licensing

Open source vs paid developer tools

Of the 1,301 active tools in the catalog, this is how many you can actually read the source of — and what the open-source ones still charge for once you stop self-hosting.

Edition October 2026 · computed Oct 1, 2026

70.5%

of active tools are open source

Open source: 917; source available, self-hostable
Proprietary: 384; closed source, vendor-hosted
Median open-source plan: $20/mo; cheapest paid tier, where one exists
Median proprietary plan: $20/mo; cheapest paid tier

by category

Where open source actually wins

Ranked by the share of a category that is open source. Categories with fewer than 8 tools are left out — a 100% share of three tools is a coincidence, not a finding.

by pricing model

How the catalog monetizes

Open source is a licensing fact, not a business model. Each row shows how many of that model's tools are open source — which is why 917 open-source tools appear across several models, not only under the legacy "Open source" one.

Open source623 tools · 621 open source
Freemium560 tools · 265 open source
Paid83 tools · 0 open source
Free35 tools · 31 open source

the cost question

Open source is not the same as free

Both medians below are the cheapest plan with a real monthly cost. A tool whose only priced tier is $0 is counted as free rather than as a $0 plan, because averaging free tiers into a price makes the whole catalog look cheaper than it is.

The median open-source tool with a paid tier charges $20/mo for it, against $20/mo for the median proprietary tool. The licence removes a software fee; it does not remove the hosting, the operations, or the model provider bill.

827 active tools carry no comparable monthly price at all — free products, pure usage-metered products, and quote-only enterprise tiers.

How this was computed

Counted across every active tool in the catalog (1,301 records). Discontinued tools are excluded — their licence is history, not a live option.
Open source is an OSI-style license: the isOpenSource checkbox, unless the license field says otherwise. Source-available (public source under a non-OSI license) is not counted as open source. The proprietary figure is every active tool that is not open source, so it includes both proprietary and source-available tools. The "Open source" pricing model is a separate, older classification, which is why the two counts differ.
A category is only listed once it holds 8 tools.
Prices are the cheapest plan with a real monthly USD cost. Non-USD plans, usage-metered plans, one-time purchases and quote-only tiers have no monthly equivalent and are excluded rather than converted.
Of the 474 priced tools, 150 come from editor-entered plan rows with a source URL and a check date; the rest are read from the editorial pricing summary.

Recomputed October 1, 2026 · scoring rubric & evidence rules · open dataset (CC-BY 4.0)

keep reading

The state of AI developer toolsThe whole catalog in one read — licensing, pricing, category density, and shutdowns, recomputed from live data.Which tools changed pricing recently?Every recorded price move, newest first: which plan changed, from what, to what.What shut down, and what replaced itShutdowns by year and category, and how often a dead tool actually left a replacement behind.