Introduction

CLONE is an index of free, open-source clones of paid software. You type the app you pay for, and CLONE shows the open twin that does the same job, what you keep, what you lose and what the subscription costs you per year.

What it is

Every entry in the index is a pair: one paid product and one open-source project that replaces it. Photoshop and GIMP. Notion and AppFlowy. ChatGPT Plus and Ollama. Each pair has a clone page, a side-by-side comparison and a yearly price, so the decision takes one screen instead of an afternoon of forum threads.

The first version of the index holds 33 clones in 12 categories. Together the paid side of those pairs costs about $9,413 per year. The clone side costs $0.

What it is not

• Not a download mirror. CLONE never hosts binaries. Every “Website” and “Get” button goes to the project’s own site or repository.
• Not a review site. There are no star ratings and no sponsored slots. A project is either a working clone or it is not in the index.
• Not an account. There is no sign-up. Saved clones, your bill and your votes live in your browser and nowhere else.

Where to go next

Quick start

Three steps: search, compare, price your bill. Nothing to install on our side.

Find your first clone

1. Type what you pay for. Use the big search on the home page or the small one in the header. Plain words work: Photoshop alternative, ChatGPT at home, YouTube without ads.
2. Open the clone. The clone page shows the license, the stars, the yearly saving and the one thing you give up.
3. Compare. “View comparison” puts the paid product and the clone side by side, row by row.
4. Price your bill. On the home page or in My Bill, tap every subscription you still pay for. The total is per year. “Show my clones” lists the replacements for exactly that set.

Direct links

Every view has its own address, so you can send someone straight to a result.

https://clonelabai.vercel.app/#/browse/q/Photoshop
https://clonelabai.vercel.app/#/tool/gimp
https://clonelabai.vercel.app/#/compare/gimp
https://clonelabai.vercel.app/#/browse/cat/ai

How a clone is picked

An entry gets into the index only when it passes four checks. If a project fails one of them, it waits on the Wanted Board instead.

The four checks

1. Same job. A person who uses the paid product for its main purpose can do that purpose in the clone. Feature parity is not required. Job parity is.
2. Source is open. The code is public under a license you can read. If the license is source-available rather than OSI-approved, the clone page says so in the license field.
3. Runs today. There is a current release or an active main branch, and the project installs on at least one common platform without a weekend of debugging.
4. Free to use. The core job is free. Paid hosting or support plans are fine, as long as you can self-host or use the free tier for the job.

Trending and Top Rated

Trending puts the four clones people switched to most this week first, then the rest by stars. Top Rated is a hand-picked list of 12 clones that people stopped calling alternatives: Blender, Godot, Ollama, Lichess, Krita, Jellyfin, Bitwarden, Immich, OBS Studio, LibreOffice, n8n and Anki.

Where the AI comes in

The model reads release notes, issue trackers and feature lists, and drafts the “keep” and “lose” lines for each pair. A human checks every pair before it is listed. The model suggests. It does not publish.

Glossary

The words CLONE uses, in the sense it uses them.

Search

Search reads what you would say out loud. It drops the filler words and scores what is left against every entry.

How results are scored

Each word you type is checked against six fields. Matches add points, entries with zero points are hidden, and the rest are sorted by score.

Ignored words

These words never count, so free alternative to Notion searches for notion:

alternative alternatives free clone clones open source for to a an the of
at home without ads cancel app apps tool like instead replace replacement
me my i need something vs and in

When nothing matches

If no entry scores, the results page offers the Wanted Board. That is on purpose: an empty search is a request nobody has written down yet.

Clone pages

One page per clone, at #/tool/<slug>. Everything you need to decide, nothing you need to scroll past.

What is on the page

• Header: name, category, a Website button to the project and a Save button.
• Four stats: stars, license, last update and the yearly saving against the paid side.
• Clones: the paid product this one replaces, with its approximate yearly price.
• Compare: the swap card with three keep lines, and the lose line next to it.
• Topics and More in category: four more clones from the same shelf.

Comparisons

The comparison page, at #/compare/<slug>, lines up the paid product and the clone row by row.

Rows

Why only one lose line

Long pros-and-cons lists hide the thing that matters. Every swap has exactly one lose line, and it is the thing you will actually notice after switching. Sometimes that is a real feature. Sometimes it is the cancellation fee.

