I pay for a lot of apps and services on my PC, and now that everything seems to be subscription-based, it gets expensive pretty quickly. $9.99 a month for Microsoft 365, $22.99 a month for Adobe Photoshop, $19.99 a month for Acrobat Pro, and a lot more. Even with the lower local pricing I get, add it all up, and I might as well build an AI data center in my living room.
And the corporate world being the corporate world, I know those subscription prices are going to get bumped up sooner or later. Now,I could decide to sail the seas for the apps I pay for, but why do that when there are genuinely good free alternatives available? Some of them aren’t just good enough to get the job done, either. They have enough features that I stopped missing the paid versions altogether.
LibreOffice is my Microsoft 365 alternative
I get the essential office tools without paying every month
Microsoft 365 is one of those subscriptions that’s difficult to avoid if you use a Windows PC. Windows actively promotes it, and you even get a free trial when you set up Windows on a new PC.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people actually need Microsoft 365, but only a fraction of what it offers. Personally, I pay for it just to use Word, Excel, and occasionally PowerPoint, so the several other Microsoft services included are pretty much useless to me.
LibreOffice covers most of what I need, and it’s totally free. It includes Writer for documents, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, and several other tools. The interface isn’t identical to Microsoft Office, and there are some compatibility differences, especially when I’m dealing with complex Excel spreadsheets or heavily formatted Word documents.
For regular work, though, LibreOffice handles things like writing documents, creating spreadsheets, making presentations, and opening common Microsoft Office file formats flawlessly.
- OS
-
Linux, Android, Windows, macOS
- Developer
-
LibreOffice
- Price model
-
Free (open-source)
PDFgear finally got me off Acrobat Pro
I went from paying for PDF editing to doing it for free
I remember the first time I had to pay for Acrobat Pro. I’ve been using the free version of Acrobat all my life just to view and annotate PDFs. Then, one time, I needed to edit a PDF and convert it to a Word document, and lo and behold, I was asked to pay to do that.
It felt like PDFs had become another area where, for greedy reasons, software companies had managed to turn basic tasks into subscription features. I initially thought that would be the only time I’d have to pay. But I started needing to edit PDFs more often, so I just kept the subscription. Well, not once I came across PDFgear.
PDFgear gives me many of the tools I used to rely on Acrobat Pro for, including editing PDFs, adding annotations, converting documents, merging and splitting files, and handling other common PDF tasks. The biggest difference is that I don’t have to think about another monthly payment every time I need to make a change to a document.
Acrobat Pro still has more advanced features and makes more sense for people who depend heavily on Adobe’s document ecosystem. But I don’t need all of that. For the PDF tasks I actually perform, PDFgear got good enough that keeping an Acrobat Pro subscription no longer made sense.
- OS
-
Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android
- Version
-
2
.1 - Plan Options
-
Free
- Services
-
PDF Editing/Signing
GIMP is my Photoshop replacement
It gives me most of the image-editing tools I actually use without requesting a fee
Photoshop is incredibly powerful and is arguably the best professional image editing software in the world. But I am nowhere close to being a professional image editor or graphics designer, so paying for it isn’t justified. I think I paid for it once, loved the features and tools I got, and just kept on paying. But I barely even use the advanced features Photoshop had to offer.
Most of my image-editing work involves things like resizing images, cropping, removing backgrounds, adjusting colors, adding text, creating thumbnails, and making other basic edits. All of that can be achieved with a simple open-source software called GIMP, without a subscription, of course. It’s a full-fledged image editor with support for layers, masks, selections, filters, brushes, text, and plenty of other tools. It can also open and export a wide range of image formats, so I’m not constantly converting files before I can work with them.
I wouldn’t claim GIMP is a perfect one-for-one replacement for Photoshop. Photoshop has a much larger user base and a lot of features that professional users may depend on. But that’s exactly why I like GIMP. I don’t need to pay for Photoshop just because it can do things I’ll probably never use.
- OS
-
Windows, macOS, Linux
- Developer
-
Simon Budig
- Price model
-
Free (open-source)
KeePassXC made me ditch LastPass
I traded cloud convenience for a database I control for free
Password managers are one of those tools I consider important. I’ve always used LastPass and, to be honest, I had no issue paying the $3 monthly subscription fee. But then LastPass had another security incident in June 2026.
Mind you, this is after the major LastPass data breach in 2022, when attackers gained access to information from a cloud storage environment that included customer account information and a backup of customer vault data. That was enough to make me reconsider whether I wanted to keep my password vault with a cloud-based service.
So, I switched to KeePassXC, a free open-source password manager that stores my credentials in an encrypted database. Instead of keeping my password vault entirely within a subscription service’s ecosystem, I can keep the database locally and decide where I want to store and synchronize it.
It supports the features I’d expect from a modern password manager, including strong password generation, browser integration, custom fields, and secure storage. The major difference is how synchronization works. KeePassXC doesn’t work like a traditional cloud-based password manager where everything is automatically synced through the company’s servers. If I want access to my database across multiple devices, I need to manage the database and synchronization myself. That requires a little more effort, but I actually prefer having that control, and remember it’s free.
- OS
-
Windows, macOS, Linux, Portable
- Price model
-
Free
I don’t need to pay for everything anymore
Subscriptions aren’t bad, and I’m still subscribed to a lot of other services. If I use an application every day, and it saves me enough time to justify its price, I’ll happily pay for it.
The problem is when I’m paying for several subscriptions simply because they’re the most recognizable options. None of the apps discussed earlier is a perfect replica of the software they replaced, and that’s not really the point. The point is that they’re good enough for what I actually need.
And when several free alternatives can replace subscriptions that were costing me hundreds of dollars a year, I’d much rather keep that money in my bank account.