Going free-first: how much did you actually save switching to OSS AI tools?
Going free-first: how much did you actually save switching to OSS AI tools?
About six months ago I made a deliberate decision: before buying any AI API or SaaS tool, exhaust the free OSS options first. Now that we're mid-year, I did the numbers.
The before stack (monthly cost)
| Tool | Old monthly cost |
|---|---|
| OpenAI embeddings (ada-002) | ~$180 |
| Pinecone starter | $70 |
| Deepgram transcription | ~$90 |
| Custom scraping service | $50 |
| Total | ~$390/month |
The after stack (all from the catalog)
| Tool | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| all-minilm-l6-v2-embeddings | $0 |
| chroma-vector-database | $0 |
| openai-whisper-speech-to-text | $0 |
| browser-use-web-agent | $0 |
| VPS to run it all | +$12 |
| Total | $12/month |
Monthly saving: ~$378. Annual saving: ~$4,500.
The hidden costs
I want to be honest: free tools have real costs that don't show up in a billing statement.
- Setup time: probably 3 days total to migrate and tune everything
- Maintenance: I deal with dependency updates and the occasional breaking change
- Quality delta: Whisper small is slightly less accurate than Deepgram on heavily-accented speech; we're living with it
- Compute: the VPS is provisioned 24/7 even when utilisation is low
Would I do it again?
Absolutely. The quality delta is small for our use case, and $4,500/year buys a lot of engineering time.
The thing I didn't expect: having all these tools listed in one place with security scan reports made the decision much easier. I could compare the grade-A listings on the leaderboards and feel confident I wasn't trading cost for a hidden supply-chain risk.
What about you? Has anyone done a similar audit? I'm especially curious whether anyone's found cases where the free option was meaningfully worse in production — I want to know where the floor is.