9 shocking repos that make money transcript

I'm going to show you nine repos that will make you money and cost nothing, but this is about more than just free. It's about customization. Every one of these tools you can get from GitHub and you can actually use your agent to customize it, make it useful for you. Let's get into it. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. The first one, oh and by the way, timestamps and links below. The first one I want you to see is PostHog.

It is incredibly popular. I think it's something like 97% of these its users are on the free version, don't even pay the company for anything. And what it does is it gives you open-source analytics that you can host yourself. And it's about charts and funnels and retention, but it's more than that. You don't just see where a customer dropped off before they bought from you. You also get to watch how they interacted with your site.

Here it is, watch a session replays and know exactly what the user did. Then you can start to roll out changes with A/B test and you can ask users questions. You can start to try different things and improve your results. Or, of course, you can ask your agent questions about the data so you can improve. This is comparable to the paid alternative, which is Mixpanel. Mixpanel can get very expensive. It's not unusual to go into the tens of thousands a year on it.

And as you can see here, I pulled up some complaints that people have had for it online, like the bill jumps fast once you pass the free tier, tracking anything usually means waiting on a developer, and support can take time to get back to you. So, PostHog is free, but it's really, really good. Look online and you're going to see the love that people have for it. Here's how you can use it to grow your business. You can actually just install it right now and see where customers quit.

Watch not just the numbers, but watch their interaction with your site and see how useful it is and see where you can tweak, where you can test, and where you can grow. And then also, because you own your customer data in the full experience, you can start asking your agent. I've got Claude code here, um as a placeholder for agent, but you can start asking your agent, "What can I be doing with this? How can I be improving my site?" And the connection between your AI and your data is unstoppable.

Now, if you don't have a business, you can do this as a consultant. You can go to stores and offer look for people who have, let's say, $200,000 a year um and offer to help them grow their sales by finding leaks and you'd be the one implementing this and you'd be the one working with Cloud Code to find the leaks and improve them. And you can use a tool like Store Leads for about $75 a month, which will help you filter Shopify stores for the right ones for you.

You can also just set up tracking for software and other companies. There There ways that you can see who's using alternatives like BuiltWith, but there other tools like Wappalyzer, where you can see who's using alternatives and you could say, "I'll switch you over to PostHog, which is an open-source solution that has more features that I think you'll like better and you won't have to pay them. Pay me a little bit of money and you'll save a lot in the long run." So, that's how you can do it with PostHog.

Let's look at the second one. Second one is Open SEO. I've had the founder on here to talk about this. He's got now 21,000 stars. He recently announced that it is part of Y Combinator. And what it is is open-source SEO that you can run yourself. So, that means you get to do keyword research, see what people are searching for and how and how hard it is for you to rank, track rankings for keywords. You know what? You can see all of these in I think a couple of things are really worth noticing.

Number one, that you can really marry it to your agent, ChatGPT, Cloud Code, etc. and have it do the work for you. And the second thing that I've seen people do is they will create custom dashboards. They will integrate it into their CRM. When I say that this is open-source and so you get to customize it, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about and this is a perfect example of it. That's why people love this. The alternative, of course, is SEMrush and you know there a few others and they get pretty expensive.

It's not unusual for SEMrush to be hundreds of dollars a month. It grows into the thousands of dollars or adds up, I should say, to the thousands of dollars a year. Am I talking too quickly? Probably I should slow down, but you tell me in the comments. I I just get so riled up and go on these things. And of course, if you look at the complaints online as I did, you can see that people say that canceling takes a long time.

You have to that there are no refunds, which I think is a fairly okay thing to offer no refunds. But they're constant upsells that people get bothered by. So, you're not looking at an inferior product, you're looking at a more customizable product that will solve some of the problems you have if you're dealing with alternatives to this. Now, of course, how do you use it in your business? You can just start using it right now and track it for free.

It will help you uh oh, yeah, you know what? I've been checking to see if you can run this on Cloudflare's free plan. As far as I can tell, Cloudflare's Cloudflare's free plan, which I think I'm still on, which I think this page that you're looking on is still running on, is still capable of running Open SEO. If you hate hosting it yourself and you still want to save money, yeah, pay Open SEO 10 bucks a month and they will host it for you.

