# Five open source AI tools that can replace what you pay for, and the catch with each > Open source alternatives to ElevenLabs, Ahrefs, ChatGPT, Cursor and Photoshop, checked against their GitHub repos: what each one does, what it really costs in rupees, and the catch nobody puts in the headline. - Page: https://www.brandbakery.tech/pulse/open-source-ai-alternatives-to-paid-tools - Last updated: 2026-11-08 Breadcrumb: [Home](https://www.brandbakery.tech/) > [Pulse](https://www.brandbakery.tech/pulse) > Five open source AI tools that can replace what you pay for, and the catch with each - **By:** Abhishek - **Published:** 2026-11-08 - **Reading time:** 11 min - **Topics:** AI & Tech A year ago I would have told you to just pay for the tools. ElevenLabs for voice, Ahrefs for SEO, ChatGPT or Claude for the thinking, Cursor for code, Photoshop for anything visual. The open source versions existed, sure, but the moment you gave them real work they fell apart. That is not true any more. And honestly, it changed faster than I expected. I came across a list of five open source alternatives in [Simon Høiberg's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTg_LAAT3e0) and his [resource page](https://www.simonhoiberg.com/resources/open-ai-alternatives). Good list. But a YouTube list is only a starting point, so I went to each GitHub repo, read the licences, checked the model cards and worked out what each one costs here in India, in rupees. Every number below was checked on 8 November 2026. Stars and prices move every week, so check the links before you decide anything. One thing before we start. "Open source" still costs money. With every tool on this list, you still pay for something: data, a GPU, or your own time to set it up. The real question is whether that bill is smaller than the subscription you are paying today. ## The short version
Paid toolOpen alternativeLicenceWhat you still pay for
ElevenLabsVoiceStudioAGPL-3.0 (app); models varyYour computer, plus a commercial voice engine
Ahrefs, SemrushOpenSEOMITDataForSEO data, per request
GPT, Claude (for many agent jobs)Qwen3.8-27B (repo)Apache 2.0GPU time
Cursor's agent, Claude CodeOpenCodeMITThe model behind it
PhotoshopPhotoCraftMIT or Apache 2.0Patience. It is alpha
Prices in rupees below use about ₹94 to the US dollar, the [market rate on 8 November 2026](https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=INR). Add 18% GST where your provider charges it. ## 1. VoiceStudio, instead of ElevenLabs **GitHub:** [github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio](https://github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio) · about 104,000 stars · repo created 9 April 2026 Voice was the category I thought would stay paid the longest. Cloning a voice that sounds natural used to need big models, lots of training data and lots of money. That is why everyone ended up on ElevenLabs. VoiceStudio is a desktop app that does most of what people open ElevenLabs for. You clone a voice from a short recording, design a new voice by describing it, dub a video into another language, turn a long text into an audiobook, or dictate and transcribe. It runs on your own machine, on macOS, Windows and Linux, with Android and iPhone builds too. No GPU? Its README says the app is ["fully usable on the CPU, just slower"](https://github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio#platforms). It also has a local API and an MCP server, so an AI agent can make a voiceover without anyone opening the app. The headline claim is 646 languages. I checked the default model's card, and the list does include Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Assamese and Urdu. A language on a list still has to sound right in Hinglish on a phone call, though, so test it on your own scripts. **What it replaces in rupees:** ElevenLabs' [own pricing page](https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) lists Starter at $6 a month, Creator at $22 and Pro at $99, billed in dollars. **The catch, and it is a big one: the licence.** The app is AGPL-3.0, and its README says that covers commercial use under its terms. The voice models inside it carry their own licences. The default engine is built on [k2-fsa/OmniVoice](https://huggingface.co/k2-fsa/OmniVoice), and that model card says the pre-trained model is licensed CC-BY-NC "due to constraints from its training data". NC means non-commercial. So for client work or ads, you have to switch engines. The usual answer is [CosyVoice 3](https://github.com/QwenAudio/CosyVoice), whose weights are [Apache 2.0](https://huggingface.co/FunAudioLLM/Fun-CosyVoice3-0.5B-2512). But read its model card: it covers nine languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian) and no Indian language. So for an Indian business that wants Hindi or Tamil voice for commercial work, the free path is thinner than the headline suggests. That is one reason our own demo line runs on [Sarvam](https://www.sarvam.ai/), an Indian voice stack. And whatever you use, clone only voices you have permission to clone. ## 2. OpenSEO, instead of Ahrefs and Semrush **GitHub:** [github.com/every-app/open-seo](https://github.com/every-app/open-seo) · about 26,800 stars · MIT · repo created 27 February 2026 SEO is a different problem. What you pay Ahrefs and Semrush for is mostly the data: years of crawling the web, search volumes, backlinks, rankings. A few developers cannot rebuild that over a weekend. OpenSEO does not try to. It covers the workflows most small businesses actually use (keyword research, rank tracking, competitor insights, backlinks, site audits and AI visibility) and buys the raw data from [DataForSEO](https://dataforseo.com/pricing), a paid API that sells search data per request. So you pay only