on a laptop. Virtual objects are the standout feature for agent state: per-entity keyed concurrency without hand-rolling locks.",
"warn": "BSL 1.1 is not open source: you may not offer Restate as a managed service without a commercial licence for four years. Smaller ecosystem than Temporal, so there are fewer answers when you get stuck.",
"install": "npx @restatedev/restate-server"
},
{
"slug": "supabase-cron-queues",
"name": "Supabase Cron + Queues",
"url": "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/cron",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Postgres-native cron and queues",
"price": "Included on all plans including Free (500MB database, 2 active projects, pauses after 1 week idle). Pro from $25/mo. No separate per-job or per-message charge.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Supabase Cron wraps pg_cron for schedules ranging from every second to once a year, and Supabase Queues wraps pgmq for durable message queues with guaranteed delivery. Both are managed from the dashboard, callable from plain SQL, and consumable from Edge Functions.",
"why": "If your app state already lives in Supabase, this is the fewest moving parts possible: schedule a job and enqueue work with SQL, no extra vendor, no extra invoice, no extra dashboard to check.",
"warn": "Supabase advises no more than 8 concurrent jobs and under 10 minutes per job: this is a database extension, not a compute platform. Free-tier projects pause after a week of inactivity, which silently stops your crons."
},
{
"slug": "temporal",
"name": "Temporal",
"url": "https://temporal.io",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Durable execution, MIT self-host",
"price": "Self-hosted server free under MIT. Cloud gives $1,000 in starting credits; Essentials from $100/mo for 1M actions, Business from $500/mo for 2.5M, Enterprise 10M. Extra actions $50 per million.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The heavyweight durable-execution engine: workflows are ordinary code in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET, PHP or Ruby, and the server replays event history to survive process crashes, deploys and multi-day sleeps. MIT-licensed server, mature SDKs, used for money movement and long-running sagas.",
"why": "Reach for it when correctness is non-negotiable: payments, provisioning, anything where a dropped job becomes a support ticket. A workflow can sleep for 30 days and wake up with its local variables intact.",
"warn": "Steep learning curve: determinism constraints, workflow versioning and worker fleets are real engineering work. Self-hosting means running Cassandra or Postgres plus Elasticsearch, and Cloud starts at $100/mo once the credits run out.",
"install": "brew install temporal && temporal server start-dev"
},
{
"slug": "trigger-dev",
"name": "Trigger.dev",
"url": "https://trigger.dev",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Open-source TypeScript background jobs",
"price": "Free: $5 monthly compute credits, 20 concurrent runs, 1-day log retention. Hobby $10/mo, Pro $50/mo (200+ concurrent). Compute $0.0000169 to $0.00068 per second plus $0.25 per 10,000 runs.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Write background tasks as plain TypeScript functions inside your repo; the SDK handles queueing, retries, checkpointing and long-running execution with no timeouts. Apache-2.0 licensed and self-hostable. Realtime hooks stream run status straight into a React UI.",
"why": "The obvious choice for a Next.js app that needs a job to run for ten minutes when Vercel functions cap out. npx trigger.dev@latest dev gives local development against production infrastructure with almost no config.",
"warn": "Billing is per second of compute, so a task idling on a slow API still bills unless you use the wait primitives. The free tier keeps logs for only one day, which makes debugging yesterday's failure impossible.",
"install": "npx trigger.dev@latest init"
},
{
"slug": "upstash-qstash",
"name": "Upstash QStash",
"url": "https://upstash.com/docs/qstash",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Serverless HTTP message queue",
"price": "Free: 1,000 messages/day (about 30,000/mo), 1MB max message, 50GB bandwidth, 3-day DLQ and log retention. Pay-as-you-go $1 per 100K messages. Fixed 1M/day $180/mo; Fixed 10M/day $420/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A hosted queue and scheduler that speaks pure HTTP: you POST a job and QStash calls your endpoint later, with retries, delays up to a year, cron schedules, dead-letter queues and request signature verification. No connections, no workers, no Redis to operate.",
"why": "The simplest way to add background work to a serverless app: one fetch to enqueue and one route handler to do the work. Works from Vercel, Cloudflare, Deno or anything that can receive an HTTP POST.",
"warn": "Each delivery attempt counts as a message, so a flaky endpoint with retries multiplies your bill. The free tier keeps DLQ and logs for only 3 days and caps message size at 1MB."
},
{
"slug": "vercel-cron",
"name": "Vercel Cron",
"url": "https://vercel.com/docs/cron-jobs",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Cron for Vercel functions",
"price": "Included on all plans. Hobby free: 100 cron jobs per project, once-per-day maximum, plus or minus 59 minutes of drift. Pro (from $20/user/mo): 100 jobs, per-minute schedules and precision. Function usage billed separately.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Declare schedules in vercel.json and Vercel invokes the matching route on time. No extra service, queue or dashboard: the cron entry just calls a normal function, so it inherits that function's runtime, timeout and billing.",
"why": "Lowest-friction scheduler if you already deploy to Vercel: three lines of JSON plus a route handler. Good for nightly digests, cache warming, cleanup jobs and kicking off a real queue.",
"warn": "Hobby is capped at once per day with up to 59 minutes of drift, and more frequent expressions fail at deploy time. Crons only fire; they do not queue, fan out or retry, so real work still needs a job runner."
},
{
"slug": "windmill",
"name": "Windmill",
"url": "https://www.windmill.dev",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Code-first self-hosted job platform",
"price": "Community edition free with unlimited executions, 3 workspaces, max 50 users, 10 GiB storage. Enterprise from $120/mo base plus $20/developer and $10/operator seat, plus compute units.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Open-source developer platform that turns TypeScript, Python, Go, Bash or SQL scripts into APIs, cron jobs, flows and auto-generated UIs. A Rust engine runs jobs fast with distributed dependency caching. Flows are a visual DAG layered on top of real, Git-versioned code files.",
"why": "The closest thing to self-hosted Retool plus Airflow plus cron in one deployment. Reach for it when you want scripts as the unit of work rather than nodes, and refuse to pay per execution forever.",
"warn": "Dual AGPLv3 and Apache-2.0 source, but the published Docker images bundle proprietary enterprise code, so check which build you are running before redistributing. Enterprise pricing is seat plus compute-unit based and adds up quickly.",
"install": "docker compose up -d # windmill-labs/windmill compose file"
},
{
"slug": "zapier",
"name": "Zapier",
"url": "https://zapier.com",
"cat": "auto",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Widest-integration no-code automation",
"price": "Free: 100 tasks/mo. Professional from $19.99/mo (750 tasks, scales to 100K). Team from $69/mo. Agents free tier 400 activities/mo; Agents Pro $33.33/mo for 1,500.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The original consumer-grade automation service, with 9,000+ app integrations, far more than anyone else. Multi-step Zaps, filters, paths and webhooks on paid plans. Zapier MCP exposes 30,000+ actions to Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and Zapier Agents adds a conversational agent builder.",
"why": "If an obscure SaaS tool has an integration anywhere, it is on Zapier. Reach for it when integration breadth matters more than price, or when you want an MCP endpoint over 30,000 actions without writing a server.",
"warn": "Billing is per task, meaning every successful step in every Zap. The 100-task free tier evaporates fast, and each Zapier MCP tool call burns two tasks from that same bucket."
},
{
"slug": "ahrefs",
"name": "Ahrefs",
"url": "https://ahrefs.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Backlink and keyword research suite",
"price": "Ahrefs Webmaster Tools free for domains you verify. Starter $29/mo. Lite $129/mo, Standard $249/mo, Advanced $449/mo, Enterprise $1,499/mo (annual). Extra seats $40-$100/mo. Brand Radar AI from $199/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Ahrefs runs its own web crawler and exposes it through Site Explorer for backlinks, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Content Explorer. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives free Site Audit and Site Explorer data for domains you verify in Search Console.",
"why": "The backlink index is the reason to pay: Site Explorer shows exactly who links to competing publications, and Content Explorer surfaces the articles pulling those links so you can pitch the same editors.",
"warn": "Everything is credit-metered — reports, rows, exports — and overages bill automatically. Seats add $40-$100/mo, and Lite keeps only 6 months of historical data.",
"install": "Verify your domain in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free crawl data."
},
{
"slug": "answerthepublic",
"name": "AnswerThePublic",
"url": "https://answerthepublic.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Search question visualiser",
"price": "Free: about 3 searches per day on a free account. Paid plans start near $9/mo billed annually for Individual, with Pro and Expert tiers around $99/mo and $199/mo; monthly billing costs more. Owned by NP Digital.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "AnswerThePublic mines autocomplete suggestions from Google and Bing and arranges them into wheels of questions, prepositions and comparisons around a seed keyword. The output is the who, what, why and how phrasing people actually type, exportable to CSV.",
"why": "It turns a vague topic into a hundred real reader questions in a minute — exactly the raw material for a FAQ block, an explainer series, or the H2s inside a long feature.",
"warn": "This is autocomplete scraping, not volume data: no search counts unless you attach a paid keyword tool. Free searches are capped at a few per day per account."