So, it goes from free if you host it yourself, 10 bucks a month if you let them deal with the hosting, and you still save money either way. So, if you're on a on a competitor, switch over to them. And the other way is if you haven't tried SEO and you're not into SEO, let your agent, let Claude or whatever agent you use, manage your SEO for you. I just talked with this really nice older gentleman who is a therapist who has essentially done this, let Claude manage his SEO, and he is now growing sales and doing so well.

Um and at the end of my pre-interview with him, he said, "Actually, Andrew, I don't want to tell the world how I do this. I don't want to do an interview with you." But he's doing it well, and this is something that you can do with Open SEO. Basically, let Claude, let your agent handle it. Onto the consultant play. Obviously, SEO is a consistent generator of revenue. I've seen multiple I've interviewed multiple companies.

In fact, one of the first ones that I that I interviewed here was a guy named Chirag Kulkarni, who is I think now in the I don't know, it's definitely doing millions of dollars essentially doing SEO for companies, and this tool Open SEO could be the backbone of you getting started with a simple SEO company Um, because you can build on it, because it's inexpensive to try, and because now in a world where AEO is getting bigger, people have a new interest in SEO as a foundation for AEO, answer engine optimization.

And so, you can just use Google Maps to find the type of firm that you want to go after. Solo practitioners seem like they're often open to new ideas for growing their businesses. Let's get on to the next one. Invoice Ninja. It's got 10,000 GitHub stars, and the basic thing here is if if you just need to send quotes to your clients, they approve them, then you create invoices, why go for a very expensive paid plan from someone else when you could just host this yourself?

You can take your online payments by card, and I think more and more if you are sending out invoices, you should maybe even hide the credit card option or get rid of it and go to the bank option because then you don't have as many fees. Um, in fact, as soon as I get into the $500 and definitely to the $1,000 uh price point, I just get rid of the credit card option. I don't make it available. And if someone asks, I bring it back.

Um, so, this allows you to do that. More importantly, you get to do auto billing on retainers and subscriptions, and you get all the things that you're used to from paid paid uh software like FreshBooks. I like FreshBooks, but now it's 70 bucks a month if you pay month to month, plus there's an extra $11 a month for every extra team member. It adds up into the hundreds of dollars a month, and people are complaining online about prices going up without anything really dramatically new coming.

I know that they were competing with QuickBooks. I don't know how far they've gotten along with it, but if you're not looking for a QuickBooks alternative and just want to good invoicing software that your agent can manage, Invoice Ninja will be the one for you. So, how do you use it to grow your business? Number one, stop chasing unpaid bills. You know what? I had um someone say, "I'm going to Andrew, have you come out to a conference, and you'll speak, and I'm going to pay for it." And he was a friend, and I said, "Sure." Kind of friendish, never met before, but an online friend.

How do I go to him and say, "Now you have to pay me. When's the payment?" I don't need to deal with that. I just put it into invoicing and let the invoice be the follow-up process. So, even if it's not like an official thing that you're selling, put it into an invoice and have and have the invoice software follow up and make sure that you get payment. The other thing is, if you are selling any kind of service, I'm telling you right now, switch to the auto bill.

Tell them this is a month-to-month plan, even if you don't need them to sign up for 6-month minimum or annual plan. Tell them even if you just think that it's going to be 1 month, say it's a one it's a one month it's a month-to-month plan, you can cancel anytime, even a day before the month comes up. And so, this allows you to turn simple retainers into subscriptions. All right, the consultant play. One of the things that I've discovered as somebody now who who owns a property in Texas is a lot of um a lot of service companies are not good at sending invoices.

They're not good at collecting. It actually is a real problem for me. The person wants to pay, like Alan, who just did hundreds of dollars of work just basically mulching some trees. I got to know how much do I pay you for that, Alan? You've never mulched for me before, never sent me an invoice. There are a lot of companies like that. You can handle their um their payments. Or, what you could do is you could go and you can say to them, "You know what?

How about if I sell Give me your customer list or work together and I turn your existing customers into monthly retainers." And imagine if Alan were Actually, Alan does do this. He's on a subscription. My plumber did this for me. I said, "How about if you pay us a subscription every 6 months, we'll charge you a little bit of money. You become a high priority customer, so if you have a leak, we are going to jump on your leak before anyone else's leak, which in the freeze of Austin is a major issue.