for what you use. **What it costs:** the [hosted version](https://openseo.so/pricing) is $10 a month (about ₹940) with $10 of usage included. Their pricing page says a keyword search costs about $0.05 (about ₹4.70) and a rank check up to 1.5 cents a keyword, because they charge what the data costs plus a flat 28%. Self-host it and you skip that 28%: you bring your own DataForSEO key, where the [minimum top-up is $50](https://dataforseo.com/pricing) and the balance never expires. Compare that with [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/pricing), where Lite is $129 a month (about ₹12,100), and [Semrush](https://www.semrush.com/prices/), where the SEO plan is $139 a month (about ₹13,100). For a clinic, a coaching institute or a local brand that checks rankings a few times a month, that difference is real money. Two things I like. First, the README says it can be self-hosted on your own Cloudflare account, and that works on the free plan, so there is no server to babysit. Second, it ships an MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex or ChatGPT can read your SEO data directly. Ask your agent to find the keywords where you sit on page two and see who ranks above you. That is a genuinely useful job. **The catch:** you are getting DataForSEO's numbers, and they will not match Ahrefs one to one. If your agency reports to you in Ahrefs numbers, keep that in mind before you compare. ## 3. Qwen3.8-27B, instead of GPT or Claude for many agent jobs **Model:** [huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B) · **GitHub:** [github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3.8](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3.8) · Apache 2.0 · released 14 August 2026 This one is a model. Strictly speaking it is "open weight": you can download it, run it, fine-tune it and use it commercially under Apache 2.0. You just do not get the training data. Why it matters: for a long time, only the huge open models came anywhere close to the paid frontier models, and running those properly needs data centre hardware. Qwen3.8-27B is a dense 27 billion parameter model that fits on one graphics card. The [model card](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B) gives it 262,144 tokens of context natively (extendable to about a million), image and video understanding, and adjustable thinking. The benchmarks on that card are Qwen's own, so read them as a vendor's claims. Still, they are interesting. On SWE-bench Pro, an agentic coding test, the card shows 61.7 for Qwen3.8-27B against 53.4 for Claude Opus 4.6 Max. On Terminal Bench 2.1, Opus 4.6 Max still wins, 78.2 to 73.0. A model this small even being in that conversation is the story. Simon says in his video that he moved his company's agent system onto Qwen for support tickets, light coding and scripts, and that it made more odd decisions than the paid model but kept the work moving. That matches what I would expect. Smaller models need a tighter harness: clear tools, short steps, checks after each step. **The hardware, in rupees.** The [official FP8 weights](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B-FP8) are about 31 GB, and the full BF16 weights about 56 GB. Weights are only part of it, because long context eats memory fast. That is why people pair it with a 96 GB card like the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000. Your options: - **Rent in India.** [E2E Networks](https://e2enetworks.com/gpus/nvidia-rtx-pro-6000), with data centres in Delhi NCR and Chennai, lists one RTX PRO 6000 at ₹236.55 an hour, before GST. Eight hours a day for 22 working days comes to roughly ₹41,600 a month. Your data also stays in India, which some clients will ask about. - **Rent abroad.** On Vast.ai, [ComputePrices tracked](https://computeprices.com/providers/vast/gpus/rtx-pro-6000) single RTX PRO 6000 listings from about $1.00 an hour (around ₹94) on 7 November. Cheaper, but it is a marketplace of other people's machines, so do not put customer data there. - **Government compute.** If you are an eligible startup or research team, the IndiaAI Mission offers GPU access at around ₹65 per GPU hour, [per Business Standard](https://business-standard.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/india-ai-compute-race-subsidised-gpu-capability-gap-126062900734_1.html). It needs an approved project, so it is not a quick swipe of the card. - **Buy.** Indian listings for the card run from about ₹14 lakh to ₹19 lakh before GST and duty, according to [one Indian cloud provider's survey](https://cloudpe.com/blog/rtx-pro-6000-price-india/). Rough maths: ₹14 lakh buys about 5,900 hours at E2E's rate, which is eight months running day and night. Buying only makes sense if you will really keep it busy, and that is before electricity. **The catch:** the model is free and the GPU costs money. If your usage is light, paying per token for a hosted model is still cheaper than renting a card that sits idle. Open weights pay off when the volume is high, or when you need control over where the data goes. ## 4. OpenCode, instead of Cursor's agent or Claude Code **GitHub:** [github.com/anomalyco/opencode](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode) · about 225,000 stars · MIT · repo created 30 April 2025 This is the biggest project on the list by a distance. OpenCode is a coding agent: you point it at a project, say what you want, and it reads the codebase, edits files and runs commands. Terminal, desktop app or inside your editor. If you have used Claude Code or Cursor's agent, it will feel familiar. It ships with a "build" agent for real changes and a read-only "plan" agent that asks before running commands, which is a sensible default. To be fair to Cursor, it is a whole editor with a lot built around it. The fair comparison is with Cursor's agent, the part that takes a task and writes the code. What makes OpenCode interesting: - **Any model.