},
{
"slug": "beehiiv",
"name": "beehiiv",
"url": "https://www.beehiiv.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Newsletter platform with growth tooling",
"price": "Launch free to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends, custom domain and website. Scale $43/mo ($517/yr). Max $96/mo ($1,151/yr). Enterprise custom past 100,000 subscribers. beehiiv takes 0% of paid subscription revenue, Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "beehiiv, built by former Morning Brew staff, combines email sends, a hosted website and archive, paid subscriptions, referral programmes, a recommendation network and an ad marketplace. The free Launch tier runs to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends and a custom domain.",
"why": "The recommendation network and boosts turn other newsletters into a distribution channel, which is the hardest part of starting one. The ad network plus 0% revenue share means monetising without adding another vendor.",
"warn": "Boosts and the ad network need Scale ($43/mo) or above, and subscriber tiers step the price up. Your list exports cleanly but the hosted site, archive and referral programme do not."
},
{
"slug": "bitly",
"name": "Bitly",
"url": "https://bitly.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Short links and QR codes",
"price": "Free: 5 links/month, 2 QR codes/month, unlimited clicks, no analytics. Core $10/mo billed annually ($120/yr, 100 links/mo, 30-day history). Growth $35/mo ($348/yr, custom domain included). Premium $300/mo ($2,388/yr).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Bitly is the incumbent link shortener: short links, QR codes, click analytics broken down by location and referrer, a UTM builder and a link-in-bio page. Custom branded domains arrive on Growth, and click history retention runs from 30 days to a year by tier.",
"why": "Recognisable and durable — the redirect will still resolve years later, which matters for a link printed in a content site or embedded in an archived issue.",
"warn": "The free plan is now 5 links a month with no analytics, effectively a demo. Branded domains need Growth at $35/mo and click history expires after 30 days on Core."
},
{
"slug": "buttondown",
"name": "Buttondown",
"url": "https://buttondown.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Minimal markdown newsletter tool",
"price": "Free for your first 100 subscribers. Beyond that pricing scales by active subscriber count, plus feature bundles: +$9/mo (segmentation, paid subscriptions, analytics, RSS-to-email, sponsorships), +$29/mo (custom-domain archives, multiple newsletters, automations), +$79/mo (whitelabel, teams).",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Buttondown is a small, independently run newsletter tool centred on markdown writing, a clean API and privacy-respecting defaults. It bills on active subscribers rather than total contacts, with optional feature bundles layered on top of the base price.",
"why": "The API and markdown-first workflow let you publish from a repo or CMS instead of a web editor — the closest thing to newsletters as code. No forced tracking pixels on readers.",
"warn": "Core features are unbundled: segmentation, paid subscriptions and RSS-to-email need the +$9/mo tier, automations the +$29/mo tier. It is a very small company, so expect fewer integrations than beehiiv or Kit.",
"install": "Import an existing list by CSV or through the API."
},
{
"slug": "dub",
"name": "Dub",
"url": "https://dub.co",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Link attribution and short links",
"price": "No free plan as of 2026. Business $90/mo: 10k new links/mo, 250k tracked events, 100 custom domains, 10 users. Advanced $300/mo: 50k links, 1M events, 20 users. Enterprise custom. 14-day trial, about 10% off annual.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Dub is a link management and attribution platform: branded short links on your own domain, QR codes, geo and device targeting, A/B testing, and click-to-conversion tracking with SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP and Ruby. It also runs affiliate and partner payout programmes.",
"why": "Branded short links on your own domain keep newsletter click data first-party and portable between email tools. Conversion tracking ties a link in an issue to an actual subscription rather than a click.",
"warn": "The old generous free tier is gone — entry is now $90/mo, which prices out small publications. If you only need short links, a self-hosted shortener or your email tool's own tracking is the cheaper answer."
},
{
"slug": "google-search-console",
"name": "Google Search Console",
"url": "https://search.google.com/search-console",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Google first-party search data",
"price": "Free forever, no paid tier and no seat limits. Performance data covers 16 months. API, Looker Studio connector and BigQuery bulk export all included at no cost.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Search Console reports how a site performs in Google: queries, impressions, clicks and average position, plus index coverage, sitemap submission, Core Web Vitals and manual action notices. Data spans 16 months and can be exported by API or streamed into BigQuery.",
"why": "The only source of real query data — every other tool estimates. It shows which articles Google already ranks and which queries you nearly rank for, which is where the cheapest traffic lives.",
"warn": "The Performance UI caps at 1,000 rows per query and samples heavily; use the API or BigQuery export for full data. Its numbers will never match your analytics tool.",
"install": "Verify via DNS TXT record or your host's one-click integration."
},
{
"slug": "hacker-news-and-reddit",
"name": "Hacker News and Reddit",
"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Organic community launch channels",
"price": "Free. Hacker News sells no placement at all. Reddit sells ads separately, but organic posts in any subreddit cost nothing.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Hacker News ranks links by upvotes with a steep time decay, and Show HN is the convention for launching your own work. Reddit distributes through topical subreddits, each governed by its own self-promotion rules and volunteer moderators.",
"why": "A front-page HN post moves thousands of technically-minded readers in an afternoon and reliably produces backlinks. One well-matched subreddit can outperform every paid channel for a niche publication.",
"warn": "Both punish marketing tone: HN buries promotional titles and Reddit mods ban accounts with no comment history. Spikes are single-day events, and an HN front page can take down under-provisioned hosting.",
"install": "Post as Show HN with a plain descriptive title and no adjectives."
},
{
"slug": "kit",
"name": "Kit",
"url": "https://kit.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Creator-focused email marketing",
"price": "Newsletter plan free to 10,000 subscribers: unlimited broadcasts, unlimited forms and landing pages, 1 basic automation. At 1,000 subscribers Creator is $33/mo ($390/yr) and Pro is $66/mo ($790/yr); price scales with subscriber count.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is email marketing built for writers: broadcasts, visual automations, tag-based segmentation, forms, landing pages and digital product sales. The free Newsletter plan reaches 10,000 subscribers, and a creator network drives recommendations between publications.",
"why": "Tag-and-segment beats list-based tools when one publication runs several beats — readers self-select topics and receive only what they asked for. Ten thousand free subscribers is the most generous free tier in serious email.",
"warn": "Sequences, advanced automations and most integrations are paid; free stops at one basic automation. Pricing steps up by subscriber count, so a viral month raises the bill automatically."
},
{
"slug": "lighthouse-pagespeed-insights",
"name": "Lighthouse / PageSpeed Insights",
"url": "https://pagespeed.web.dev",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Core Web Vitals and speed audit",
"price": "Free. Web UI is unlimited; the PageSpeed Insights API allows 25,000 requests/day at no cost. Lighthouse is open source under Apache 2.0 and runs in Chrome DevTools, the CLI or CI.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "PageSpeed Insights runs Google's open-source Lighthouse audit against a URL and scores performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO alongside lab Core Web Vitals. It also surfaces real-user CrUX field data — LCP, INP and CLS from actual Chrome visitors — when a URL has enough traffic.",
"why": "Core Web Vitals are both a ranking input and a real bounce factor on image-heavy article pages. Lighthouse CI can fail a build when a page regresses, so performance stops rotting silently.",
"warn": "Lab scores swing between runs and reward synthetic conditions — trust the CrUX field data over the headline score. A new site has no field data at all for months.",
"install": "npx lighthouse https://example.com --view"
},
{
"slug": "mailchimp",
"name": "Mailchimp",
"url": "https://mailchimp.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Mainstream email marketing platform",
"price": "Free: 250 contacts, 500 sends/month capped at 250/day. At 500 contacts, Essentials $13/mo, Standard $20/mo and Premium $350/mo for the first 12 months, then standard rates; all scale with contact count.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Mailchimp, now part of Intuit, is the incumbent email marketing platform: campaign builder, template library, automations, audience segmentation, landing pages and reporting, with the widest integration ecosystem of any email service provider. The free plan caps at 250 contacts.",
"why": "Every CMS, plugin and store already integrates with it, so it is the path of least resistance when a newsletter must connect to systems you do not control.",
"warn": "The free tier shrank hard — 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends is barely a pilot. Intro pricing resets after 12 months, and billing counts contacts including unsubscribed ones on some plans."