And we'll also do a couple of things for you, um like drain your What's the thing? The water boiler and do this and do that." And go, "Sure." I signed up for their subscription. So, this is another opportunity for you to go to these businesses and say, "You will be the one who helps them get consistent revenue." And Invoice Ninja could be a way for you to do that. All right, these are all ideas. I want you to think about them and to use my my suggestions here to just spur something in you.

All right, let me tell you about my sponsor Zapier. I know you think you know about Zapier, but let me tell you the problem Zapier is solving for you right now if you are like me using AI. I use AI all the time, and I just complained recently that my bill just went up up up. Like really, my Grok bot bill should have been 140 bucks a month? The 2-day overage for going over my bill was $265. I asked my bot, "Why?" It's all these automations.

I said, "What do you mean?" Well, automations for AI are real intense processes. They have to think through, they have to rationalize, they have to make decisions, and often they make mistakes because they're probabilistic engines. What Zapier says is, "Why do you need an AI probabilistic guessing machine to go and check your calendar every 5 minutes or every hour or to check your email? What you're doing is you're racking up your expenses with these automations, and you're allowing mistakes.

Let code do that." And so, Zapier has these um automations where you let the code do things that are mundane, repetitive, and don't need the intelligence of AI, and then you offload the the stuff that's important for AI to be there to AI. And so, that's how you're paying less little for the code, and you're only using AI when you need it. And that's what their next-gen Zaps do. You just connect Zapier to Claude or your whatever agent.

You tell it, "I want you now to start using this for automations. Let's talk through how to do it." And it will set you up with it. Okay, I've got a link in the description. You can't even Google this. This just came out. It's really hard for me to find the link, but I got it from the company. It'll be in the description. Let's move on to the next one. Number four, Cal DIY. It's got 48,000 stars. This is the thing that you use to send people your calendar so they could book a time with you.

That means that you're going to get to own your booking page on your own domain. And if you stop paying a bill, you don't lose the connection to your calendar. It checks Google, Outlook, Apple calendars. Anyone still using Apple calendars? If you're one of these nerds, I want to know you if you're using Apple calendar. Tell me why you prefer it, and you won't get double booked. It's going to add the Zoom link, the Google Meet, the Teams link.

Are you using Teams? Let me know that in the chat, too. Why? Not to put you down. I really want to know. Okay, and it's going to charge people through Stripe and PayPal before they book with you if you want. It's really well done. It comes from a company that sells this as a service, but they also put it on GitHub for free for you to use. The paid alternative, as you probably know, is Calendly. Their standard seat price is $12 a seat per month.

It adds up for a 10-person operation to over $1,000. And people are complaining. They say free gets you just one meeting type. Everything else starts to cost you per seat. Users say that it's hard to cancel, and charges keep coming. The powered by Calendly badge stays unless you pay. I think with Calendly, I don't bother It doesn't bother me so much, but clearly it is bothering people, and they're complaining about it online.

So, how do you use Calendly to grow your business? Obviously, if you're already using an alternative, even if it's like if it's a paid one, switch over. You save money instantly. If it's one of the free ones that Google offers, and Google in their calendar now offers a free one, and you want to look a little more professional, use this and put it on your site. And the other thing you can do is if you're a consultant and you're tired of people not showing up, just start charging for your first consultation, or ask them to put a refundable deposit for the first consultation.

And that's going to make your calendar, which Google doesn't offer this as far as I know, make your calendar into something that ensures that people are ready to do business with you, not just ready to show up when the time is available on your calendar. All right, so how do you make money with this? Listen, as a creator for now two decades, as a podcaster who's written a great book on it. You should go check out my book on uh how to do interviews based on my my many years of podcasting.

Other podcasters come to me and say, "How do you make a living at this? Where Where do I start? How do I make money?" And the thing that I always tell them is, "Go to your audience, and tell them that you're offering consulting services." And they say, "What kind of consulting services?" I say, "It don't tell them. You shouldn't tell them. Just say, 'I'm offering consulting services. There's a link below.'" Let them fill out the the time on your calendar to talk to you.

