Open source apps have improved significantly over the years – good enough to serve as a viable replacement for many paid services. As a result, the team at How-To Geek has begun canceling some of our paid subscriptions and replacing them with new ones. open source, self-hosted alternatives. Here are three such programs that have proven to be worth the switch and have earned a permanent place in our workflow.
Medusa
Organize your movies and music yourself
Medusa is actually a free, open source alternative to Plex. If you’re not familiar with Plex, think of it as a way to self-host your own personal Netflix-style media server. You install Jellyfin on the system, point it to one or more folders containing your media (movies, TV shows, and music), and it turns them into your own personal streaming service. No need to worry about subscriptions, lifetime passes, or features locked behind a paywall.
This pricing model is a big part of why Jellyfin is having a moment right now. Plex recently hit it Lifetime Plex Pass $250 to $750it feels like a push to drive new users to its $7 monthly plan. The thing is, many of these “premium” features, such as hardware transcoding, intro skipping, and sharing your media with friends and family, are free with Jellyfin. Granted, some will argue that the Plex looks more polished than the Jellyfin – and I agree – but that polish isn’t worth the premium they’re asking for.
If you’re interested in getting started, my colleague Nick Lewis has a quick guide to converting an old one. Turn your Windows 10 laptop into a Jellyfin server. Andy Betts also regularly covers Jellyfin tips and tricks. For example, if you’re a Plex user thinking about switching, it has a how-to guide Plexifin to migrate easier.
It is worth emphasizing that Jellyfin (and Plex). Not replacements for Netflix. They don’t provide content – you bring your own. In my case, I’ve ripped several 4K Blu-rays and hosted them on Jellyfin for friends and family to stream. But for anything I don’t have in my collection, I keep subscribing to Prime and Netflix.
Audio bookshelf
Create your own personal Audible
Audio bookshelf it’s essentially Jellyfin for audiobooks. It’s a self-contained server for managing your audiobook library, tracking listening progress, fetching cover art and metadata, and even automatically detecting chapter markers.
Patrick Campanale – our team’s go-to place for home lab advice Sound for audiobookshelf After being annoyed by how quietly Amazon buried all of his audiobook purchases. It makes sense if you mainly want to listen to your own library, because the app isn’t constantly trying to sell you something new.
I myself followed and found Freedom especially useful for migration. It lets you download DRM-free copies of audiobooks already in your Audible library. Another option worth considering create your own audiobooks. If you have eBooks or PDFs, modern AI-powered text-to-speech tools like ElevenLabs can turn them into surprisingly good audiobooks.
That said, Adam Davidson found one on our team A completely different use for the audiobookshelf. He first set out to build a podcast server on his Raspberry Pi using Podgrab, but Podgrab didn’t have a clean way to delete old episodes. So he switched to Audiobookshelf instead, because it also manages podcast RSS feeds, complete with rules for how many episodes to keep and auto-delete old ones. For reading, he uses AudioBooth, an app that connects to Audiobookshelf so he can download episodes and listen offline.
The next cloud
Your one-stop solution to replace the Google ecosystem
The next cloud It’s not just an app – it’s a whole package. Basically, it works like a Google Drive-style file sync tool, but also handles calendars, contacts, notes, editing documents, and even photo management if you want to include everything. In short, most of what the Google ecosystem offers has its own version of Nextcloud, all running on its own server.
JT McGinty from our team last year After switching to Linux, everything connected. It replaced Google Drive with Nextcloud Files, replaced Google Photos with Nextcloud Photos integrated with community plugins like Recognize and Memories for facial recognition, and even replaced Google Docs with ONLYOFFICE integration for editing documents and spreadsheets directly in the browser. He also kept Nextcloud Notes for quick Markdown-based notes and routed his email through the Mail app for a unified interface.
It’s a complete replacement for both Google Drive and mine, but for personal use only. I still rely on Google for work because it remains the industry standard and you can’t realistically reshape an existing company’s workflows around your preferences. Plus, most of my professional work is posted online anyway, so privacy isn’t a major concern there.
If you decide to use Nextcloud, consider it a productivity tool, not a backup solution. If your home server fails and that’s the only place you store your files, they’re gone too. It’s a trade-off: Nextcloud gives you ownership and control, but not the same internal redundancy as Google. Therefore you must follow a proper 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy for something important.
- OS
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Windows, ChromeOS, macOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, Android
- Brand
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Google
- Developer(s)
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Google
- Free trial
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Yes
A great cloud storage solution for anyone who needs collaboration and sharing tools but doesn’t need zero-knowledge encryption.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg
These are just three of hundreds of open source, self-hosted applications. We’re constantly testing new ones, replacing the apps we use every day to see if these alternatives are really good enough. If you’re serious about deep access to FOSS, check out this list of free, open source software. Replace Microsoft, Google and big tech.