},
{
"slug": "moz-pro",
"name": "Moz Pro",
"url": "https://moz.com/products/pro",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "SEO suite behind Domain Authority",
"price": "Free tools (Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer, MozBar, Domain Analysis) with small monthly query caps. Moz Pro runs about $49/mo Starter, $99/mo Standard, $179/mo Medium and $299/mo Large, around 20% off annual, after a 30-day free trial.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Moz Pro covers rank tracking, site crawls, link research and keyword research, and originated Domain Authority and Page Authority — the 0-100 scores the industry still quotes in outreach emails. Its free tools allow limited monthly queries against the Moz link index.",
"why": "Domain Authority is the number sponsors, PR contacts and link partners recognise, so it is worth having on hand even if you audit elsewhere. MozBar overlays metrics directly on the search results page.",
"warn": "The Moz link index is smaller than Ahrefs's, and DA is Moz's own metric, not a Google signal — do not optimise for it. Free tool quotas are a handful of queries per month."
},
{
"slug": "otterly-ai",
"name": "Otterly.ai",
"url": "https://otterly.ai",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Affordable AI search monitoring",
"price": "Lite $29/mo ($25/mo annual) for 15 prompts. Standard $189/mo ($160 annual) for 100 prompts. Premium $489/mo ($422 annual) for 400 prompts. Enterprise from about $1,000/mo. Free trial, unlimited team members on all tiers.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Otterly.ai monitors brand mentions and link citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with daily tracking, 50+ country coverage, prompt research and a GEO audit. Standard and above add API access, MCP access and agent analytics.",
"why": "At $29/mo for 15 prompts it is the cheapest honest entry to AI-answer tracking — enough to watch your masthead brand plus a handful of core topics without an enterprise contract.",
"warn": "Fifteen prompts vanishes fast once you track topics as well as brand, and the next step to 100 prompts is $189/mo. API and MCP access require Standard or above."
},
{
"slug": "peec-ai",
"name": "Peec AI",
"url": "https://peec.ai",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI search visibility tracker",
"price": "No public price list: Starter (50 prompts, 1 project), Pro (150 prompts), Advanced (350 prompts, multi-country, Looker Studio) and Enterprise are quoted after signup — reported entry is roughly EUR 90/mo. Unlimited users on every tier, 15% off annual, free trial.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Peec AI is a European AI-visibility analytics tool tracking brand visibility, average position and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, refreshed daily. Plans are sized by tracked prompts and projects rather than seats, and every tier includes unlimited team members.",
"why": "Unlimited seats at the entry tier is rare in this category — a whole editorial team can watch one AI-visibility dashboard without per-seat billing. Daily refresh catches shifts right after a model update.",
"warn": "Prices are not published, so budgeting means a sales conversation or a signup. Engine coverage is three models, narrower than Profound or Otterly.ai."
},
{
"slug": "profound",
"name": "Profound",
"url": "https://www.tryprofound.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "AI answer-engine visibility platform",
"price": "Starter $99/mo billed yearly: ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 100 agent credits/mo. Growth $399/mo billed yearly: 3 answer engines, 100 prompts, 400 credits. Enterprise custom, up to 9 engines with SSO, SAML and SOC 2.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Profound tracks how a brand appears inside AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, reporting share of voice, sentiment, the citation sources models draw on, and the prompts that trigger you. It also analyses AI crawler and agent traffic hitting your own site.",
"why": "When research traffic never reaches your site, this shows whether the AI answer cited you or a competitor. Citation data reveals which third-party pages the models trust, so you know where to get mentioned.",
"warn": "Starter covers ChatGPT alone with 50 prompts; multi-engine coverage means $399/mo billed yearly. Tracked prompts are the real meter and fill up fast for a broad publication."
},
{
"slug": "schema-markup-validator",
"name": "Schema Markup Validator",
"url": "https://validator.schema.org",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Structured data validators",
"price": "Free. No account and no quota on the web UIs. Google's Rich Results Test and the Search Console enhancement reports are equally free.",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The Schema Markup Validator checks JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa against schema.org vocabulary, while Google's Rich Results Test checks whether that markup qualifies for a specific rich result. Search Console then reports structured data errors across every indexed page.",
"why": "For a content site, NewsArticle, Person and FAQPage markup drives rich results and hands AI crawlers clean facts to lift. Validating before publish stops a broken template shipping across the whole archive.",
"warn": "Valid markup does not guarantee rich results — Google decides. The generic validator happily accepts schema Google ignores, so run both tools.",
"install": "Paste your rendered JSON-LD into validator.schema.org."
},
{
"slug": "screaming-frog-seo-spider",
"name": "Screaming Frog SEO Spider",
"url": "https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Desktop website crawler",
"price": "Free: 500 URLs per crawl with nearly all features. Licence £199/year per user (roughly $250). Volume discounts: £189 each at 5-9 licences, £179 at 10-19, £169 at 20+.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that fetches every URL on a site and reports broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions, hreflang errors and orphan pages. It renders JavaScript and pulls in Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed Insights data.",
"why": "Fastest way to find what is technically broken before blaming the algorithm. Free mode crawls 500 URLs, which covers a young project entirely, and the licence just removes the cap.",
"warn": "It runs on your machine and eats RAM — large crawls need database storage mode and patience. No scheduling, history or dashboards unless you build them yourself.",
"install": "Download the desktop app; free mode needs no account."
},
{
"slug": "se-ranking",
"name": "SE Ranking",
"url": "https://seranking.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Mid-market SEO platform",
"price": "14-day free trial, no card. Core $129/mo ($103.20/mo annual): 2,000 daily tracked keywords, 1 seat. Growth $279/mo ($223.20 annual): 5,000 keywords, 3 seats. Enterprise custom. Agency Pack $69/mo adds the AI search tracker.",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "SE Ranking bundles daily rank tracking, competitor research, site audit, backlink monitoring, content tooling and white-label reporting. Tracking refreshes daily rather than weekly on paid plans, and an AI Search Tracker monitors brand appearances inside AI answers.",
"why": "Daily rank tracking across thousands of keywords for around a hundred dollars a month, with reports clean enough to hand to a publisher or a sponsor without reformatting.",
"warn": "Only one manager seat on Core, and AI search tracking arrives through the $69/mo Agency Pack rather than the base plan."
},
{
"slug": "semrush",
"name": "Semrush",
"url": "https://www.semrush.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "All-in-one SEO and marketing suite",
"price": "Free: 1 demo project, 10 reports/day. SEO $139/mo ($117.33/mo annual). Starter (SEO + AI Search) $199/mo, Pro+ $299/mo, Advanced $549/mo. Extra users from $45/mo.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Semrush bundles keyword research, rank tracking, site audit, backlink analysis, competitor traffic estimates and content tooling. Plans now split into an SEO-only tier and SEO + AI Search tiers that add tracking of brand mentions inside ChatGPT and other answer engines.",
"why": "Keyword Magic Tool plus Topic Research is the fastest route from a vague topic to a publishable content calendar. Position Tracking and Site Audit in one dashboard is what most editorial teams actually need.",
"warn": "AI search visibility starts at the $199/mo Starter plan — the $139/mo SEO plan omits it. Users bill per seat from $45/mo and many reports carry daily caps."
},
{
"slug": "sitebulb",
"name": "Sitebulb",
"url": "https://sitebulb.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Technical SEO auditor with ranked hints",
"price": "14-day free trial, no card. Desktop Lite (10k URLs per audit) and Pro (500k URLs per audit) are single-user and priced per currency on site — roughly £14 and £30/mo, 15% off yearly. Extra desktop users £7/mo. Cloud from £95/mo (about $120).",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Sitebulb is a technical SEO crawler that turns raw crawl data into prioritised hints — each issue carries a severity score and an explanation of why it matters. It ships as a desktop app and a cloud version, auditing structured data, accessibility, Core Web Vitals and internal linking.",
"why": "Where Screaming Frog hands you a spreadsheet, Sitebulb hands you a ranked to-do list with the reasoning attached — useful when the person fixing the site is not an SEO specialist.",
"warn": "Desktop licences are per user and crawls run locally. Cloud starts at £95/mo and enterprise plans run past £20k/year, a steep jump from desktop."
},
{
"slug": "substack",
"name": "Substack",
"url": "https://substack.com",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Newsletter network, revenue share",
"price": "Free to publish — no monthly platform fee at any list size. Substack takes 10% of paid subscription revenue, plus Stripe processing of roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Substack hosts newsletters and their web archive, handles paid subscriptions and payouts, and runs a social layer — Notes, recommendations, an app feed and video — that redistributes posts to other Substack readers. There is no monthly fee; it takes a cut of paid subscriptions only.",
"why": "The network is the product: recommendations from established writers are a subscriber source no self-hosted newsletter can replicate. Zero fixed cost lets a content site run free for years and pay only when readers do.",
"warn": "That 10% is permanent and compounds — at $10k/mo in subscriptions you pay $1,000/mo where beehiiv or Ghost charges a flat fee. Design, SEO control and layout are limited, and the archive lives on their domain unless you map your own."
