The Arsenal

MIT-licensed, genuinely open-source Zapier/n8n alternative with no reselling restrictions and built-in AI agent/MCP support.

Open standard, originally from Google and now under the Linux Foundation, for letting independent AI agents (not just agents-to-tools) talk to each other across vendors.

A simple, open convention — one markdown file in a repo root — that tells any coding agent how to build, test, and work in that project.

Free open-source terminal pair-programming tool that edits your repo via git commits, using any LLM API key.

The original cloud spreadsheet-database hybrid — polished and easy for non-technical staff, but cloud-only and priced per seat.

Rock-bottom-cost pay-as-you-go email sending API from AWS, with none of the polish.

Sourcegraph's agentic coding tool billed in flat-rate 'orb' usage tiers rather than per-seat.

Best-regarded API for coding and agentic work; Sonnet 5 is the value pick, Opus 5 for hardest tasks.

Anthropic's small set of example MCP servers (Filesystem, Git, Fetch, Memory, etc.) meant as SDK teaching examples.

PDF generation + e-signature (Etch) API combo: fill PDF templates and collect signatures programmatically.

The classic open-source data-pipeline scheduler; powerful for DAG-based batch jobs, overkill and code-heavy for typical SMB automation.

A marketplace of ~60,000 pre-built scrapers ('Actors') plus a platform to run your own.

Open-source drag-and-drop internal tool builder with per-user pricing on top of a free self-hosted tier.

Open-source Firebase-style BaaS with auth, databases, storage and functions, self-hostable or cloud.

Free, local-first open-source tracing and eval tool from Arize; upgrade path to their paid Arize AX platform.

Speech-to-text API provider that now also offers an all-in-one Voice Agent API bundling STT+LLM+TTS at a single per-minute rate.

Enterprise-grade hosted identity platform, now priced separately and steeply for B2B/SSO use cases.

Open-source billing/entitlements layer that sits on top of your own Stripe account — not a merchant of record.

The original cloud object storage service — reliable, ubiquitous, but egress fees add up fast.

Amazon's OCR/forms extraction service for text, tables, key-value pairs, invoices, receipts and IDs.

Microsoft's cloud OCR/forms service with prebuilt models for invoices, receipts, IDs and tax forms plus custom extraction.

Open-source Airtable alternative — a spreadsheet-style database UI with per-user cloud pricing or free self-hosting.

Open-source, code-first TypeScript auth framework you self-host for free, with an optional paid hosted dashboard.

Enterprise-leaning AI phone call platform with flat per-minute talk-time pricing and its own telephony or BYO Twilio/SIP.

Eval-first platform for LLM apps: run scored experiments, then trace production against the same scorers.

Enterprise-grade proxy network and scraping infrastructure, priced for high-volume operations.

Open-source AI agent that drives a browser autonomously from a plain-language task description.

Managed cloud headless browsers with anti-bot handling, built for AI agents and scrapers.

Open-source low-code builder for internal apps, free to self-host with no per-seat licensing fee.

Budget CDN and edge storage with pay-as-you-go pricing and no free-egress gimmicks needed — it's just cheap.

Free-feeling, TikTok-native video editor with auto-captions, templates, and AI tools baked in.

AI-native short-form editor built around auto-captions, AI video/voiceover, and AI 'digital twin' avatars.

Template-based document generator (fill a Word/Excel/PowerPoint template with JSON data) with a free self-hosted community edition.

Low-latency TTS and STT provider (Sonic voice model, Ink-2 transcription) aimed at real-time voice agents.

Developer-friendly open-source embedding database, simple enough to run in-process for a prototype.

Anthropic's terminal/IDE coding agent that reads a repo, plans, edits multiple files, runs tests, and now can act semi-autonomously via Auto Mode.

Hosted auth with prebuilt React UI components, organizations, and per-MAU pricing.

Free, open-source VS Code extension that runs an autonomous coding agent using your own API keys.

Edge compute (Workers), static hosting (Pages), zero-egress object storage (R2), and serverless SQLite (D1).

Multilingual and multimodal embedding model from Cohere, strong on non-English text and mixed text/image search.

Models that operate a computer directly — reading screenshots and issuing mouse/keyboard actions — instead of only calling defined APIs.

Reactive TypeScript backend-as-a-service with its own document/relational database, not Postgres.

Open-source, self-hosted Heroku/Vercel alternative you run on your own server (e.g. a Hetzner box).

Notification workflow platform billed simply per send, with an MCP server already built.

Python framework for role-based 'crews' of agents that collaborate on a task, plus a visual builder.

