The registry of exits · 64 TRAD tools and counting
They rented you your own tools. Then they paywalled the features, walled the files behind accounts, and changed the deal whenever they felt like it. Enough.
In the age of AI, the moat is gone. Every subscription-locked, paywalled, betrayed-you-once "TRAD" product now has a free, open-source replacement. This is the list.
Exhibit A · Adobe → ArtCraft
ArtCraft's Crafting Apps are clean-room, open-source rebuilds of the tools that defined creative rent, written from scratch in Rust. They run native on macOS, Windows and Linux, and most also run in the browser. Apache-2.0. No subscription. No account.
Early and moving fast: most apps are in alpha or active development. The registry below also lists mature alternatives for every one.
The registry
Pixels, vectors, layouts and interfaces.
Generative AI metered in 'credits', then upsold on top of a Creative Cloud plan you already pay for.
An open-source studio for AI image and video with real control: 3D compositing, character posing, image-to-3D. Pick the models you want, with no middleman.
Fast vector illustration reimagined in pure Rust, with a familiar Appearance-panel workflow.
Two decades of battle-tested SVG-native illustration.
The publishing industry's toll booth. Your layouts are hostage to a proprietary format.
Page layout and publishing with threaded text frames, rebuilt in Rust.
Professional desktop publishing with CMYK, spot colors and PDF/X output.
Perpetual Lightroom was killed off. Now your photo library lives behind a monthly bill.
A photo library and raw developer that runs entirely on your machine.
A mature, non-destructive raw workflow with a huge camera list.
Subscription-only since 2013. The FTC sued Adobe in 2024 over hidden early-termination fees, the same year its new terms let it access your work.
A clean-room Photoshop rebuilt in Rust. Same menus, same shortcuts, opens layered PSDs.
The veteran open image editor. GIMP 3 brought non-destructive filters.
Best-in-class digital painting, built by artists.
Cloud-only files on someone else's servers, and seat pricing that keeps getting reshuffled.
Interface design and prototyping with auto layout and variables, in native Rust.
Open-standards design and prototyping. Self-host it or use the free cloud.
Editing, motion graphics and screen recording.
Motion design held behind Creative Cloud, with project files nothing else can read.
Motion graphics and compositing with text, shape and solid layers, in pure Rust.
Its compositor and Grease Pencil handle serious motion and VFX work.
Your edit timeline, rented by the month and locked to the Creative Cloud.
A professional nonlinear editor with scopes and a multitrack timeline, built from scratch in Rust.
A full-featured multitrack editor from KDE.
A lightweight cross-platform editor with broad format support.
Acquired by Atlassian in 2023. The free plan caps you at 5-minute recordings and a small video limit, then the upsell starts.
The open-source Loom. Record your screen and camera, share a link instantly, and own the storage yourself if you want.
The industry standard for recording and streaming, with no time limits.
Recording, mixing, editing and notation.
The world's most-used free audio editor.
Avid halted perpetual sales in 2022 to push the industry standard onto subscriptions, and only brought them back after the backlash.
A clean-room Pro Tools in Rust, with Edit and Mix windows, ten inserts and sends, and CLAP plugins.
A professional DAW for recording, editing and mixing.
Avid shut down the original Sibelius team in 2012, then pushed composers toward subscriptions.
Professional music notation with beautiful engraving and playback.
Modeling, drafting, engineering and engines.
Autodesk stopped selling perpetual licenses in 2016. Draft or pay.
A clean-room AutoCAD-style drafting app with a command line, hatching and dimensions.
Lightweight 2D CAD with DXF support.
Autodesk stripped features from Fusion's free personal tier in 2020. Parametric CAD is still a subscription business.
Parametric 3D CAD. Version 1.0 fixed the topological naming problem.
The full 3D pipeline: modeling, sculpting, rigging, animation, simulation and rendering. Used on Oscar-winning films.
In 2023 Unity announced a per-install Runtime Fee, applied retroactively. It backed down, but the trust was gone.
A free 2D and 3D game engine. No royalties, no fees, no strings.
Words, numbers, slides, PDFs and signatures.
Merging, splitting or editing a PDF, an open ISO standard, sits behind an Acrobat Pro subscription.
