Every paid tool below has a free alternative that does the same job for most people. The ten from the video are first, then five more that did not fit, then how to actually make the swap without breaking anything.
Read this before you cancel anything. Free usually means a free tier, not unlimited. Run the free tool for a full week on real work first. A tool you genuinely use is worth paying for.
The ten from the video
Each paid tool below is priced on its SECOND paid tier, the plan you move to when the entry plan stops being enough. That is the number in the video. The entry price is in brackets so you can see both.
- IMAGE CREATION. Midjourney Standard, 30 dollars a month (Basic is 10), to Nano Banana. gemini.google.com. Googles image model, free inside the Gemini app. No card, no queue.
- AI RESEARCH. Perplexity Max, 200 dollars a month (Pro is 20), to Consensus. consensus.app. Searches actual peer reviewed papers instead of the open web and shows how many studies support the answer. Free tier.
- AVATAR CREATION. HeyGen Pro, 99 dollars a month (Creator is 29), to Hedra. hedra.com. Talking avatars from one photo plus a script. Free credits refresh monthly.
- CODE GENERATION. GitHub Copilot Pro+, 39 dollars a month (Pro is 10), to Cursor. cursor.com. The Hobby plan is 0 dollars with no card and no time limit. Limited agent requests and tab completions.
- VIDEO GENERATION. Higgsfield Plus, 39 dollars a month (Starter is 15), to Hailuo. hailuoai.video. Free credits every day, roughly 3 to 5 clips, topped up on sign in.
- IMAGE EDITING. Adobe Firefly Pro, 30 dollars a month (Standard is 10), to Photoroom. photoroom.com. Background removal and product shots. Free plan exports up to 250 images a month with a watermark.
- SOCIAL SCHEDULING. Buffer Team, 12 dollars a month per channel (Essentials is 6), to Publer. publer.com. Free plan covers 3 accounts with 10 scheduled posts each.
- WEBSITE BUILDER. Framer Pro, 30 dollars a month (Basic is 10), to Lovable. lovable.dev. Free plan gives 5 credits a day up to 30 a month and publishes live to a lovable.app subdomain. No card.
- VIDEO EDITING. CapCut Pro, 20 dollars a month, to Edits. instagram.com/edits. Instagrams own editor. Genuinely free, no watermark. CapCut has only one paid tier for individuals, so this row is the same at either end.
- VOICE GENERATION. ElevenLabs Creator, 22 dollars a month (Starter is 5), to MiniMax. minimaxi.com. Free text to speech credits across many languages.
What that adds up to
On the second paid tier the ten come to 521 dollars a month, which is 6,252 dollars a year. On the entry tier of each they come to 136 dollars a month, or 1,632 a year. Both figures are the sum of the ten plans listed above, and the video shows the 521.
Nobody pays for all ten. The point of the number is the shape of it. Most people carry three or four of these and never look at the total, and the free replacement for each one is a link away.
Five more that did not fit
- TRANSCRIPTION. Otter to Whisper. github.com/openai/whisper. Open source, runs on your own machine, free forever.
- DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING. Figma to Penpot. penpot.app. Open source, free, self hostable.
- SCREEN RECORDING. Loom to OBS Studio. obsproject.com. The standard for recording and streaming, free.
- AUTOMATION. Zapier to n8n. n8n.io. Self host it and every workflow is free.
- IMAGE UPSCALING. Topaz to Upscayl. upscayl.org. Free, open source, runs offline.
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Unlocks: How to actually do the swap · Honest notes
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