A VS Code fork with a built-in AI agent that reads and edits your whole repo.

Speech-to-text and text-to-speech API provider with per-minute pricing and a dedicated Voice Agent API.

Extremely cheap Chinese-developed model API with a 1M context window and off-peak discount pricing.

MIT-licensed open-weight model family from a Chinese lab that now matches or beats several closed frontier models on coding benchmarks at roughly a tenth of the API price.

Edit video/audio by editing a text transcript; strong for polishing screen recordings and removing filler words.

An autonomous 'AI software engineer' that plans and executes coding tasks largely unsupervised.

Open-source headless backend and auto-generated admin UI that wraps directly around an existing Postgres database.

Docker's free, open-source way to run MCP servers as isolated containers and expose them through one gateway.

Free, MIT-licensed open-source document converter from IBM Research that runs fully offline/on your own machine.

Enterprise-grade template-based document generator (Word/PDF) with both cloud subscription and perpetual project licensing.

Open-source DocuSign alternative you can self-host for free or run hosted with API access.

The market-leading e-signature platform; sends and tracks legally binding signature requests.

Simpler, cheaper e-signature tool (formerly HelloSign) with a real API and generous single-user plan.

Best-in-class AI voice: text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and sound effects, with a real API and a hosted MCP server.

A search API built for AI/LLM use — semantic web search plus clean page content, pay-per-call.

Document processing platform combining parsing and field extraction, priced in credits per page/action.

Figma's official MCP server that feeds real design context (components, variables, layout) to AI coding agents.

Full-featured form builder (payments, PDF generation, scheduling) with a generous free tier at 1,000 responses/month.

Google's mobile/web BaaS: NoSQL database, auth, hosting and functions, pay-as-you-go beyond a free Spark tier.

Turns any URL or whole site crawl into clean Markdown/JSON, billed per page in credits.

Runs full Docker containers ('machines') close to users worldwide, billed per resource reserved.

Open-source forms/surveys platform with a self-hostable community edition, aimed at in-product surveys and forms.

Google's embedding model, priced mid-pack, with a genuinely free experimentation tier via Google AI Studio.

GitHub's AI pair programmer: inline completions, chat, and agent mode inside your IDE.

GitHub's official MCP server for reading repos/code and managing issues and PRs from any AI agent.

All-in-one CRM/marketing/automation platform for agencies; API access requires at least the $297/mo Unlimited plan.

Google's open-source, code-first framework for building and deploying multi-agent systems.

Google Cloud's document parsing suite with OCR, Form Parser, and trainable custom extractors.

Cheapest frontier-adjacent tier with huge free allowance and native long context; Flash is the value pick.

Free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted Docker API that converts HTML, Markdown, URLs, and Office files to PDF.

Drop-in proxy or async logger for LLM calls — the easiest tracing setup of the bunch, weaker on evals.

German cloud VPS provider, dramatically cheaper than AWS/Azure with huge bundled bandwidth.

AI avatar video generator — turn a script into a talking-head video with a digital avatar and cloned voice.

Field service management software (scheduling, invoicing, QuickBooks sync) with API access gated to the top plan.

CRM/marketing platform with a genuinely free tier that includes real API access — the most accessible CRM API for a solo developer.

Enterprise prompt-management and eval platform for LLM apps — now being absorbed into Anthropic.

Event-driven durable functions platform for developers; free hobby tier then usage-based, open-source core.

Scheduling, quoting and invoicing software for home-service contractors, with an open GraphQL API.

Auth platform bundled with usage-based billing tools, generous 10,500 free MAU, and free enterprise SSO on its mid-tier plan.

Notification-orchestration layer that routes one event to email, SMS, push and in-app via your own provider accounts.

Open-source, embedded vector database built on the Lance columnar format, designed to run serverless off object storage.

Andrew Ng's LandingAI offers an agentic document extraction API tuned for messy real-world forms and handwriting.

The original general-purpose LLM app framework: chains, retrieval, tool-calling, huge integration catalog.

Open-source LLM tracing, evals, and prompt management you can self-host for free.

Low-level graph framework for building stateful, resumable, human-in-the-loop agents.

LangChain's own tracing/eval/prompt platform; deepest integration if you use LangChain or LangGraph.

Merchant-of-record checkout for digital products/SaaS; Lemon Squeezy files your sales tax and VAT for you.

Linear's official hosted MCP server for finding, creating, and updating issues, projects, and comments.

Open-source real-time audio/video framework plus a managed cloud, with an Agents SDK for building custom voice bots and its own inference marketplace.