Subscription bill

Tap the paid products you still pay for. CLONE adds up the yearly price, shows the five-year number and lists the clones for exactly that set.

The math

yearly   = sum(price_per_year of every tapped product)
five_yr  = yearly × 5
cloned   = $0

Prices are list prices for the plan most people buy, converted to a yearly number. Monthly plans are multiplied by 12. One-time purchases are counted once, in the first year.

The starting bill

A new visitor starts with four common subscriptions tapped: ChatGPT Plus, Adobe Photoshop, Notion Plus and YouTube Premium. That is $792 per year. Untap them, tap your own, and the number is yours.

The whole index

Tap every product in the index and the bill reaches $9,413 per year, most of it from three tools: Unity Pro ($2,200), Autodesk Maya ($1,875) and Autodesk Fusion ($680).

Saved and history

CLONE has no accounts. Everything it remembers about you stays in your browser’s local storage, under five keys.

Storage keys

Starting over

Clear site data for CLONE in your browser, or run this in the console on the site:

Object.keys(localStorage).filter(k => k.startsWith("clone.")).forEach(k => localStorage.removeItem(k))

Wanted Board

The paid products nobody has cloned well yet. Vote for the ones that hurt, or post your own.

Statuses

Voting

• One vote per request per browser. Tap again to take it back.
• The top requests are pinned for builders every week.
• Requests you post start with your own vote and are marked “yours”.

Most wanted right now

Open the Wanted Board →

Index format

Every card, clone page and comparison is built from one record. These are its fields.

A record

{
  "slug":    "gimp",
  "name":    "GIMP",
  "cat":     "design",
  "desc":    "Full raster editor with layers, masks, curves…",
  "paid":    "Adobe Photoshop",
  "yr":      264,
  "license": "GPL-3.0",
  "stars":   "5.9k",
  "url":     "https://www.gimp.org",
  "keep":    ["Layers, masks, filters", "PSD import", "Runs on any OS"],
  "lose":    "The cancellation fee",
  "topics":  ["photo", "raster", "psd"]
}

Fields

Routes

Categories

Twelve shelves. Every clone sits on exactly one.

All categories

Licenses

The license decides what you may do with a clone. Here is what is in the index and what each one means for a normal user.

In the index

Using a clone at work

Submit a clone

Found a clone we missed? If it passes the four checks, it goes in the index.

Before you send it

1. It does the main job of a paid product people actually pay for.
2. The source is public and the license is readable.
3. It has a release or active commits in the last six months.
4. The core job is free to use or free to self-host.

The template

Fill this in and post it on X with the repo link. One clone per post.

CLONE submission
clone:   project name
repo:    https://github.com/owner/name
replaces: paid product and plan
price:   $ per month or year
keep:    three things it does that people pay for
lose:    one honest line

Post on X

What happens next

The model drafts the record from the repo, a person checks it against the four checks, and the clone shows up in Latest Additions. If it fails a check, it goes to the Wanted Board as “Being cloned” so people can watch it grow.

Limits and accuracy

What the numbers on CLONE are, and what they are not.

Numbers are approximate

• Prices are rounded list prices for one common plan in USD. Your region, plan and discounts will differ.
• Stars are rounded counts of the main repository and move every day.
• Updated labels show how fresh an entry is in the index, not the project’s last commit.

Same job, not same product

A clone replaces the job, not every feature. Team workflows, plugins and file formats can differ. The lose line names the biggest gap, and the project’s own docs name the rest.

Privacy

CLONE has no backend. Search, the bill, votes and saved clones run in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there are no analytics scripts on the page.

$CLONE

The token of the index. Same name, same idea: the expensive thing, cloned.

Contract

soon

Links

FAQ

Short answers to what people ask right before they cancel something.

Is it legal to use a clone?

Yes. Every clone in the index is its own code written by its own community. None of them copy the paid product’s code.

Will my files open?

Usually. The keep lines say when a clone reads the paid format, like GIMP with PSD or LibreOffice with .docx. Complex files can still look slightly different.

Why is my favourite app missing?

Either nobody submitted it yet or it failed a check. Post it on the Wanted Board, or send it with the submission template.

Does CLONE make money from the links?

No. There are no affiliate links and no paid placements. A project is listed because it works.

Can I lose my bill?

Yes, if you clear your browser data. It lives only in your browser.

Changelog

What changed in the index and on the site.