},
{
"slug": "ubersuggest",
"name": "Ubersuggest",
"url": "https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/",
"cat": "seo",
"group": "ship",
"tagline": "Budget keyword and rank tracker",
"price": "Free: roughly 3 searches per day on a free account. Individual $29/mo, Business $59/mo, Enterprise $99/mo, with a 7-day trial. One-time lifetime licences are offered periodically.",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Ubersuggest, run by NP Digital, covers keyword ideas, search volume, content ideas, rank tracking, backlink data and basic site audits. It is positioned as the cheap alternative to Ahrefs and Semrush, with monthly plans plus recurring one-time lifetime offers.",
"why": "For a solo publisher, $29/mo buys enough keyword research and rank tracking to plan a content calendar, and the lifetime option removes the recurring bill entirely.",
"warn": "Index depth and freshness lag Ahrefs and Semrush badly, especially on backlinks. The free tier is a few searches a day, and lifetime plans carry their own usage caps."
},
{
"slug": "karpathy-skills",
"name": "karpathy-skills",
"url": "https://github.com/multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "CLAUDE.md behavioral ruleset",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "A ~65-line CLAUDE.md built around four LLM coding failure modes Karpathy identified. Adds no tools — it changes how the agent decides: surface assumptions before coding, refuse speculative abstraction, keep diffs scoped, define a verifiable stopping condition. ~203k stars.",
"why": "Cheapest quality win on the entire list. One file, no install, works alongside everything else. 'Surgical Changes' alone stops the drive-by refactors that break a working layout while fixing something unrelated.",
"install": "curl -o CLAUDE.md .../main/CLAUDE.md"
},
{
"slug": "superpowers",
"name": "superpowers",
"url": "https://github.com/obra/superpowers",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Claude Code plugin — dev methodology",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "An agentic skills framework by Jesse Vincent that imposes a full development workflow: a Socratic brainstorming phase before any code is written, enforced RED-GREEN-REFACTOR TDD, subagent-driven parallel execution, systematic debugging and worktree management. ~272k stars.",
"why": "The brainstorming phase is the part that matters for a build — it forces the requirements conversation (what is an issue? how does the archive paginate?) before Claude starts generating components you will throw away.",
"install": "/plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official"
},
{
"slug": "ecc",
"name": "ECC (Everything Claude Code)",
"url": "https://github.com/affaan-m/ECC",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Full agent harness + marketplace",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The largest harness here by volume: 68 agents, 285 skills, 94 slash commands, a security scanner for prompts and configs, session memory, and a browser-based Plan Canvas. Coordinates a fixed lifecycle: plan → test → implement → review → verify → remember → improve. ~241k stars.",
"why": "Powerful but maximal — installing this and superpowers and gstack at once means three competing methodologies. Pick one harness.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/affaan-m/ECC"
},
{
"slug": "gstack",
"name": "gstack",
"url": "https://github.com/garrytan/gstack",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "23-role agent org + sprint pipeline",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Garry Tan's skill bundle that turns Claude Code into a simulated engineering org — 23 agent roles (CEO, designer, engineer, QA lead) as slash commands, structured as Think → Plan → Build → Review → Test → Ship → Reflect. Includes a bundled browser for real testing and persistent cross-session knowledge. ~128k stars.",
"why": "Heavier than you probably need for a content site site, but the design review and QA gates are the useful part — work passes through review before shipping instead of being one-shot generated.",
"install": "git clone ... ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup"
},
{
"slug": "learn-claude-code",
"name": "learn-claude-code",
"url": "https://github.com/shareAI-lab/learn-claude-code",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Course — build an agent from scratch",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "17 progressive lessons with runnable Python building a nano Claude-Code-like agent: agent loop, tools, permissions, context management, skill loading, task system, worktrees, MCP. Its thesis is that agency comes from model training, so your job is building tools and permissions around the model.",
"why": "Background reading, not a build tool. Useful if you want to understand why the memory and cost tools below work the way they do.",
"warn": "Ambiguous link. Two repos share this name — shareAI-lab/learn-claude-code (~66k stars, the code course) and delbaoliveira/learn-claude-code (~183 stars, an 11-lesson in-terminal course). The star profile of the surrounding links suggests the former; open the original link to be sure."
},
{
"slug": "ponytail",
"name": "ponytail",
"url": "https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail",
"cat": "plan",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Write-less-code ruleset",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A ruleset premised on 'the best code is code you never wrote'. Applies a seven-rung decision ladder forcing the agent to exhaust stdlib, existing project code and dependencies before writing anything new. Repo claims ~54% less code, 20% cheaper, 27% faster. ~104k stars.",
"why": "Directly relevant to a Lovable project, where the failure mode is Claude re-implementing a component that already exists three folders over. Also ships review, audit and debt-tracking commands.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert/ponytail"
},
{
"slug": "anthropics-skills",
"name": "anthropics/skills",
"url": "https://github.com/anthropics/skills",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Official Agent Skills repo + spec",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Anthropic's canonical skills repository: reference implementations, the formal Agent Skills specification, and an authoring template. Source of the document skills (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx) that ship in Claude products. ~170k stars.",
"why": "Read the spec, then write one skill of your own: a Resource Project house-style skill capturing editorial voice, headline conventions, image credit format and caption rules. That is how brand voice stops being re-explained every session.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills"
},
{
"slug": "taste-skill",
"name": "taste-skill",
"url": "https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "13 frontend design skills",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Portable design instructions with three tunable 1–10 dials — DESIGN_VARIANCE, MOTION_INTENSITY, VISUAL_DENSITY — plus named aesthetic variants shipped as separate skills. ~77k stars.",
"why": "The minimalist-ui (Notion/Linear editorial) and high-end-visual-design variants are the relevant ones. Also includes redesign-existing-projects, which audits and upgrades an existing codebase rather than assuming greenfield — useful if the site already exists.",
"install": "npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill"
},
{
"slug": "ui-ux-pro-max",
"name": "ui-ux-pro-max",
"url": "https://github.com/nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Design-intelligence skill",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "A searchable design knowledge base the agent consults before writing UI: 79 UI styles, 192 industry-specific reasoning rules, 192 color palettes, 74 Google Font pairings, 22 tech-stack guidelines and 119 UX/accessibility guidelines. ~117k stars.",
"why": "Font pairing and palette selection are exactly where generic AI output announces itself. The industry rules map project requirements to a tailored design system rather than defaulting to the same three shadcn looks.",
"install": "npm i -g ui-ux-pro-max-cli && uipro init --ai claude"
},
{
"slug": "awesome-claude-skills",
"name": "awesome-claude-skills",
"url": "https://github.com/ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Curated skill directory + collection",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A directory across 11 categories that is also a working collection — 30+ skill folders live in the repo, including connect-apps, file-organizer and mcp-builder. Covers Claude Code, Claude.ai and the API. ~73k stars.",
"why": "Browse the Document Processing and Business/Marketing categories for skills adjacent to editorial workflow — batch processing submissions, formatting exports."