Let them then pay whatever amount is. It doesn't really matter to me, but it should be significant. And then ask them, and Calendly will allow you to ask questions like that, "What's the problem you want me to solve? What does the solution look like? Why are you coming to me?" That will help understand help explain what they see you as uh as being able to help. And then you can go beyond consultation to create maybe software that solves a problem or a real consulting company that solves it.

So, that's how I help other creators earn their first money and figure out where their big revenue is coming from. That is a service that you can build. Calendly is a tool that will allow you to do that. All right. Next. Autumn. This is going to allow you to charge your users. How many people are now vibe coding, but they're not charging for jack? The nice thing about Autumn is it is not just per month. You can also charge per token.

And if you're in the AI space where you're creating a software that needs AI to operate well, it's costing you every time people use it. Why don't you start charging per token? If that's what you want to do, Autumn is going to let you do it. And if what you want to do is just do standard charging, it will allow you to do that, too. It's got 2,692 stars at this moment on GitHub. So, it's not one of the biggest projects out there, but it will allow you to do things like per request charges, per minute charges.

Whatever your app wants to meter, they're going to allow you to do that. And that's the beauty of this project. You can also offer free trials without a credit card up front, usage limits every month, etc., etc. It is something that's there to compete with Chargebee. Chargebee flow is about 100 Actually, it's a about or exactly 160 bucks a month for a company that's billing $20,000 a month. That's 9 1,920 bucks a year.

Meanwhile, people who have it are complaining the prices can double at renewal. Once you're locked in, it becomes harder. The fees rise every time your revenue rises. And the support can take a long time to get back to you. I've interviewed the founders of Chargebee. At the time, I didn't know how big they were. I'm now seeing how deeply embedded they are into companies and how it becomes expensive to use and hard to switch away.

So, how can you use this? Obviously, if you're building software, why not you're experimenting with building, why not experiment with just adding um adding a something that they could pay for adding a fee. And the beauty of this is that it's going to allow you to play around with how to add a fee and it is free software that you can go get right now from GitHub. I have this whole report, by the way. I know I'm ripping through this.

Um if you just click here, you can go directly to the repo every one of these and you can see it and get it directly. Uh the other thing you can do is if you haven't done it yet, start raising prices without losing customers. Put new customers on the higher plan and grandfather the older customers in um so that they get the lower plan. All right. How do you do this as a consultant? Here's a consultant play. Set up billing for small software companies.

Set up billing for small companies. You can use BuiltWith to see who is using competitors to Autumn and then reach out to them. Don't make it a mass message all at once. I would start off with easily by saying, "Hey, you know what? I'm starting a consulting company that is helping businesses switch to less expensive but more powerful token-based fees." Find a couple of words that you think will work and then say, "Can I just talk to you to understand why you're using what you're using and to show you this thing that I I built." Get on a call with them to understand first then close sales or experiment.

Maybe you're more of a like a boom boom boom ABC, always be closing and you want to close uh sales fast. You can find people who are using competitors and give them a lower fee by using Autumn. All right, and take a part of that. All right, Typebot. I don't love how closely their name is to the name Typeform, but maybe that's meant to let you know exactly what it is and just get on the right side of the trademark issue.

Here's what it is. It's chat-style forms and chatbots that you host yourself. So, you're going to be able to build these forms using drag and drop, using dozens of blocks like the text block, the image block, the video blocks. The thing about these things is I can read these, but you already know what blocks are out there because this is a solved problem that has existed for a long time. You can also allow branching off answers.

So, if someone if you ask someone, um have you ever bought from me before? If they say no, take them down one set of questions. If they say yes, take them down a different set of questions. Don't treat them the same. This allows you to do it. It allows you to use Zapier to connect it to thousands of apps or just Google Sheets and save the data where you want it. It will also allow you to put it anywhere including, and I love this part, on WhatsApp.

I only love it because the rest of the world is kick is pulling me kicking and screaming into WhatsApp. And I'm learning to like it. Actually, I'll tell you the thing I like about WhatsApp is I can have my agent run it for me in the browser, unlike iMessage which needs to happen on my computer. So, I can say to my agent, "Hey, you manage my WhatsApp now." Kind of nice. Kind of nice. Let's go to the next one. The alternative on this one is Typeform.

You know it. The reason Typeform charges so much is because they are now the enterprise play. This is the company that now enterprise trusts, so they could charge a lot. We're looking at hundreds of bucks a month. And I know they have what? A $13 a month plan that then will cut out too quickly because they suddenly consider you enterprise when you hit a certain What was it? 100 forms? Nothing significant. They really [snorts] They're not giving you enough.