A PDF workbench to read, organize, combine, split and secure, built from the ISO 32000 spec.
A self-hosted PDF toolbox with more than 50 tools: merge, split, OCR, sign, convert.
The open-source DocuSign alternative. Self-host it and own your signing infrastructure.
Everything you type goes through their servers, and the useful suggestions are paywalled.
An open-source grammar and style checker for more than 30 languages. Run the server locally for full privacy.
The spreadsheet the world runs on, rented through Microsoft 365.
A clean-room Excel-style spreadsheet with conditional formatting, sparklines and charts.
A full-power spreadsheet with pivot tables and .xlsx support.
Slides shouldn't need a subscription and a Microsoft account.
A clean-room PowerPoint with a ribbon, a notes panel and vector diagrams, in pure Rust.
Presentations with full .pptx compatibility.
Microsoft 365 raised prices in 2025 by bundling Copilot. Australia's regulator sued over how that was sold.
A clean-room Word with a ribbon, a styles gallery and a navigation pane, in pure Rust.
Mature, offline and fully compatible with .docx.
Notes, wikis, whiteboards and read-it-later.
Atlassian killed Server licenses in 2024, forcing teams onto its cloud or far pricier Data Center.
A collaborative wiki with real-time editing, spaces and permissions.
Simple self-hosted documentation organized into books, chapters and pages.
In 2023 the free plan was cut to one notebook and 50 notes. A decade of notes became a ransom note.
End-to-end encrypted notes in Markdown, synced through any service you choose. Imports .enex files.
A hand-drawn-style collaborative whiteboard with end-to-end encrypted sharing.
Your company brain on someone else's servers, with AI upsold on top.
The open-source Notion: docs, databases and kanban, local-first and self-hostable.
Docs, whiteboards and databases on one canvas. Local-first.
A self-hosted read-it-later and bookmark manager with full-page archiving.
Save articles and read them distraction-free. Imports from Pocket.
Chat, meetings and email.
Nitro upsells everywhere, and a 2025 breach exposed ID photos users had submitted for age verification.
The open-source chat platform formerly known as Revolt, with servers, channels and voice.
Ads in your inbox, and the new Outlook syncs third-party mail accounts through Microsoft's cloud.
Email, calendar and contacts with no ads and no tracking.
Free workspaces hide every message older than 90 days. Your own history, held for ransom.
Threaded team chat that keeps async discussion sane. Fully open source.
Encrypted, federated chat on the open Matrix protocol.
A 40-minute limit on free meetings, and installing the app is all but forced.
Video meetings in the browser. No account, no time limit, self-hostable.
Tasks, databases, scheduling, forms and automation.
Free bases cap out at 1,000 records. Your data grows, your bill grows.
A no-code database with a spreadsheet UI. Self-host it with no record limits.
A spreadsheet-style database built on Postgres.
The free plan gives you one event type. Want a second meeting length? Pay up.
Self-hosted appointment booking with Google Calendar sync.
Group scheduling polls to find a time that works for everyone, with no login for participants.
Server licenses were ended in 2024. Move to Atlassian's cloud or pay Data Center prices.
Issues, cycles, modules and roadmaps without the bloat. Self-host for free.
Self-hosted kanban boards with swimlanes, checklists and Trello import.
Minimalist, fast kanban project management.
Free plans that cut you off after a handful of responses.
Open-source surveys and forms, privacy-first and self-hostable.
No-code automation with hundreds of integrations. Self-hosted, with unlimited tasks.
CRM, email marketing, analytics, support and publishing.
Your visitors' data feeds Google's ad machine. Several EU regulators ruled its use broke GDPR.
Lightweight, cookie-free, privacy-friendly analytics.
Simple, fast, self-hosted analytics.
Hootsuite killed its free plan in 2023. Scheduling posts now costs a subscription.
Open-source social media scheduling across every major network.
Per-seat fees plus per-resolution AI charges, just to talk to your own customers.
An omnichannel support inbox covering live chat, email, WhatsApp and more.
Since Intuit bought it, the free plan keeps shrinking and pricing scales with your audience.
A self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list manager in a single fast binary.
Your words behind their paywall, your audience on their platform.
Independent publishing with built-in newsletters and paid memberships, run by a nonprofit.