},
{
"slug": "claude-plugins-official",
"name": "claude-plugins-official",
"url": "https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Official plugin marketplace",
"price": "Free · Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The curated registry behind Claude Code's built-in plugin discovery, split into Anthropic-built plugins and reviewed third-party ones. Each entry can bundle MCP config, slash commands, subagents and skills.",
"why": "The safe default source. Anthropic reviews external listings but explicitly does not guarantee third-party code or MCP behavior — read what you install.",
"install": "/plugin install {name}@claude-plugins-official"
},
{
"slug": "wshobson-agents",
"name": "wshobson/agents",
"url": "https://github.com/wshobson/agents",
"cat": "skills",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Multi-harness plugin marketplace",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "91 plugins, 202 agents, 180 skills and 105 commands from a single markdown source compiled into harness-specific artifacts, so the same plugin runs natively on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and Copilot. Includes a tiered model strategy per task.",
"why": "Install by domain rather than wholesale — pull the plugins matching what you are actually building and skip the rest.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add wshobson/agents"
},
{
"slug": "claude-mem",
"name": "claude-mem",
"url": "https://github.com/thedotmack/claude-mem",
"cat": "memory",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Automatic session memory + MCP",
"price": "Free · Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Captures what the agent does via hooks, compresses events into semantic summaries, stores them in SQLite with FTS5 plus a Chroma vector DB, and injects the relevant slice into future sessions. Progressive disclosure: search returns a ~50–100 token index before you fetch detail. ~91k stars.",
"why": "Runs with no intervention after install, which is why it beats a manual notes file. Content wrapped in <private> tags is excluded from storage.",
"install": "npx claude-mem install"
},
{
"slug": "planning-with-files",
"name": "planning-with-files",
"url": "https://github.com/OthmanAdi/planning-with-files",
"cat": "memory",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "File-based planning skill + hooks",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Makes the agent externalize its plan to disk (task_plan.md, findings.md, progress.md) so it survives /clear, compaction and crashes. Five lifecycle hooks re-read and re-inject the plan on session start and before major decisions. A Stop hook blocks termination until every phase is done.",
"why": "The fix for the single most annoying failure mode: Claude forgetting the design decisions you made two sessions ago and re-inventing the component. Deterministic completion gate means half-finished refactors do not get abandoned.",
"install": "npx skills add OthmanAdi/planning-with-files -g"
},
{
"slug": "repomix",
"name": "repomix",
"url": "https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix",
"cat": "memory",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Repo-to-single-file packer + MCP",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Packs an entire repository into one AI-consumable file (XML, Markdown, JSON or text) with directory tree, contents and per-file token counts. Tree-sitter compression strips implementation bodies to signatures for ~70% token reduction. Honors .gitignore; Secretlint scans for credentials before output.",
"why": "A one-shot context packer, not persistent memory — the right tool when you want to hand the whole project codebase to a model in a single message, or audit what is actually in there. The secret scan before output is a genuinely good safety default.",
"install": "npx repomix@latest"
},
{
"slug": "codegraph",
"name": "codegraph",
"url": "https://github.com/colbymchenry/codegraph",
"cat": "memory",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Code knowledge graph (MCP server)",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Parses the repo with a Rust/tree-sitter kernel into a local SQLite graph of symbols, call edges and imports, served to agents over MCP — so the agent asks one structured question instead of grepping dozens of files. 100% local. Benchmarked at 88% fewer tool calls and 62% fewer tokens. ~67k stars.",
"why": "Pays off once the codebase is big enough that Claude spends its first ten tool calls just finding things. Auto-syncs via OS file watchers, so no manual reindexing.",
"install": "npm i -g @colbymchenry/codegraph"
},
{
"slug": "graphify",
"name": "graphify",
"url": "https://github.com/Graphify-Labs/graphify",
"cat": "memory",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Mixed-corpus knowledge graph",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Turns a mixed corpus — code, docs, SQL schemas, configs, PDFs, images — into a queryable knowledge graph. Code extraction is deterministic and local; only prose and images route through Claude. Every edge is labeled EXTRACTED, INFERRED or AMBIGUOUS. Outputs graph.json, an interactive HTML visualization, a report and an Obsidian vault. ~107k stars.",
"why": "The mixed-corpus part is your project angle — it will ingest editorial PDFs, style guides and back-issue docs alongside the code, not just source files. The --wiki export produces agent-navigable markdown grouped by concept.",
"install": "uv tool install graphifyy"
},
{
"slug": "firecrawl",
"name": "Firecrawl",
"url": "https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Web extraction API + MCP server",
"price": "Free 1,000 credits · $16–$599/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": true,
"what": "Turns arbitrary sites into LLM-ready markdown or schema-constrained JSON, handling JS rendering, crawling and cleanup. Scrape, crawl, map, batch, search-with-full-content, browser interaction and autonomous agent modes. Parses web-hosted PDFs and DOCX. Self-hostable (AGPL core). ~128k stars.",
"why": "The archive-migration tool. Point it at an existing site and get every back-issue article as clean structured JSON ready for Supabase. Also the competitive-research tool — crawl other publications and extract their section taxonomy. Free tier is 1,000 credits; a typical archive fits inside $16/mo.",
"install": "npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all"
},
{
"slug": "playwright-mcp",
"name": "playwright-mcp",
"url": "https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Browser automation MCP (Microsoft)",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Drives a real browser and exposes the page to the model as a structured accessibility snapshot rather than a screenshot — so the agent targets elements deterministically without vision or pixel guessing. Adds network mocking, storage state, tracing, video and PDF generation. ~36k stars.",
"why": "This is how Claude checks its own work. Have it load the article page, verify the layout at three breakpoints, confirm images lazy-load, and catch the broken nav before you do. The accessibility-tree approach doubles as a free a11y audit on a publication site.",
"install": "claude mcp add playwright npx @playwright/mcp@latest"
},
{
"slug": "awesome-mcp-servers",
"name": "awesome-mcp-servers",
"url": "https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "MCP directory (~50 categories)",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The de-facto MCP discovery index — servers across ~50 domains, annotated with markers for official status, language, local vs cloud, and OS support. Companion lists for clients and devtools. ~91k stars.",
"why": "Where you go when you need a connector that does not exist yet. Relevant categories worth browsing: Knowledge & Memory, Search & Data Extraction, File Systems, Databases, Communication."
},
{
"slug": "cc-switch",
"name": "cc-switch",
"url": "https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Desktop config manager for AI CLIs",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A desktop app replacing hand-edited config files across seven AI coding tools. Centralizes MCP server and Skills configuration with bidirectional sync, plus usage tracking, cost analytics, session history and cloud sync. Writes through SQLite so a crash cannot corrupt config. ~125k stars.",
"why": "Useful once you have installed a dozen MCP servers and skills across projects and lost track of which config owns what.",
"warn": "Carries affiliate-style provider promotions — worth knowing when reading its provider recommendations.",
"install": "brew install --cask cc-switch"
},
{
"slug": "claude-code-router",
"name": "claude-code-router",
"url": "https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Local model routing proxy",
"price": "Free · MIT",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A local gateway between coding agents and model providers: route requests by rule, add ordered fallback models, credential pools and retries, and get an observability dashboard with per-request latency, token and cost accounting. ~37k stars.",
"why": "The cost-control lever if you want cheap models on mechanical work and Opus only on architecture. The observability dashboard is arguably more valuable than the routing.",
"install": "npm i -g @musistudio/claude-code-router && ccr ui"
},
{
"slug": "github-mcp",
"name": "github-mcp",
"url": "https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Official GitHub MCP server",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "First-party MCP server connecting agents to the GitHub API across ~23 toolsets you can enable individually: repo and git operations, issues and PRs, Actions run inspection, code scanning and Dependabot alerts, Discussions and Projects. ~32k stars.",
"why": "Relevant the moment you sync the Lovable project to GitHub — which you must do anyway to use Pencil or Superdesign. Toolsets are individually switchable, so keep the context footprint small.",
"install": "claude mcp add (remote OAuth or local Docker)"
},
{
"slug": "multica",
"name": "multica",
"url": "https://github.com/multica-ai/multica",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Multi-agent orchestration platform",
"price": "Free self-host · cloud trial",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Assign issues to coding agents the way you assign them to teammates — agents pick up work, run in their own runtime, report progress and submit for review, with timestamped tool logs and per-run token accounting. Brokers 20 agent CLIs behind one interface. ~46k stars.",
"why": "Overkill for one site, sensible if you are running your build alongside PRO EDU, Endgame Society and other client projects at once. Squads let you mix human and agent assignees.",
"warn": "Custom 'Multica License' — Apache 2.0 plus restrictions on hosted resale and commercial embedding.",
"install": "brew install multica-ai/tap/multica"
},
{
"slug": "vibe-kanban",
"name": "vibe-kanban",
"url": "https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban",
"cat": "agtools",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Kanban board for coding agents",
"price": "Free · Apache-2.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A local web app giving each task its own workspace (branch, terminal, dev server), letting you queue and assign work to agents from a board and review diffs inline before opening a PR.",
"why": "Skip it. Listed for completeness only.",
"warn": "Sunsetting. BloopAI announced shutdown in April 2026 — cloud features are dead and subscriptions were refunded. The local version still works and the repo moves to community maintenance, but it has been untouched since April 2026."
},
{
"slug": "claude-code-best-practices",
"name": "Claude Code best practices",
"url": "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Official Anthropic docs",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Anthropic's first-party guide, built around one stated premise: the context window is the most important resource to manage, and performance degrades as it fills. Covers /clear, /compact, /rewind, /btw, a CLAUDE.md keep-or-cut table, subagents for investigation, and the explore→plan→code→commit workflow.",
"why": "Read this before installing any of the compression tools. Most of the savings people chase with plugins come free from context discipline — and it names the failure patterns (kitchen-sink session, infinite exploration, over-specified CLAUDE.md) so you can recognize your own."