And so, these these guys came out and they said, "You know, we're actually going to make it free, make it available." And the thing about Typeform is it sunsets renewals and refunds that are hard to get. It's Excuse me, it has surprise sunset surprise renewals and refunds that are hard to get. Hit your response cap, and this one pisses me off. Oh, shoot. Do I have to now check the box on YouTube for that? This is the one that irritates me.

You hit your response cap, and suddenly your forms go offline. And then, removing the Typeform logo means paying in for an even bigger plan. I don't want these software vendors to use me to promote their software, especially if I'm paying. So, here's how Typebot can actually grow a business. If you're using one of the alternatives, you now have a free option where you never get a response cap again. You can just keep using it.

And the second thing is there's so many clever ways to use forms like this like a product finder. You have someone on your site, you want to make it easy for them to find what they need, use this form to ask them questions so that they could then be directed to where they want to go. Um and if you want to do this as a consultant, you're going to help info product people who are now doing nothing but collecting email addresses and then running the same campaign to them.

Start to ask questions on the form. So you can use Buildwith again to see who's using tools like ConvertKit's landing pages and similar landing pages who could then use a leveling up. I heard I heard a consultant to to help grow our sales and the first thing he did was he started asking more questions after the email address was put into our site. But they weren't just more annoying questions, they were useful questions that then increased our conversion because of the quality of the questions and he didn't even then show a different offer based on what people said.

Interesting. That's the play with Typebot. Let's go to the next one. Frap CRM track leads and deals with drag and drop board stages. If you need a CRM that works like you'd expect it to, this is the one and if you don't like the way it works, you can actually really edit this one well. Give it every deal give every deal its own page. You got email, call notes, tasks. Make it have it make calls using Twilio, get WhatsApp messages put in there and then pull pull your leads from Facebook and Instagram.

And you can build your own fields, your own views. In fact, this is just open source so you can actually take it and build whatever you want with it. The alternative to this is and I know we could say like it's Salesforce but it's not really competitor Salesforce, probably not a competitor HubSpot. It's more like a Pipedrive. People who are paying $89 a seat to help to use software that helps them close more sales, they find it valuable but Pipedrive right now has key features like lead capture that cost extra as add-ons.

Reviewers are saying the canceling is confusing, takes too many steps, support emails can go unanswered. Um, and I've got sources to all this so you can go and see where where I got this. I I didn't want to just go with my gut. I wanted to say, "Is this really what people are saying?" And that's where I got those links. All right. So, how do you make money from it? If you've got a business right now, add sales people to it without having to pay 20 bucks a month.

You know what? I had a free plan from an alternative company and I thought, "Great, it's free and by the time we get charged, I'm going to be raking in the cash." We were making good money but not raking in the cash and this was a big expense of few thousand dollars and I wasn't getting much from the bloated alternative. This is a free option that you can use and this will allow you also if you're someone using Facebook, Instagram to capture leads or any other tool, capture them properly in a CRM that's designed to help you close sales.

The consulting play is pretty straight up. There are people right now who are asking to hire people to set up CRMs for them. Offer this as a CRM that you set up and you don't just get to the fixed price that you charge to to install it, you also can get ongoing maintenance or ongoing software um charges. Frap CRM is from this family in India that was irritated about crea- about paying for CRM and they said this this got to be an easier way.

Okay. Mautic, open source email marketing and automation that you self-host. I'm going to jump for a second here forward. This is the competitor to GoHighLevel. I was on GoHighLevel. I was paying them $497 a month. When it was time for me to cancel, it was too difficult to get into them. When it was time for me to make changes, it was difficult because I had set it up using a consultant. Remember the consultant I told you earlier, the one who grew our sales?

He happened to sign us up for GoHighLevel and we were just kind of stuck. Um, so what does Mautic give you in its place? You get to build emails with drag and drop builder, AB tests. You get to send your email out using your third-party provider of choice. Like you like Amazon? Use Amazon. And you get to design visual campaigns, you get to grow your list with landing pages, forms, pop-ups. You get to score leads to say who's actually probably going to buy from us and who's not.

