How 80 tools price themselves

This directory currently holds 80 live listings. Each one carries a pricing model chosen from four values, and a set of tags applied independently of it. That is a small enough sample to say nothing about the industry and a complete enough one to say something exact about this catalogue, so treat what follows as a census, not a survey.

The distribution

Model	Listings	Share
Freemium	50	62.5%
Paid	23	28.75%
Open source	5	6.25%
Free	2	2.5%

Freemium is not the leading model here so much as it is the default one. Five out of eight tools have decided that the first interaction should not involve a card, and the interesting part is what the remaining three-eighths have in common.

"Free tier" is the most common tag and the least informative

52 of 80 listings carry the free-tier tag, the most-applied tag in the catalogue by a distance. The second, api-first, is on 19.

But 50 listings are freemium, and freemium means a free tier by definition. So the tag is telling you almost exactly what the pricing model already told you. 49 listings hold both. The three carrying the tag without the model are Peerlist and Product Hunt, which are priced free outright, and create-t3-app, which is open source, distinctions without much of a difference from where the reader is standing. Exactly one freemium listing is missing the tag, which is a data-entry slip rather than a finding.

This is worth stating plainly because a filter for "free tier" looks like it is narrowing 80 results down to something manageable and is in fact handing back almost two thirds of the directory. A facet that matches 65% of the catalogue is not a filter. It is a mood.

The tags that actually partition the set are further down: self-hostable (9), team-collaboration (8), no-code (6), privacy-focused (4). Those are the ones where clicking changes what you are looking at.

Open source is a licence, not a price

Only 5 listings are priced open-source, but 14 carry the open-source tag. The gap is nine products that ship source code and charge money anyway, usually hosted-versus-self-hosted, occasionally an open core with paid modules on top.

Sentry, Supabase, PostHog and Plausible all sit in that gap. All four will let you run the whole thing yourself for nothing. All four would prefer you did not, and price the hosted product accordingly.

So the pricing model answers "what does it cost", and the tag answers "can you read the source". Those turn out to be nearly independent questions, and conflating them is the most common mistake in how these tools get described.

Self-hostable is rarer than open source

9 listings are self-hostable against 14 open source, and the two sets overlap by 8. Six open-source listings cannot be self-hosted in any meaningful sense, create-t3-app and LangChain because there is no server to host, Hugging Face, Replicate, LottieFiles and Open Launch because the open part is a client or a component and the service behind it is not.

That is the shape of the modern open-source product: the licence is genuine, the code is genuinely readable, and the operational reality is that running the whole thing yourself is a project rather than a download.

The exception runs the other way. Obsidian is self-hostable and is not open source at all. The app is proprietary and the data is plain markdown in a folder you already own, which turns out to deliver most of what people want from self-hosting without the licence having anything to do with it.

If self-hosting is what you actually want, the tag to filter on is self-hostable, not open-source. It is the difference between nine options and fourteen, five of which will not do the thing you wanted.

The categories that gave up on free

Two categories in this catalogue have no freemium listings at all.

Finance (Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Wise) is entirely paid. That is less about pricing philosophy than about what the product is: these companies take a percentage of money moving through them, so a free tier is not a marketing decision, it is a fee of zero on a transaction of zero. The model is already usage-based, which makes freemium redundant rather than generous.

Boilerplates is the more interesting one. Four listings, three paid and one open source, and the open-source one, create-t3-app, is a scaffolding CLI rather than a product. Nobody is running a free tier of a starter kit, because there is no tier to run. You get the code once and the transaction is over. It is the only category here where the thing being sold is not a service.

What this does not tell you

Eighty listings chosen by us. The selection is biased toward tools that a developer or a founder would plausibly use, because that is who this directory is for, and it under-represents enterprise software almost entirely: 12 listings carry enterprise-ready, and every one of them is a tool an individual could sign up for this afternoon.

A census of a curated set describes the curation as much as the market. The numbers above are exact. What they are exact about is this catalogue.