Why we built unsubs.org: the end of unused SaaS subscriptions

Most people we talk to have the same story. They sign up for a tool because they need it for one project. The project ends. The tool doesn't. Months later it's still on the card statement, quietly renewing, and cancelling it feels like a chore for another day.

We built unsubs.org because we were tired of that story, and because the fix turned out to be harder to find than it should be.

The problem: the alternatives exist, but they're hard to find

Here's what surprised us. For a lot of popular subscription tools, there's already a version you can pay for only when you use it, or buy once and keep. Booking pages that charge per booking. Storage priced per gigabyte you actually store. Email sending priced per message. Writing apps, photo editors and transcription tools sold as a one-time licence.

But try searching for them. "Calendly alternative" gives you a page of other monthly subscriptions, usually ranked by who pays the most for the click. "Free" alternatives often turn out to be a trial that converts to a plan, or an open-source project you'd have to install on your own server. The thing most people actually want, a finished product without the monthly bill, gets lost in between.

And the stakes are real. When C+R Research surveyed 1,000 US consumers, people underestimated their monthly subscription spending by $133 on average. For businesses, Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index estimates around $21 million a year in wasted licence spend per organisation on average. That's not a rounding error. It's a market that's ready for a different deal.

What unsubs.org is

A catalog of software alternatives to subscription SaaS, with one strict rule: every tool we list is either pay-per-use or pay-once. If there's no way to use it without a recurring plan, it's not here.

You can browse by category, like Scheduling, AI & Chat or Storage & Backup, or start from the subscription you want to drop, for example Calendly alternatives. Each listing shows how it's priced, so you can compare what you'd actually pay with what you pay now.

What we leave out, on purpose

Self-hosted and open-source software. This is the choice we get asked about most. Open source is great, and there are already good directories for it. But "run it yourself" swaps a monthly bill for servers, updates and backups, and that's not the trade most people are looking for. We list finished products that someone else runs and maintains.

Subscriptions in disguise. A "pay as you go" plan with a monthly minimum, or a "lifetime" deal that needs a yearly renewal to keep working, doesn't count.

How we keep it honest

A catalog is only useful if you can trust the order things appear in. So we set a few rules early and wrote them into how the site works:

• Paid placements never change the organic order. A vendor can sponsor a spot on an alternatives page, and when they do, it's clearly labelled "Sponsored". The rest of the list stays where it would be anyway.
• Only reviewed listings go live. Anyone can suggest a tool, but nothing is published until we've checked that it really is pay-per-use or pay-once.
• Real prices, with the currency. We show what a tool costs and in which currency, so you're not comparing euros with dollars by accident.

The site makes money from those labelled sponsorships and from affiliate links, which some vendors pay when you click through and buy. That's why the outbound links exist, and it's also why we're strict about keeping them out of the ranking.

Building it in public

unsubs.org is new, and the catalog is small and growing. We'd rather list fewer tools we're sure about than pad it with ones that don't fit the rule. We'll share what we learn as we go here on the blog: which categories people search for most, what's surprisingly hard to find without a subscription, and what we get wrong.

If you want to help, two things make the biggest difference:

• Tell us about tools we've missed. Suggest one here.
• Tell us which subscription you most want to get rid of. That's how we decide which alternatives pages to build next.

If you want the bigger picture first, start with why pay-per-use is replacing the flat monthly fee or our list of software without a subscription. Otherwise, dive into the catalog.