** Its website says it works with [200+ LLM providers through Models.dev](https://opencode.ai), including local models. You can [point it at Ollama](https://opencode.ai/docs/providers) running on your own machine, or a Qwen server on a rented GPU. - **It runs where you want.** Run it as a server and drive it from a browser or your own code through its SDK. - **GitHub, on your own runners.** [Mention `/opencode` or `/oc`](https://opencode.ai/docs/github) in an issue or pull request comment and it works in a new branch and opens a PR with the changes, inside your own GitHub Actions runner. **What it replaces in rupees:** Cursor's [pricing page](https://cursor.com/pricing) currently lists individual plans from $8 to $200 a month (about ₹750 to ₹18,800), and notes that third-party models are billed separately by usage. **The catch:** the agent is free and the model costs money. Plug in Claude or GPT with your own API key and you pay per token, which can cost more than a flat plan if you code all day. Plug in a local Qwen and you pay for the GPU instead. And this is the combination I find most exciting: an open agent, on an open model, on hardware you control. Nobody can cut your limits overnight on a machine you own. ## 5. PhotoCraft, instead of Photoshop **GitHub:** [github.com/storytold/photocraft](https://github.com/storytold/photocraft) · about 77,800 stars · MIT or Apache 2.0 · repo created 30 September 2026 Photoshop has looked untouchable for decades. More than 30 years of features, and the whole creative industry runs on the PSD format. Nobody was going to rebuild that. PhotoCraft is trying. It is a [clean-room rebuild of Photoshop in pure Rust](https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), written from public specifications, with the same menus and shortcuts, real layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors and brushes. It opens and saves PSD files, runs offline with no account, and has installers for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web. It is part of a bigger suite from [ArtCraft](https://getartcraft.com/apps) that is going after other creative apps too. How it is being built is the part that made me stop. The repo is barely five weeks old and GitHub search shows more than 3,800 merged pull requests. A quick search of its commit history turns up hundreds of commits co-authored by Claude. And its [roadmap](https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/HEAD/ROADMAP.md) measures the work left in agent hours. Every menu item is one of more than 500 commands, with a CLI and an MCP server on top, so anything you can click, an agent can do. **What it replaces in rupees:** Photoshop on its own is about ₹1,675 a month on an annual plan in India, according to [Cloudfy, an Adobe reseller](https://cloudfysystems.com/blog/adobe-photoshop-pricing-india). Check Adobe India's own page for today's offer. **The catch:** it is early, and the team says so plainly. The roadmap calls it alpha: about 76% of Photoshop's feature breadth, but only about 45% "ready for real work", and the PSDs it writes are not yet reliably accepted by Photoshop. So no, do not cancel Creative Cloud if a client sends you PSDs. Watch it, try it on side work, and check again in a few months. ## So which one should you actually switch? My honest take, for a small business in India: - **Switch now:** OpenSEO, if you or your agency are paying for Ahrefs or Semrush mainly for keyword checks and audits. The saving is the clearest on this list, and the risk is low. - **Try it on a real job:** OpenCode, if you already pay for a coding tool. Run it next to what you use for a week, on the same tasks. - **Only with a plan:** Qwen3.8-27B. Worth it when you have steady volume or data that must stay with you. Not worth renting a GPU to save on ten chats a day. - **Check the licence first:** VoiceStudio. Fine for personal and internal use, but sort out the commercial engine and your languages before any client work. - **Watch it:** PhotoCraft. Brilliant to see, and too early to bet a client deadline on. The bigger point is this. A year ago the open versions were toys. Today they are real options in categories I thought would belong to a few companies forever. The paid tool is sometimes still better, and that is fine. But now it has to earn your money. ## Where this leaves your business Most business owners do not want to rent GPUs or read model licences. They want the phone answered and the lead followed up. That is fair. This is the work we do at Brand Bakery. When we build an [AI employee](https://www.brandbakery.tech/ai-employees) for a business, such as an [AI sales executive](https://www.brandbakery.tech/ai-employees/sales-executive) that calls new leads and books visits, part of the job is exactly this kind of choice: which model, which voice, which licence, which country the data sits in, and what each one costs a month. Paid where it is clearly better, open where it does the job, and the licence checked before anything goes live. If you want to know what that would look like for your business, [talk to us](https://www.brandbakery.tech/contact). ## Keep reading - [More from Pulse](https://www.brandbakery.tech/pulse) - Start a project: https://www.brandbakery.tech/contact --- Brand Bakery is a design-first digital studio in New Delhi. Start an enquiry at https://www.brandbakery.tech/contact or email support@brandbakery.tech. This is the Markdown copy of https://www.brandbakery.tech/pulse/open-source-ai-alternatives-to-paid-tools; the site index for language models is https://www.brandbakery.tech/llms.txt.