The open-source C/C++ inference engine that Ollama, LM Studio, and most local-model tools are actually built on top of.

Data-framework-first agent toolkit, strongest for retrieval-augmented generation over documents.

LlamaIndex's document parser that converts PDFs and scans into markdown/JSON for LLM pipelines.

A polished desktop app for running open-weight models locally with a GUI, now free for both personal and workplace use, plus an optional paid cloud-inference layer called Bionic.

Open-source auth platform with a clear, itemized à la carte pricing model and a genuinely self-hostable core.

Combined marketing + transactional email tool for startups, billed by contact count not send volume.

Visual, credit-metered automation platform with a large app library and growing AI/agent tooling.

TypeScript agent framework built on the Vercel AI SDK, with workflows, RAG, and a hosted cloud tier.

Open-weight Llama models with no first-party Meta API — you rent inference from a host like Together AI, Groq, or Fireworks.

Microsoft's unified open-source agent framework, merging Semantic Kernel and AutoGen.

The highest-polish AI image generator — strong pick for scroll-stopping Instagram thumbnails and cover art.

French frontier-adjacent API with open-weight options and the cheapest generalist model (NeMo) in the market.

Mistral's dedicated OCR model and API, priced per page, for turning PDFs/scans into structured markdown or annotated JSON.

The open protocol/standard that lets AI models call tools and read data through a common interface.

Node-based automation builder with heavy AI/agent support, self-hostable but with a licence that blocks reselling access to it.

Serverless Postgres with instant branching and scale-to-zero, no bundled auth/storage.

Git-based static/Jamstack hosting with serverless functions, a Vercel alternative.

Free, open-source, self-hosted auth library for Next.js and other JS frameworks — no vendor bill at any scale.

Open-source Firebase-alternative on Postgres + Hasura GraphQL, with auth, storage and functions.

Open-source, fair-code spreadsheet UI that turns an existing Postgres/MySQL database into an Airtable-like interface.

Notion's official hosted MCP server letting AI agents search, read, and update a Notion workspace.

Open-source notification infrastructure (workflow engine) for routing events to email/SMS/push/in-app.

The MCP steering group's own directory of publicly available MCP servers — an "app store" for MCP.

The easiest way to download and run open-weight models on your own machine, now with an optional paid cloud tier for bigger models.

Multi-channel notification platform (push, in-app, email, SMS) best known for mobile/web push at scale.

OpenAI's lightweight, production-focused SDK for building agents with handoffs and tracing.

The default frontier API: GPT-6 Astra for hard reasoning, GPT-5.6 Luna for cheap everyday work.

OpenAI's coding agent bundled into ChatGPT — web, CLI, IDE extension, and cloud task delegation.

OpenAI's embedding API — the default, cheapest mainstream choice for turning text into vectors.

OpenAI's speech-to-speech model API — a single model handles listening and speaking, billed per audio token rather than per minute.

Feeds it a long video (e.g. a podcast or demo), gets back auto-clipped, captioned short-form cuts.

Enterprise-grade usage-based billing engine; fully custom, sales-led pricing with no public numbers.

Open-source identity infrastructure (Kratos, Hydra, Keto) with a usage-metered cloud network and a true self-hosted enterprise license.

Enterprise proxy and Web Scraper API provider, priced from $49/mo for the scraper API.

All-in-one merchant-of-record billing platform for SaaS; handles global tax and adds optional paid add-ons.

API/webhook-driven PDF generator: design a template once, POST JSON data, get a finished PDF back.

Vector similarity search as a Postgres extension — store embeddings next to your normal rows.

Fully managed vector database, the original dedicated vector-search-as-a-service product.

Developer-friendly automation platform mixing visual builder with inline code steps, credit-metered, cloud-first.

Managed database platform, now offering both Postgres and its original MySQL/Vitess engine — no free tier.

Free, open-source library to drive real Chromium/Firefox/WebKit browsers from code.

Microsoft's official MCP server giving an AI agent real browser control via Playwright's accessibility snapshots.

Open-source backend in a single executable file: SQLite database, auth, storage, realtime and admin UI.

Newer merchant-of-record billing platform built around usage metering for AI/API products, with a generous free tier.

The leading community Postgres MCP server — schema-aware querying, safe SQL execution, and index/health tuning.

Deliverability-obsessed transactional email service that refuses to also do marketing blasts.

Python-native data-pipeline orchestrator, positioned as an easier alternative to Airflow; free self-hosted core, paid Cloud for teams.

The current best-practice framework for thinking about agent security: prompt injection is unsolved architecturally, so defense means limiting what any one agent session can do, not trusting the model to resist attacks.

