About
I'm Guto Martino, a marketer. I've worked in crypto and blockchain since 2019, which means I've spent my career around software that is open by default. The wallets, the chains, the infrastructure: everything my industry runs on is open source. It works, and nobody thinks that's strange.
My day job is running a marketing agency, and a big part of that job is evaluating tools: for clients, for campaigns, for my own stack. Year after year, the same thing bothered me. I kept approving subscriptions for software that had an open source equivalent almost nobody had heard of. Not because the open version was worse. Because nobody markets it. Open source projects are built by engineers who would rather ship a release than write a landing page, so the paid tool with the better ad budget wins by default.
In 2026 the last excuse died. Working with AI coding agents showed me that setup, the thing that used to make open source impractical for people like me, was becoming a solved problem. So I started swapping my own stack: Granola went out for meeting notes, my scheduling moved to Cal.com, my design work runs on Open Design. Then I built this site to do the same investigation, properly, for everything else.
What this site is
There Is An Open Source For That answers one question: should you replace a paid app with an open source alternative, yes or no, and what's the catch.
It is not another directory. Directories tell you what exists, and there are good ones already. Every page here is a decision: use it if, skip it if, watch out. Every factual claim carries a source link and the date we verified it. And every tool gets graded on whether you can actually start using it without touching a terminal, because most of the people drowning in subscription costs are not developers.
If a claim can't be verified, it doesn't get published. We dropped a finished page about a 31,000-star project just before launch because two quotes didn't check out at the source. How we verify everything.
How it's made
AI agents do the heavy research: they pull license data, release history and deployment paths, and they find what real users report. Then I review and sign every verdict before it publishes. Nothing goes live on an agent's word alone.
I'm telling you this plainly because you would figure it out anyway, and because I think it's the honest way to use these tools: machines for the legwork, a named human accountable for every conclusion.
Corrections
If anything on this site is wrong, tell me: hello@thereisanopensourceforthat.com. Maintainers of covered projects especially. I correct verified errors within 48 hours and note the change on the page.
What this site will never do: paid placements, affiliate-ranked lists, or pages published without sources. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it happens.