Video ID: vpiiqbpdkNk
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpiiqbpdkNk
Added At: 25-06-25 21:26:41
Processed: No
Sentiment: Positive
Categories: Education, Tech
Tags: productivity, workflow, automation, open-source, alternatives, SAS tools
Summary
The speaker replaced six expensive tools with free and open-source alternatives, saving over $10,000 a year. The alternatives include Dogmost for internal documentation, Plane for project management, Straply for blogs and newsletters, Nadn for workflow automation, Nood DB for Airtable-like functionality, and Grafana for analytics.
Transcript
I replaced six tools with free open- source and self- hostable Alternatives and it's saving me more than $10,000 every year and not only that my team and I got much more productive after changing these tools I bet you're already very familiar with notion sapure make air table post hog and a lot of other of these fashionable SAS tools but I also bet that you probably haven't heard of these free and self- hostable Alternatives that we replace them with so I want to bring them to your attention in this video I'll show you six amazing free tools that you can use to run your business if you're new to this channel welcome here I'm Simon harberg and I'm the founder of a SAS portfolio consisting of four bootstrapped SAS products to handle social media AI customer support link tracking and Graphics design we are a small and fully remote startup team and this year we are in the process of leaving the cloud and what better place to start than to replace a lot of the expensive SAS tools we use with free self hostable Alternatives that we host on our own servers let's go the first tool we're replacing is notion and I'll be honest it's actually a bit sad we changed from clickup to notion a few years back and it was such a massive Improvement and I got so hooked on this tool that I quickly ended up covering both internal vikii project management and for Content too we used notion together with make to write both newsletters and blog post directly in no's editor and then using automation to publish and send it out but notion was starting to run a bit expensive with their per seed pricing and if I'm being honest I think they're trying a bit too hard to become an everything app at least for my team and I things just started to get a bit chaotic so we're branching out three separate responsibilities and replacing them with each their own tool for internal Vicki and documentation we're now using dogmost it reminds a lot of notion but it only covers the do and notes part and it does that really well dog is completely free and open source and very easy to deploy to either your own servers or your Cloud platform of choice for project management we're now using plane very simple minimalistic project management tool that covers exactly what you need to collaborate no more no less you can self-host plane for free but they actually sell an upgraded version of their software as a lifetime deal it's $799 one time and then you get access to additional useful features such as Cycles time tracking and realtime collaboration we picked up this lifetime deal I can only recommend it finally for blogs and newsletters we're now using an actual CMS it's called strappy and it's a perfect solution for small teams if you can live without single sign on and support they have a free version that you can self host two other tools that we're getting really expensive for us were separ and make in all fairness we almost left separ all together throughout 2024 the whole platform experience was just getting unbearably slow and clunky for a long time make was our go-to it was a more lightweight faster and more affordable alternative to seure this worked well for a while until make started to feel more and more like sapure sluggish kind of clunky to navigate and as your workflows get more complex and start piling up prices get up there too so we made a decision and replaced both separ and make entirely with this tool called nadn not only do you get unlimited workflows if you self-host nadn but it is also a much much better tool n8n is a really powerful automation tool but it is also the tool that has the best fully working AI agent implementation I have tried I have a whole video where I show you how I build AI agents in naden I'll drop that at the end of this video so stick around for that the next tool on the list is our air table alternative to be honest I actually don't have anything negative to say about air T it's a wonderful tool it's been around for a long time and even though it's a total Beast it's still a delight to use it pricing is also fair but since we're already down the rabbit hole here we decided to replace air table with a free self- hostable alternative too and that's nood DB super cool air table alternative it's more simple but absolutely gets the job done and yes they have a free Community Edition that you can self host to and with a database tool like this it actually gives you the added benefit of keeping your data totally private when it's hosted on your own servers now as a SAS business you need analytics it is just such a super important part of your work I've used a bunch of different tools and the only ones that are decent are amplitude and post Haw both expensive both super clunky slow and endlessly frustrating to use and the thing is you still can't get them to report accurately ask anyone I don't don't know a single founder who doesn't struggle with analytics in one way or another and at some point accept that it's just never going to report exactly how you would like it until recently I made a decision a lot of people probably wouldn't agree with but it just finally works and it's free hear me out I set up a postris database started manually loging my events and then using Graff to visualize it I have never had better analytics than this I can use SQL to describe exactly how I want my data aggregated and visualized and grafana is surprisingly intuitive even though it's a pretty Advanced tool now I get product analytics where I have all other metrics as well as lcks it's super fast I can customize it exactly in the way I want and if you suck at SQL like I do chat gbt is very very good at it and it will help you get your queries just right so you can finally report things accurately as a bonus I want to add deep seek to the list I'm sure you've heard all about it but deep seek is a new AI model that performs on the same level as chat GPT but require much less resources and it's open source you can literally go to huging phas and download the models you can then either run these models locally if your computer has the right specs or if you have users to serve you can get a GPU line on hetner for just €84 per month and host the models here now you have your own chat GPT for a fixed monthly cost this is absolutely something I'm very excited to try out as you may know I'm offering lifetime access to all of my four SAS products for a single onetime purchase and when it comes to Lifetime deals keeping your cost low and predictable is crucial two of the products that are included in this offer are using AI quite extensively so if there's anything that can get me really excited it's the thought of AI at a fixed cost and it seems like we're finally getting there as always I have added links to all of these resources in the description below so please go check it out see if it's something you can use too and remember to go St them all on GitHub the acknowledgement means a whole lot for these projects if you want to see how I put together an AI agent using nadn and feed hve go watch this video next see you over there