},
{
"slug": "claude-hud",
"name": "claude-hud",
"url": "https://github.com/jarrodwatts/claude-hud",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Statusline telemetry plugin",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": true,
"what": "Renders live session telemetry in the Claude Code status line: context-window fill, real token counts (not estimates), cost, active tools/skills/MCP servers, running subagents, todo progress and subscription rate-limit headroom. ~26k stars.",
"why": "Install this first. It is the measurement layer — you cannot control spend you cannot see, and context fill is the variable that quietly degrades output quality on long sessions.",
"warn": "Requires Claude Code 1.0.80+ and Node 18+. Forks exist — pin the jarrodwatts original.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add jarrodwatts/claude-hud"
},
{
"slug": "caveman",
"name": "caveman",
"url": "https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Token-compression skill + tooling",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A skill that makes the agent respond in terse fragment style to cut output tokens, at four compression levels. Companion tools attack the input side: caveman-compress rewrites CLAUDE.md and memory files (~46% fewer input tokens), caveman-shrink wraps any MCP server with compressed tool descriptions. ~69k stars.",
"why": "The caveman-compress and caveman-shrink utilities are the parts worth having — they save tokens without making the agent's prose unreadable.",
"warn": "Headline claim is 75% output reduction; the repo's own 10-task benchmark reports 65% average with a 22–87% range. And terse fragment output is genuinely harder to review.",
"install": "curl -fsSL .../install.sh | bash"
},
{
"slug": "claude-code-quickstart",
"name": "Claude Code quickstart",
"url": "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Official getting-started docs",
"price": "Free",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Install-to-first-change walkthrough: install paths, /login for Pro/Max/Team, first session, first edit, git, essential commands, permission-mode cycling with Shift+Tab, /clear, /resume, and claude -p for one-off queries.",
"why": "The 'New to Claude? Start here' link most likely points here. Adjacent free first-party options: Anthropic Academy (anthropic.com/learn) and the 'Claude Code in Action' course.",
"warn": "The original label is descriptive rather than a slug, so this is a best-guess destination among three plausible Anthropic pages."
},
{
"slug": "codex-plugin-cc",
"name": "codex-plugin-cc",
"url": "https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "OpenAI Codex plugin for Claude Code",
"price": "Free (needs Codex CLI)",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "OpenAI's official plugin letting you call the Codex CLI from inside a Claude Code session for cross-model review. Commands: /codex:review, /codex:adversarial-review, /codex:rescue, /codex:transfer. Runs as a background job and returns findings into your session. ~32k stars.",
"why": "The adversarial review is the interesting one — a second model challenging design decisions rather than just finding bugs. Token benefit is indirect: the heavy investigation happens in Codex's context, not yours.",
"install": "/plugin marketplace add openai/codex-plugin-cc"
},
{
"slug": "system-prompts-ai",
"name": "system-prompts-ai",
"url": "https://github.com/x1xhlol/system-prompts-and-models-of-ai-tools",
"cat": "cost",
"group": "claude",
"tagline": "Leaked system prompt corpus",
"price": "Free · GPL-3.0",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Full system prompts, tool definitions and model configs extracted from 30+ commercial AI coding products — Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Copilot, v0, Windsurf, Replit, Manus. ~141k stars.",
"why": "A study reference for how production teams write terse tool descriptions and budget context at scale. Directly useful if you are writing your own skills or agent prompts for the content pipeline.",
"warn": "Ambiguous link. A second credible candidate exists (asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks, ~63k stars). Both are prompt corpora; open the original link to confirm which was meant."
},
{
"slug": "alternativeto",
"name": "AlternativeTo",
"url": "https://alternativeto.net",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free crowdsourced alternatives finder",
"price": "Free · no paid tier · funded by partnerships and optional donations",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Crowdsourced database of 150,000+ apps and services ranked by more than two million user opinions, filterable by platform, licence, self-hosted and open source. Community rankings sit alongside staff-curated Crew Picks, and anyone can submit apps or reviews.",
"why": "The honest counterweight to paid AI directories: when a tool doubles its price or kills its free tier, this is where you find the cheaper or self-hostable replacement in one search.",
"warn": "Rankings reward long-standing vote counts, so established tools outrank newer ones and coverage of 2026-era agent tooling lags specialist directories."
},
{
"slug": "anthropic-academy",
"name": "Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action)",
"url": "https://www.anthropic.com/learn",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free vendor courses + certificates",
"price": "Free · every course and certificate, no credit card · account required",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Anthropic's own course catalog, hosted on Skilljar. Tracks cover Claude 101, Claude Code 101, Cowork, Agent Skills, MCP and the Claude API. Claude Code in Action is the deepest: plan mode, compaction, the rewind menu, hooks, permission modes, headless runs, GitHub Actions review and packaging plugins.",
"why": "Free, current, and written by the people who ship the tool, so it is right about defaults that blog posts get wrong. Best first stop once you are past single prompts and want longer unsupervised runs.",
"warn": "Vendor training: it teaches the Anthropic way and never compares Claude Code with Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI. Courses change as the product ships, so bookmarked lessons go stale.",
"install": "https://anthropic.skilljar.com"
},
{
"slug": "awesome-claude-code",
"name": "awesome-claude-code",
"url": "https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free curated GitHub list",
"price": "Free and open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Curated index of Claude Code skills, hooks, slash commands, agent orchestrators, plugins and CLAUDE.md examples, at 45,000+ stars and over 1,100 commits. Sibling lists cover neighbouring tools: awesome-cursorrules (40,000+ stars) collects project rule files for Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Claude Code.",
"why": "Copy a proven CLAUDE.md or rules file instead of writing one from scratch. It is the highest-leverage free hour you can spend on improving the quality of everything your agent produces.",
"warn": "Curation quality varies and entries go stale as Claude Code ships features, so some commands target older config formats. Read anything before pasting it into a repo that has your credentials.",
"install": "git clone https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code"
},
{
"slug": "better-t-stack",
"name": "Better-T-Stack",
"url": "https://better-t-stack.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free stack-builder CLI",
"price": "Free and open source (MIT)",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "CLI plus browser stack builder that scaffolds end-to-end typesafe TypeScript projects from parts you choose: Hono or Elysia, tRPC or oRPC, Drizzle or Prisma, Turso, Neon or Convex, Better Auth, Turborepo monorepos and web or native frontends. 5,600+ stars, MIT, actively developed.",
"why": "The maintained answer to create-t3-app's drift: same typesafe philosophy, current dependencies, and you pick the pieces rather than accept one opinion. Preview a stack in the web builder before generating anything.",
"warn": "Essentially one maintainer (Aman Varshney) with sponsor backing. The large option matrix means less common combinations are far less battle-tested than the defaults.",
"install": "bun create better-t-stack@latest"
},
{
"slug": "create-t3-app",
"name": "create-t3-app (T3 Stack)",
"url": "https://create.t3.gg",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free typesafe Next.js scaffold",
"price": "Free and open source",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "CLI that scaffolds a typesafe full-stack Next.js app from a short set of prompts: TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma or Drizzle, Tailwind and NextAuth. At 29,000+ GitHub stars it defines the T3 Stack conventions that a large share of tutorials and Stack Overflow answers assume.",
"why": "A clean, opinionated starting repo that agents know well because it is heavily represented in training data. Prompts about tRPC routers and Prisma schemas land more reliably here than in a bespoke folder structure.",
"warn": "Latest release is 7.40.0 from November 2025, still targeting Next.js 15 and NextAuth v5, so roughly nine months without a release as of August 2026. Fine to start from, but you upgrade dependencies yourself.",
"install": "npm create t3-app@latest"
},
{
"slug": "divjoy",
"name": "Divjoy",
"url": "https://divjoy.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Abandoned React codebase generator",
"price": "Paid one-time licence, price shown only at checkout · effectively unmaintained",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Visual React codebase generator that assembles a SaaS app with auth, Stripe subscriptions, a dashboard, user settings and a landing page from picked options across React, Next.js, Tailwind or Material UI, and Firebase or Supabase. The site reports 17,000+ codebases generated and still sells licences.",
"why": "Historically the friendliest generator for non-developers, but there is no reason to pay for it now. Any current coding agent pointed at the free Vercel SaaS starter produces fresher, more idiomatic code.",
"warn": "The public changelog's last entry is October 2023 and the footer still reads 2024, so roughly three years without updates. Expect deprecated Supabase and auth APIs and pre-App-Router patterns."
},
{
"slug": "egghead-io",
"name": "egghead.io",
"url": "https://egghead.io",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Short-lesson video subscription",
"price": "Yearly Pro membership around $250 list, frequently discounted in sales · large free lesson library · 30-day refund",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "A library of short, tightly edited screencasts and courses on React, TypeScript, Node and tooling, pitched at working developers rather than beginners. Many individual lessons and older courses are free to watch; Pro membership unlocks the premium catalog, enhanced transcripts, captions and downloads.",
"why": "Good when you need one specific concept in ten minutes rather than a 40-hour course. Check the free lessons first, because a lot of what a solo builder needs sits outside the paywall.",
"warn": "Catalog age varies wildly and highly-ranked courses can be years old, targeting React or Node versions your agent no longer generates. Membership price is only shown at checkout."
