I Replaced 4 Paid Subscriptions With Free Tools ($65.97/Month) — Here's What Actually Held Up

My subscription list had a pattern I did not enjoy looking at: four tools, $65.97 a month, $791.64 a year, and at least half of that money was paying for features I never open.

So I ran the obvious experiment. For each paid tool, I picked the free replacement people actually recommend, did the same everyday jobs in it, and wrote down where it broke. No benchmarks, no stopwatch theatre. Just: can it do the work, and what is the one catch nobody puts in the listicle?

Prices below are US list prices, annual plan billed monthly where that is how the vendor sells it, checked November 2026.

1. Photoshop ($22.99/mo) → Photopea ($0)

Photopea runs in a browser tab and opens real PSD files with layers, masks, blend modes and smart objects intact. That is the whole pitch, and it is true. I opened layered files, retouched photos, exported PNGs and JPGs, and saved work back out as PSD to hand off. If you know Photoshop's layout, you already know where everything is.

Every editing feature is on the free tier. Nothing is locked behind the paywall, because the paywall barely exists: Premium is about $5 a month and it removes ads and adds storage. It does not add tools.

The catch: it lives in a browser, and browsers have memory limits. A giant PSD with a few hundred layers will slow down or choke, where desktop Photoshop just gets on with it. The free tier also rations the AI tricks to roughly one action a day, and the ads sit next to your canvas the whole session.

Verdict: keep the swap if your photo work is edits, retouching, social graphics and client PSDs of sane size. Switch back if you spend your days in 2 GB print files.

Photopea: a full Photoshop-style editor in a browser tab, free with ads.

2. Premiere Pro ($22.99/mo) → DaVinci Resolve ($0)

This is the swap that sounds like a downgrade and is not. Resolve's free version is a complete professional editor: cut, colour grade, Fusion effects and Fairlight audio in one app, no watermark, no trial clock, exports up to Ultra HD 3840×2160 at 60fps. The colour tools are the reason film people use it, and they are in the free build.

The paid Studio version is a $295 one-time payment, not another subscription, and it adds things like stronger noise reduction, extra effects and output above 4K. Most people will never need it.

The catch: the learning curve is real, and it is not Premiere-shaped. The page-based layout (Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, Deliver) takes a weekend to stop feeling strange, your Premiere keyboard shortcuts are worthless, and colour work wants a decent GPU. Your old project files do not come with you either. You start fresh.

Verdict: keep the swap if you edit for YouTube, clients or yourself and can afford one rough weekend of relearning. Switch back if your income depends on a Premiere pipeline shared with other editors.

DaVinci Resolve: editing, colour, effects and audio in one free app.

3. Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/mo) → LibreOffice ($0)

LibreOffice is the boring swap, and boring is good here. Writer, Calc and Impress open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, handle the documents most people actually produce, and cost nothing, forever, with no account and no subscription nagging. For letters, invoices, school work, family budgets and ordinary spreadsheets, I hit no wall at all.

The catch: fidelity at the edges. A heavily formatted Word document with complex tables, tracked changes from three reviewers and a macro or two can come back slightly rearranged, and Excel macros basically do not survive the trip. You also lose the 1 TB of OneDrive storage and the Copilot AI features bundled into Microsoft 365, which for some people is the actual thing they were paying for.

Verdict: keep the swap if your documents are yours and mostly simple. Switch back if your job runs on shared, macro-heavy Excel files or you need that terabyte of cloud storage anyway.

LibreOffice: a full office suite that opens Microsoft files and charges nothing.

4. Notion Plus ($10/user/mo) → Obsidian ($0)

Notion Plus costs $10 per user per month billed annually, and a good chunk of that buys collaboration and polish. For personal notes, though, Obsidian's core app is free without feature limits: local Markdown files on your own machine, backlinks between notes, a graph view, and hundreds of community plugins. Your notes are plain text files. No export hostage situations, ever. It works fully offline because there is no server to wait for.

The catch: it is a notes app, not a team workspace. There is no Notion-style shared database your team edits together in real time, and syncing across your own devices is your problem to solve, with free options like a cloud folder or iCloud, or Obsidian's own Sync at $4 a month billed annually if you want it done for you. The first hour also feels plainer than Notion. It grows on you, but it is not pretty out of the box.

Verdict: keep the swap for a personal knowledge base, journal, study notes or writing drafts. Switch back if other people live in your workspace with you.

Obsidian: free, local Markdown notes with backlinks and a graph view.

The bill, after

That is $791.64 a year for the same four jobs, done slightly differently.

Who should NOT switch

Keep paying if any of these sound like you:

• Clients or employers hand you files and expect them back in the exact same app, macros, plugins and all.
• Your team works inside the paid tool together, daily. Replacing a shared workspace is a group decision, not a solo saving.
• You use the paid extras that were the real purchase: OneDrive's terabyte, Adobe's cloud libraries, Premiere's shared projects.
• The free tool's catch lands exactly on your main job, like Photopea's browser memory limit landing on a print designer's giant files.

For everyone else, the honest summary is this: three of my four swaps held up completely, and the fourth (Resolve) held up after one annoying weekend. The subscriptions were not buying me capability. They were buying me habit.

What have you cancelled and replaced this year, and which one did you quietly re-subscribe to? That second list is always the more honest one.