Send SMS, web notifications. It basically has a lot of features. I don't think it matches uh GoHighLevel feature for feature, but what it does is it gives you an open-source alternative that you have more control over. So, if you're a business owner, you now get to own the whole email experience for yourself. And the other way that you can use this to grow your business is turn subscribers into customers. I do feel like I'm machine gunning you on this one.

This is why I like to have a co-host because a second voice slows it down, but there's so much that I wanted to tell you and I'm so freaking excited about this stuff. Okay. Um the one complaint that nobody's given me is that I'm a cheerleader for everything that I talk about and it's true. I really do. I All right. Turn subscribers into customers. If all you have is a landing page that collects email addresses, now you can turn Mautic to do follow-up emails.

You're going to let Claude code set them up for you and you're going to start to be more intelligent with the way that you follow up people. And of course, if you are somebody who wants to do this as a consultant, there's so many different ways to do this. One is to help info marketers and these info product makers are the ones who are just collecting email address. They have a lot of margin, but they don't have a lot of time because they're selling their own education.

This is a way for you to go to them and say, "I can help you grow your sales by switching to a more intelligent marketing platform that you can own." And then you can set it up for them. 2,500 is actually on the cheap side. 300 bucks a month and you're going to have such a long relationship with them as you do this as a service and keep adding the features that they want because you got your agent supporting you. Finally, we got Chatwoot.

It's an open-source customer support inbox that you self-host. I I You know what? I want to say this is um that Y Combinator backed this company, but I can't 100% say say it. It does have 37,000 plus stars. And here's what it'll do. It will actually help your whole team answer customer support email without paying the monthly fee. If you do customer support, one of the things that you know about it is when email comes into the boss, you say, "Well, should we get an account for the boss and pay a monthly fee?

The boss is hardly ever in the box. Let's not do it. We'll forward it to them." So, now the boss has to have it forwarded over. "Should we get this guy Steve in cuz maybe sometimes we want him to check email and sometimes we don't." Nah, let's not and you start to get really chintzy about who gets a seat here because you don't want to pay per month for people who just dabble in it. And as a result, you cut back on who can answer customer support.

The other thing is that you tend not to add AI into it because you can get charged for AI. And sometimes, for every one of these seats that you attach, you're now charged for the AI addition because they all get to benefit from AI. The nice thing about Chatwoot is you don't have to pay per seat, you can bring your own OpenAI key, and you can start to create your own um your own AI support tickets replies. All right. You can even plug your own AI bot to answer customers, hand off, and then you can hand some things off to a human being.

This is what we're talking about. The alternative, of course, to this is Intercom. Wasn't Intercom just acquired? They were. They were acquired by Salesforce, I want to say, but I can't say 100% for sure. And basically, I think they've been renamed Finn because this new product, their new AI product, has taken on so much, but it is expensive. They're no longer looking for you as a customer, they're looking to go up market.

Um by the way, if I got that wrong, let me know in the comments and I'm going to look afterwards and I'm going to feel bad, but at least I'll pin somebody's comment if I got wrong who that is. Um but people are saying, "Look, the bill just keeps going higher and higher and higher from them." That they can charge you 99 cents even when your staff starts to answer customer support instead of Finn, their agent. And their own support can be a little bit difficult to work with.

So, how do you use this to grow your business? First of all, now you have a way to answer all your customer support in one place. If you've been do using Gmail and you didn't want to switch over to one of the alternatives, now you have an option that's free. And you can start building your own order support bot. We're talking about something where if someone says, "Where's my order?" they get an answer quickly, right away, and this is going to allow you to do it because Claude code can build it with Chat Bot's free version with no per answer fees.

So, if you're a business owner, that's how you can make money with it. And if you're consultant, the consultant play is to go and see who's using the competition and say, "I've got a cheaper alternative that will let more of your people answer customer support tickets or be engaged with customers and will allow you to bring AI in to make it more intelligent without having to pay per cost, and I can customize it to you because it is all open source, and you got the GitHub link right there.

The whole thing that I showed you here and every one of these is linked to below. If you found this helpful, I do these on a regular basis, these roundups of repos that I find to be really helpful and and interesting and that you can build with. Follow for more, and if you like this one, I've got another one that I think you're going to freaking love. Challenge me. Come at me. See you on that one.