},
{
"slug": "epic-react",
"name": "Epic React (Kent C. Dodds)",
"url": "https://www.epicreact.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid React workshop bundle",
"price": "One-time purchase, roughly $600 for Epic React Pro · regional PPP pricing · 30-day refund",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Rebuilt for React 19: seven workshops and 243 interactive exercises covering fundamentals, hooks, advanced APIs, Suspense, patterns, performance and Server Components, all in TypeScript. Includes lifetime access with progress tracking, 16 expert interviews, Discord channels and completion certificates.",
"why": "The most rigorous React course going, and genuinely current on Server Components. But it is built for engineers who will write React for years; most vibe coders get more from the free Next.js Learn course.",
"warn": "Price loads dynamically at checkout and moves with sales and regional pricing. The exercise-heavy format takes real weeks of work, so it is wasted money if you plan to skim it."
},
{
"slug": "every-layout",
"name": "Every Layout",
"url": "https://every-layout.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid CSS layout primitives",
"price": "$69 one-time · lifetime updates · rudiments plus the Stack, Sidebar and Switcher chapters free to read",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell's method for algorithmic, media-query-free CSS layout. Twelve composable primitives (Stack, Box, Center, Cluster, Sidebar, Switcher, Cover, Grid, Frame, Reel, Imposter, Icon) each ship with an explanation and a generator, plus an EPUB and offline access.",
"why": "Turns responsive layout into named parts you can request by name, as in 'use a Sidebar with a 30 percent threshold', which agents follow far more reliably than a description of pixel behaviour.",
"warn": "Vanilla-CSS-first and custom-element based, so mapping the primitives onto Tailwind takes extra work. Read the three free chapters before paying."
},
{
"slug": "freecodecamp",
"name": "freeCodeCamp",
"url": "https://www.freecodecamp.org",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free nonprofit coding curriculum",
"price": "Free · 100 percent, including projects and certifications · donation-funded 501(c)(3)",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "A 501(c)(3) public charity running an interactive browser curriculum plus a huge YouTube channel, publication and forum, reaching over a million people a day. Certifications each take roughly 300 hours and span responsive web design, JavaScript algorithms, front-end libraries, Python and data analysis. Courses, projects and certificates are all free.",
"why": "Where to send someone who cannot yet read what the agent wrote. Slower than vibe coding, but the cheapest way to close the fundamentals gap that leaves you helpless when a generated app breaks.",
"warn": "Volume over polish: some legacy sections still teach older patterns, and the certificates carry little weight with employers on their own."
},
{
"slug": "indie-hackers",
"name": "Indie Hackers",
"url": "https://www.indiehackers.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Founder community + revenue data",
"price": "Free to join, read and post · IH+ about $198/yr billed annually, or $24.75/mo",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Community of solo founders posting revenue numbers, launch retrospectives and product feedback. Free access covers the forums, the Build Board daily leaderboard, product directory, meetups and job board. IH+ unlocks subscriber-only case studies, an ideas database and credits.",
"why": "The best place to sanity-check whether anyone will pay for the thing you just vibe coded, before you sink another month into it. Revenue transparency here beats any course on validation.",
"warn": "Traffic has thinned since its peak, and paywalled 'ideas database' content leans generic and AI-assisted. The free forums are where the remaining value is."
},
{
"slug": "josh-comeau-courses",
"name": "Josh Comeau Courses",
"url": "https://www.joshwcomeau.com/courses/",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid interactive CSS and React courses",
"price": "One-time per course, Basic/Pro/Ultimate tiers roughly $200-$400 · PPP regional licences · 20 percent student discount · 30-day unconditional refund",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Two flagship courses: CSS for JavaScript Developers (10 modules, 200+ lessons, about 40 hours, 170+ videos) and The Joy of React. Both are interactive rather than video-only, with embedded playgrounds, end-of-module workshops, lifetime updates and a moderated Discord. A third, Whimsical Animations, is still in development.",
"why": "The CSS course fixes a specific vibe-coder pain: agents emit layouts you cannot debug. Learn stacking contexts, flexbox and grid once and you stop re-prompting for the same broken spacing.",
"warn": "Prices only render at checkout and shift with regional licensing, so budget a range. The React material assumes you write components by hand, which is a different workflow from agent-generated code."
},
{
"slug": "latent-space",
"name": "Latent Space",
"url": "https://www.latent.space",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free AI engineering newsletter/podcast",
"price": "Free to read and listen, archive not paywalled · optional paid supporter tier · AI Engineer events ticketed separately",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "swyx's newsletter and podcast for AI engineers, with 196,000+ subscribers. Long technical interviews with people building models, agents and infrastructure, including Karpathy, Brockman, George Hotz and Simon Willison, plus a Discord, a paper club and ties to the AI Engineer conference series.",
"why": "The best way to understand why your coding agent behaves as it does, covering context windows, tool use and evals rather than which button to press. Free, and the back catalogue is open.",
"warn": "Assumes real technical fluency, episodes run two hours, and the focus skews toward model and infra builders rather than people shipping small apps."
},
{
"slug": "lenny-s-newsletter",
"name": "Lenny's Newsletter",
"url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid newsletter + AI tool bundle",
"price": "Free tier · Annual $200/yr including Product Pass · Insider $400/yr",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Product, growth and career writing with 1.2M+ subscribers, plus a podcast and a private Slack of 30,000+ members. Paid subscribers get the Product Pass: a free year of 34 products including Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Linear, Granola, Resend and Readwise, advertised at over $36,000 of value.",
"why": "The rare subscription that can pay for itself on day one, since a free year of Cursor plus Lovable already exceeds $200. Read the redemption rules first: you must be a new user of each tool.",
"warn": "The bundle is the real product and the writing is product-management-oriented, not engineering. Free years cannot be claimed on tools you already pay for, which rules out most of the bundle for existing users."
},
{
"slug": "makerkit",
"name": "Makerkit",
"url": "https://makerkit.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid multi-tenant SaaS kit (free Lite)",
"price": "Pro $349 lifetime (1 developer) · Teams $649 (5 developers) · Makerkit Lite free and open source",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Production-grade SaaS kits on Next.js 16 with React 19, plus TanStack Start and React Router variants, paired with Supabase or with Drizzle and Prisma on Better Auth. Ships auth with passkeys and MFA, Stripe billing, multi-tenant organisations with RBAC, admin dashboard, CMS, email and E2E tests.",
"why": "The most complete of the paid kits, and multi-tenancy plus RBAC is genuinely painful to vibe code correctly. Try Makerkit Lite free first, since it shares the architecture without the invoice.",
"warn": "Large surface area: thousands of files across a monorepo, which is slow for an agent to navigate and hard to learn cold. The licence is lifetime, but update pace tracks a small team."
},
{
"slug": "master-dev",
"name": "Master.dev (formerly Frontend Masters)",
"url": "https://master.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid video course subscription",
"price": "Individual subscription about $39/mo or $390/yr · 37 percent team discount at 10+ seats · free beginner bootcamp",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Frontend Masters rebranded to Master.dev in 2026. Over 300 in-depth courses and 24 curated learning paths across frontend, backend, full-stack and AI-assisted coding, taught by engineers from Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft and Stripe, plus live interactive workshops. A free bootcamp covers HTML, CSS and JavaScript for beginners.",
"why": "Best breadth per dollar if you actually watch it. The 'Coding with AI' and backend paths cover databases, auth and deployment, which is exactly what prompt-to-app tools never teach you.",
"warn": "Subscription value depends on watching regularly; one course you finish beats a year of one you do not. Exact prices render at checkout, and the rebrand broke a lot of old frontendmasters.com links."
},
{
"slug": "next-js-learn",
"name": "Next.js Learn (Vercel)",
"url": "https://nextjs.org/learn",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free interactive framework course",
"price": "Free · free Vercel account only needed for the deploy chapters",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vercel's official free courses. The 16-chapter Next.js Foundations track builds a real dashboard app: App Router layouts, CSS and fonts, Postgres setup, Server Components, static versus dynamic rendering, streaming, search and pagination, Server Actions, error handling, accessibility, NextAuth and metadata. Companion tracks cover React Foundations and the Pages Router.",
"why": "The best free way to learn what your agent is actually generating when it writes Next.js. Working chapters 6 to 11 by hand makes you far better at reviewing and fixing agent output.",
"warn": "Written by the framework vendor, so it routes you to Vercel hosting and Vercel Postgres by default, and chapters trail the newest Next.js release by months."
