Free Plans Shrink. Open Source Goes Quiet
Twelve rows, a paid tool on the left and a free one on the right, with a line along the bottom that is more carefully written than most people notice:
“Free plans and open-source tools have limits and change often. Check terms before you rely on them.”
Read it again. It names two things, not one. Nearly every chart of this kind warns you about free plans. This one also warns you about open-source tools — and those two fail in opposite directions, which is why almost nobody checks for the second.
A free plan fails because somebody changes it. A number moves, a feature goes behind the paywall, a $0 tier quietly disappears from the pricing page. There is a decision, made by a company, on a date.
An open-source tool fails because somebody stops. Nothing is switched off and nothing is announced. The repository simply has no new releases, the issues stop getting answered, and the project keeps working perfectly right up until the day the operating system or the format it depends on moves without it.
We took this exact card apart row by row a few weeks ago and re-checked the free column. Three of the twelve had already failed — and they failed in both of those ways. That earlier post sorted the failures into four kinds: The Paid Tools Are Fine. It Is the Free Column That Rots. This one is about the two checks, because they take thirty seconds each and nobody does them.
Two failures, two checks
| A FREE PLAN | AN OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT | |
|---|---|---|
| How it fails | Somebody changes it | Somebody stops |
| What you see | A new pricing page, or a wall where there was none | Nothing. It still works |
| When you find out | The day you cross the line | The day something else moves and it does not follow |
| Is there a warning? | Usually an email nobody reads | None. Silence is the whole signal |
| The check | Open the pricing page. Is there still a $0 column? | Open the releases page. What is the newest date? |
| How long it takes | About twenty seconds | About thirty seconds |
All twelve rows, with what our re-check found
The first three columns are the card’s own, including its own labels for each free pick. The last column is what we found when we checked them one by one.
| Paid | Category | Free, as the card labels it | Kind of free | What we found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Solves anything | Hugging Face Chat (Open AI Chat) | Open project | Working |
| Runway | Text → video | Stable Video Diffusion (Open-Source Video Gen) | Open project | Working — but it is a model, not a product |
| Canva | Design | Pixlr X (Free Design Tool) | Free plan | Working |
| Midjourney | Text → image | Ideogram (Free AI Images) | Free plan | Working |
| PowerPoint | Presentations | Google Slides (Free with a Google account) | Free with an account | Working |
| Grammarly | Writing | LanguageTool (Open-Source Grammar Check) | Open project | Working |
| Zapier | Automation | Bardeen (Free plan available) | Free plan | Had shifted focus toward sales data |
| Fireflies | Meeting notes | Laxis (AI Notetaker) | Free plan | Working |
| Synthesia | Avatar video | SadTalker (Open-Source Talking Head) | Open project | No updates since mid-2024 when we checked |
| Photoshop | Photo editing | Photopea (Free Photoshop-style editor) | Free, ad-supported | Working |
| Durable | Website | 10Web (AI Website Builder) | — | No free plan; started around $10 a month |
| Iconfinder | Icons | Icons8 (Free Icons Library) | Free tier | Working |
WATCH THE ORIGINAL — 20 SECONDS
All twelve swaps with the category down the middle, and the footer about free plans and open-source tools.
▶ Paid vs free — best free alternatives — BANI Academy on Facebook
Why the quiet failure is the dangerous one
A free plan that shrinks is annoying and visible. You hit a wall, you see a price, you decide. The decision is in front of you.
A project that goes quiet gives you nothing to decide about. It keeps launching. It keeps producing output. You keep building your week around it. And then one Tuesday a browser updates, or a format changes, or the thing it depends on stops being supported, and a tool you have used for eighteen months stops working with no warning and nobody to ask.
That is what happened on the avatar row of this card. The free pick is an open-source project doing something genuinely impressive, and when we looked, its most recent activity was from the middle of 2024. Nothing about the page said so. You had to go and look at the dates.
The same goes the other way: the website row’s free pick turned out not to have a free plan at all by the time we checked, starting instead at around ten dollars a month. Nothing on the card was dishonest — the card is older than the change, which is exactly what its footer warns about and what we wrote about more generally in You Can Date This Card By One Name On It.
The sixty-second check, for both kinds
| Step | What you do | What you are looking for | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Decide which kind you are looking at | Does it have a pricing page, or a repository? | A company product vs a community project |
| 2 | Company product: open the pricing page | Is there still a column that costs nothing? | If there is no $0 column, it is a trial, not a free tool |
| 3 | Company product: find the number | Exports, seats, minutes, projects — write it down | That number is your actual ceiling, not the feature list |
| 4 | Open project: open the releases or commits page | What is the date of the newest entry? | Under six months is healthy; over eighteen is a warning |
| 5 | Open project: glance at open issues | Are recent ones being answered by anybody? | Unanswered issues mean nobody is home |
| 6 | Both: check it again before anything important | Right before you build a workflow on it, not months earlier | A check has a shelf life too |
Four honest caveats
Our findings were a snapshot, not a verdict. Three entries had problems on the day we checked them. A quiet project can wake up, a pivoted company can pivot back, and a free plan can return. Treat the dates as the evidence, not our conclusions.
Quiet is not the same as dead. An open-source tool with no recent releases may be finished rather than abandoned — some software genuinely stops needing changes. The test is not only the date but whether anything it depends on is still moving. A standalone desktop utility can sleep for years; something that talks to a platform’s API cannot.
Two rows on this card are not really products. The video row offers an open model rather than an application, and the chat row offers an interface onto open models. Both are real and useful, and neither behaves like the paid tool opposite it — you bring more of the work yourself. The broader version of that trade is in The Four Truly Free Tools Have No Upgrade Button.
Age is evidence, and it cuts both ways. A long-lived project with regular releases is the safest thing on any chart like this; a long-lived project with no releases is the least safe. The first half of that argument is in Five Of These Alternatives Are Older Than What They Replace, and knowing who funds a tool tells you which ending to expect: Ask Who Pays For The Free Column.
Questions people ask
How recent does a release have to be? As a rough rule: under six months, relaxed; six to eighteen, look at whether the issues are being answered; over eighteen months with an API dependency, assume you are on your own.
What if I cannot find a releases page? Then it is probably not open source in the way the label suggests, and you are back to checking a pricing page instead.
Is open source still worth preferring? For anything you want to control in five years, yes — nobody can take it away. Just do the thirty-second check first, because “nobody can take it away” and “nobody is maintaining it” are both true of the same project.
Do I need to re-check everything constantly? No. Check once, properly, on the day you are about to depend on something. The failure is not infrequent checking; it is checking a year before you commit and never again.
Two sentences, two habits
The footer on this card does something rare and gets no credit for it: it names both ways a free tool can let you down. Free plans and open-source tools have limits and change often.
Free plans shrink, and you will see it happen. Open-source projects go quiet, and you will not — until the day it matters. One is checked on a pricing page and the other on a release date, and together they take about a minute.
A minute, against eighteen months of building your week around something that stopped being maintained in the middle of 2024. That is the whole trade.
Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does.
If you want a deadline rather than another saved comparison, we run a free challenge — there is no barrier to entry, only a commitment fee that is refunded when you finish. It exists because a deadline makes you use the tool, which is also the fastest way to find out whether it still works.
Which free tool are you depending on, and when did you last check its dates? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.
More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.