Per-seat pricing for your own customer list, and steep costs to ever leave.
A modern open-source CRM you can self-host and fully customize.
Accounting and budgeting.
Intuit shut Mint down in 2024 and herded users to Credit Karma. YNAB keeps raising prices.
Local-first envelope budgeting with optional self-hosted sync.
Intuit stopped selling QuickBooks Desktop to new US subscribers in 2024, pushing everyone to the cloud.
Double-entry accounting for personal and small-business finances.
Movies, music, photos, audiobooks and e-books you actually own.
A self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with mobile apps.
Google ended unlimited free storage in 2021. Your memories are now a storage plan.
Self-hosted photo and video backup with face recognition, maps and mobile auto-upload.
In 2025 Amazon removed the option to download your purchased books over USB. You never owned them.
The definitive e-book library manager, converter and reader.
A truly free media server, with no premium tier and no tracking.
Files, passwords and two-factor codes.
Twilio killed Authy's desktop apps in 2024, the same year 33 million users' phone numbers leaked.
Cross-platform 2FA with end-to-end encrypted backups.
A secure, offline 2FA vault for Android.
Dropbox Basic caps free users at three devices. Your files, metered.
Self-hosted files, calendar, contacts and office in one.
Peer-to-peer file sync with no cloud in the middle.
LastPass lost encrypted customer vaults in its 2022 breach, after already limiting free users to one device type.
An audited open-source password manager with unlimited devices on the free plan.
An offline, local password vault with no cloud at all.
APIs, containers, infrastructure, hosting and code.
Since 2021, larger companies must pay a subscription to run it.
Daemonless containers and Kubernetes from a free desktop app.
A community-governed, self-hosted forge. It powers Codeberg.
Painless self-hosted Git in a single binary.
Killed its free tier in 2022, wiping out a generation of hobby projects.
A self-hosted Heroku and Netlify alternative. Push to deploy on your own servers.
Postman killed its offline Scratch Pad in 2023 and forced a cloud account just to send a request.
An offline-first API client. Collections are plain files in your git repo.
A fast, lightweight API development ecosystem in the browser.
Dropped its open-source license in 2024. It added AGPL back in 2025, but the trust was already spent.
The Linux Foundation fork of Redis, a permissively licensed drop-in replacement.
Relicensed from open source to the Business Source License in 2023, against the community that built it.
The open-source Terraform fork, stewarded by the Linux Foundation and a drop-in replacement.
Operating systems, browsers, social, smart home and AI.
Closed models behind subscriptions, and consumer chats are used for training unless you opt out.
A ChatGPT-style app that runs open models 100% offline on your machine.
Run Llama, Qwen, Gemma and more locally with one command.
Manifest V3 disabled uBlock Origin. The world's biggest ad company decides which ad blockers you can use.
An independent engine that still supports full-strength uBlock Origin.
Firefox hardened for privacy, with telemetry stripped out.
Google ended support for early Nest thermostats in 2025. Hardware you paid for, bricked by a server switch.
Local-first home automation with thousands of integrations. Works with no cloud.
API pricing in 2023 killed Apollo and other third-party apps. Moderators who protested were replaced.
Federated link aggregation and discussion. Communities run by communities.
Setup forces a Microsoft account, ads appear in the Start menu, and Windows 10's end of life sent working PCs to the landfill.
A friendly, familiar desktop that runs well on the hardware Microsoft left behind.
Decentralized social media. No algorithm, no ads, no billionaire.
No exit found. Suggest one and we'll add it.
The manifesto
Software you pay for, or don't, should keep working without a monthly ransom.
Open formats, local copies, no proprietary moat. Your work outlives any company.
Registration walls are a tax on your attention and your data. We don't pay it.
Every exit in this registry links to real, public source code. Free and open, or it isn't listed.
Grow the registry
Every entry is one small YAML file. Open a pull request, and if it's real, maintained and open source, it ships.
# src/content/registry/loom.yaml
name: Loom
vendor: Atlassian
category: video
sins: [paywall, account-wall]
charge: "5-minute cap on the free plan."
alternatives:
- name: Cap
url: https://cap.so/
source: https://github.com/CapSoftware/Cap
license: AGPL-3.0
status: stable
pitch: "The open-source Loom."