},
{
"slug": "next-js-saas-starter",
"name": "Next.js SaaS Starter (Vercel)",
"url": "https://github.com/nextjs/saas-starter",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free MIT SaaS template",
"price": "Free and open source (MIT)",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Vercel's reference SaaS template: Next.js with Postgres, Drizzle ORM, Stripe subscriptions and Customer Portal, shadcn/ui, email and password auth using JWT cookies, an RBAC dashboard, activity logging and a marketing landing page. 16,000+ stars with a live demo.",
"why": "Free proof of how auth, Stripe and Postgres fit together. Read this before paying $199 for a boilerplate, because for many projects it is already enough and agents extend it comfortably.",
"warn": "Explicitly a learning resource: no team billing, transactional email, admin tooling or tests, and the roll-your-own JWT auth is the first piece most people replace with a real auth provider.",
"install": "git clone https://github.com/nextjs/saas-starter"
},
{
"slug": "peerlist",
"name": "Peerlist",
"url": "https://peerlist.io",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free portfolio + weekly launches",
"price": "Free · profiles, Launchpad, job board, custom domain, resume builder",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "Professional network for developers and designers with 242,000+ members. Profiles aggregate GitHub, Dribbble, Medium and writing into proof of work; the Launchpad runs weekly project launches; there is also a job board, resume builder, GitHub recap tool and layoffs tracker.",
"why": "A much lower-competition launch venue than Product Hunt for a first project, and the profile doubles as a portfolio you can link from a landing page. Free, so the only cost is an afternoon.",
"warn": "Far smaller audience than Product Hunt or Hacker News, and skewed toward India-based tech talent. Good for feedback and hiring signal, thin for finding paying customers."
},
{
"slug": "practical-ui",
"name": "Practical UI",
"url": "https://www.practical-ui.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid design book + Figma kit",
"price": "$79 bundle (list $99) · team licences from $142 for 2+ · 30-day refund · free future updates",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Adham Dannaway's 373-page PDF covering 100+ logic-driven guidelines for intuitive, accessible interfaces. The bundle adds a step-by-step tutorial and a Figma design system starter kit with colour tokens, typography styles, layout grids and seven components.",
"why": "The more current and cheaper alternative to Refactoring UI, and stronger on accessibility, focus states and error states, which is precisely what generated UI gets wrong.",
"warn": "Overlaps heavily with Refactoring UI, so buy one rather than both. The Figma kit is a starter, not a full production design system."
},
{
"slug": "product-hunt",
"name": "Product Hunt",
"url": "https://www.producthunt.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free launch platform",
"price": "Free to browse and launch · optional paid promotion and advertising",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Daily leaderboard of new products, with heavy 2026 emphasis on AI: dedicated AI Agents, Vibe Coding Tools, AI Dictation and Code Review categories. Launching is free and ranked by upvotes and comments over one day, alongside forums, streaks, Kitty Points and community events.",
"why": "Still the highest-visibility free launch day a solo builder can get, and the vibe coding categories give an AI-built tool a natural home. Expect signups and feedback rather than revenue.",
"warn": "Results correlate strongly with the audience you bring on launch day. Vote-brigading is detected and penalised, and paid 'launch support' services rarely earn back their fee."
},
{
"slug": "r-vibecoding",
"name": "r/vibecoding",
"url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free subreddit",
"price": "Free · Reddit account required to post",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The main subreddit for people building software mostly by prompting. Threads are dominated by tool comparisons (Cursor versus Claude Code versus Lovable), showcases of shipped projects, complaints about credit burn and pricing changes, and help requests when a generated app breaks in production.",
"why": "Fastest read on which tools actually work this month, since pricing and model quality change faster than any article can track. Search before posting; your exact error has usually been solved already.",
"warn": "Heavy self-promotion and affiliate marketing dressed as reviews. Treat every 'built it in a weekend, now at $10k MRR' post as unverified, and never paste API keys into a thread."
},
{
"slug": "refactoring-ui",
"name": "Refactoring UI",
"url": "https://www.refactoringui.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid design book for developers",
"price": "Essentials $99 · Complete package $149 · team pricing for 3 to 25+ · one-time, no subscription",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger's 218-page PDF plus three downloadable video tutorials, teaching visual design as concrete tactics instead of theory. The Complete package adds a component gallery, colour palettes, font recommendations and 200 SVG icons. Over 30,000 copies sold.",
"why": "The fastest way to stop your AI-built app looking AI-built. Feed its rules on spacing scales, colour and hierarchy straight into agent prompts and output quality jumps the same afternoon.",
"warn": "Published in 2018 and never substantially revised, so examples predate modern Tailwind, dark mode and container queries. The principles hold up; the screenshots look their age."
},
{
"slug": "shipfast",
"name": "ShipFast",
"url": "https://shipfa.st",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid Next.js SaaS boilerplate",
"price": "Starter $199 · All-in $249 · bundle with CodeFast $299 · one-time with lifetime updates",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "Marc Lou's Next.js boilerplate: NextAuth with Google OAuth and magic links, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy payments, Mailgun or Resend email, MongoDB or Supabase, Tailwind components and animations, SEO tooling and a blog. Ships with Discord access, partner discounts and a startup leaderboard.",
"why": "Worth it only for the wiring you would otherwise debug across two weekends: webhooks, checkout and email deliverability. Skip it if you can read the free Vercel starter, which covers much of the same ground.",
"warn": "Marketing-heavy and lightly maintained, with updates measured in months. MongoDB-first and older Next.js patterns sit awkwardly against what current agents generate, and 'lifetime updates' means small fixes, not rewrites."
},
{
"slug": "show-hn",
"name": "Show HN (Hacker News)",
"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/show",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Free launch and feedback venue",
"price": "Free · Hacker News account required",
"tier": "free",
"pick": false,
"what": "The Hacker News section for things you made that others can try right now. Rules are strict: working software, hardware with video, or books with sample chapters. Blog posts, landing pages, sign-up walls, newsletters, fundraisers and minor version bumps are off-topic.",
"why": "Brutally honest technical feedback plus real traffic, for free. Also the quickest way to discover whether your AI-generated app falls over under load or ships an obvious security hole.",
"warn": "The audience is hostile to thin AI wrappers, forced signups and demos behind a paywall. Asking friends to upvote is detected and gets the post killed."
},
{
"slug": "supastarter",
"name": "supastarter",
"url": "https://supastarter.dev",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid multi-framework SaaS kit",
"price": "Solo $299 · Startup $799 (5 seats) · Agency $1,499 (10 seats) · one-time with lifetime updates",
"tier": "paid",
"pick": false,
"what": "SaaS starter kits for Next.js, Nuxt and TanStack Start in a shared monorepo: auth with passwords, passkeys, OAuth and 2FA, swappable payment providers, organisations, internationalisation, typesafe APIs, file storage, email and analytics. Recent releases add Next.js 16.3 and packaged AI agent skills.",
"why": "The pick if you are not on React, since the Nuxt kit has no serious free equivalent. It is also the most explicitly agent-friendly kit, shipping documented conventions and skills for Claude Code and Cursor.",
"warn": "Steep for a solo builder and seats are counted per developer. Provider-agnostic payments and auth add abstraction layers you must read before customising billing logic."
},
{
"slug": "there-s-an-ai-for-that",
"name": "There's An AI For That (TAAFT)",
"url": "https://theresanaiforthat.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "AI tool directory",
"price": "Free to browse · listing $49 one-time review fee · Maximum Exposure $347 · free slots via monthly contests",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "The largest AI tool directory: 52,000+ tools plus models, devices and robots, all free to browse and search. Getting listed costs $49 for a reviewed listing or $347 for newsletter placement, analytics and PPC credits; monthly contests on X give indie makers occasional free listings.",
"why": "Useful for finding the niche tool that already does the thing you were about to build. As a launch channel it is cheap but low-intent traffic, so expect clicks rather than customers.",
"warn": "Pay-to-list means ranking partly reflects marketing budget. Futurepedia (about 2,800 curated tools) and Toolify (30,000+, largely auto-generated) share the same bias, so cross-check any listing."
},
{
"slug": "total-typescript",
"name": "Total TypeScript",
"url": "https://www.totaltypescript.com",
"cat": "learn",
"group": "learn",
"tagline": "Paid TypeScript workshops",
"price": "Pro Essentials $250 · Pro Complete $795 (5 workshops) · free beginner tutorial, tips and articles · 30-day refund",
"tier": "mixed",
"pick": false,
"what": "Matt Pocock's exercise-driven TypeScript platform: you solve challenges in the editor, then watch the solution. Five premium workshops cover Pro Essentials, Type Transformations, Generics, Advanced Patterns and Advanced React with TypeScript. The free tier includes a beginner tutorial, tips, concept articles, a VS Code extension and TS Reset.",
"why": "Type errors are the number one thing that stops an AI-generated codebase compiling. The free beginner tutorial alone unsticks most vibe coders; only buy Complete if TypeScript is genuinely your day job.",
"warn": "$795 is a lot when the agent writes most of your types. Start with the free track and the tips feed, and treat the paid workshops as a career investment rather than a shipping tool."
}
]
}