I canceled 3 paid subscriptions with these free, open-source apps — and don’t miss a thing

Published Sep 9, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. I know I can’t be the only one who hates how almost everything has become a subscription now. Fortunately, the issue is primarily isolated to popular mainstream software — there’s still a lot of niche software that’s just as good, if not better, that hasn’t moved to the subscription model. This is particularly true in the open-source space, which is filled with genuinely excellent apps that can help you ditch many of your paid subscriptions without losing most of the benefits. Here are three such FOSS apps that I personally used to replace some of my paid subscriptions. Nextcloud Stop renting your cloud storage and start owning it First up, we have Nextcloud, the FOSS app I used to cancel my personal Google Drive subscription. Apart from letting you host your own cloud storage that you can access from your other devices, Nextcloud gives you an entire software suite comparable to Google Workspace. You’ve got Collabora for office productivity, a Notes app that fills in for Keep, a Calendar app, a Photos app, and plenty more. Now, to be fair, Google offers all those apps for free, too. What Google is actually charging you for is the storage — and Nextcloud isn’t giving you free cloud storage either. That said, it does let you turn the storage you already own into cloud storage that you can access from all your other devices. So yes, technically, you’ll still pay for storage, but it’s a one-time purchase, which beats having to pay a recurring monthly fee in perpetuity. For reference, at the time of writing, even with the current storage price hikes, a 4TB NAS-compatible hard drive will cost you somewhere around $200. Meanwhile, Google’s 5TB plan is $20 a month — roughly $240 a year. As such, compared to the 5TB plan, that hard drive pays for itself in under a year. Furthermore, a good NAS drive will easily last you five to six years, if not more — so you’re saving good money there. Jellyfin Build your own Netflix and Spotify Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To GeekCredit: Jellyfin Next up, I have Jellyfin, a self-hosted app for building your own personal media server. Once set up, you can point it to your collection of movies, TV shows, and even music and make it available for streaming on all your other devices. It basically lets you build your own personal Netflix or Spotify. That said, I wouldn’t really call it an alternative to these streaming apps since it doesn’t host any content of its own. One of the main reasons we subscribe to these streaming services is for the content, but with Jellyfin, you can only stream media you already own. As such, it’s more of an alternative to Plex and similar media servers. Now, Plex does have a free tier, but most of the useful stuff is locked behind a paywall. Features like intro and credit skipping, sharing your media with friends and family, and hardware transcoding are all part of Plex Pass, which, at the time of writing, costs $6.99 per month. In fact, Plex even stopped offering remote streaming for free, which means you need to pay to watch your own media when you’re away from home. Fortunately, with Jellyfin, you get all of these features for free. That saves you roughly $70 a year. KeePassXC Your passwords don’t need to live on someone else’s server Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To GeekCredit: KeePassXC Finally, we have KeePassXC, a FOSS, fully local password manager. Before switching, I personally used LastPass and then 1Password, which, at the time of writing, costs about $3 a month for the individual plan and about $5 a month for a family plan. However, with KeePassXC, I’m getting all the basic features I expect from a password manager for free — the ability to generate and store complex passwords and autofill them as I navigate the web. The only real drawback is from a convenience standpoint. Because it’s local-only, all your passwords are stored on the specific computer you’re using. There’s no option to simply log in from a different system and pull down your entire vault the way you would with a cloud-based password manager. That said, for someone like me, this is a feature, not a bug. You see, I was a victim of the major 2022 LastPass hack. I had to spend an entire weekend changing my passwords on more than 200 websites I was signed into. Needless to say, it was a horrible experience that I swore to never put myself through again. I switched to 1Password afterward because it had better security, but ultimately, my data was still stored in the cloud and accessible through an online service. I didn’t want to risk it anymore, and ultimately went with KeePassXC which gives me full control over my data. I should also mention that even though KeePassXC is local-only, you can technically sync your passwords across your other devices. You see, all your passwords live inside a single local file with a .kdbx extension. You can use a tool like Syncthing to synchronize that file across your laptop, your phone, and everything else. There’s more where that came from These were three free and open-source applications that I personally used to replace my paid subscriptions — but they’re far from the only ones. The problem with FOSS apps is that, because they’re free, they often lack a marketing budget. As such, it’s up to us, the end users, to spread the word. So if you know of any FOSS apps that helped you cancel a subscription or two, let us know in the comments.