Google's free Node.js library for controlling headless Chrome/Chromium.

Type-safe Python agent framework from the Pydantic team; one API across all model providers.

Open-source vector database with a generous free managed tier and full self-hosting option.

The default small-business accounting software; free developer sandbox, but production data-reads are now metered and can cost real money at scale.

Alibaba's Qwen model family, hosted directly or via third parties like Together AI; Qwen Flash is a very cheap everyday tier.

RAG-as-a-service: upload documents, get hybrid search, reranking, and chunking handled without building your own pipeline.

Deploy-anything PaaS (Docker, databases, cron) billed per-second for compute actually used.

Free, MIT-licensed React library for building PDFs (invoices, quotes) declaratively as React components, in Node or the browser.

AI image and vector generator with a real developer API — good for on-brand thumbnails, icons, and vector graphics.

API that turns messy PDFs, scans and tables into clean structured data for RAG and automation pipelines.

Free, MIT-licensed React framework (not a hosted app builder) for hand-coding admin panels and internal tools fast.

Simple PaaS for web services, background workers, and cron jobs with predictable flat-tier pricing.

Browser-based IDE where an AI agent builds, deploys, and hosts full apps for you.

Developer-first transactional email API with a clean React Email template story.

AI phone agent platform with per-minute pricing that itemizes voice infra, TTS, and LLM costs.

Drag-and-drop builder for internal admin apps that read/write your database via SQL or REST.

AI video/image generation (Gen-4/4.5) for b-roll, cutaways, and stylized clips you can't film yourself.

Enterprise CRM; API access is bundled into per-user licensing and effectively starts around $175/user/month for full access.

Billing platform focused on 'usage governance' — letting customers see, predict and control their own usage.

A scraping API that handles JS rendering and proxy rotation, billed in per-request credits.

Large, mature email API/SMTP platform now folded into Twilio's product lineup and pricing.

A fast, cheap API for real Google search results (search, images, news, maps).

Enterprise-grade field service platform for larger trades businesses; API access requires becoming an approved partner.

The dominant e-commerce platform; self-serve, well-documented API on every paid plan, though data access and rate limits scale with plan tier.

Slack's official hosted MCP server letting approved AI agents search, read, and post to a Slack workspace.

A hosted MCP marketplace/gateway with managed OAuth — lists free external servers, charges to host servers on its own infrastructure.

Hugging Face's barebones Python library for agents that write and run code as their main action.

In-person + online payments platform popular with brick-and-mortar SMBs (retail, food, services).

Open-source layer over Playwright that lets you script browser actions in plain English.

The default payment gateway/processor for developers; you stay the merchant of record.

Stripe's official hosted MCP server so an AI agent can query and act on a Stripe account and search Stripe docs.

A model-vendor feature that forces API responses to strictly conform to a JSON Schema, removing most of the 'the model returned malformed JSON' class of bugs.

API-first passwordless/B2B auth platform with a modest free MAU tier and per-connection SSO pricing.

Auto-captioning and short-form polish tool: animated captions, AI b-roll, auto zooms, and one-click publishing.

Hosted Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions bundled in.

Auth bundled into Supabase's Postgres/BaaS platform — free MAU tier riding on the same plan as the database.

Hosted, flat-fee (no per-user charge) no-code app builder aimed at client-facing portals and internal databases.

Notion-like free-first form builder with unlimited forms and responses even on the free plan.

Search API optimized for AI agents, returning ranked/relevant results and extracted content.

Open-source Airtable-alternative built on Postgres, giving a spreadsheet UI with a real relational database underneath.

Twilio alternative with its own carrier network, undercutting Twilio's per-message SMS pricing.

Heavyweight durable-execution engine for mission-critical long-running workflows; open source, but Cloud pricing starts high.

Document ingestion API benchmarked as high-accuracy on messy scans, now bundled inside a broader agentic-sandbox platform.

Restaurant POS platform whose write-capable API is closed to a partner program — only read-only reporting access is self-serve.

Open-source low-code platform for building internal tools, with a genuinely free self-hosted community edition.

AI upscaling/frame-interpolation for salvaging low-res or shaky screen recordings into crisp export-ready footage.

Apache-2.0 OpenTelemetry instrumentation for LLM calls, plus a paid hosted dashboard; now owned by ServiceNow.

Code-first, open-source background jobs/durable functions platform for developers, billed per run and compute-second.

Object-storage-backed vector search built to be dramatically cheaper at rest by storing vectors on S3-like storage.

Distributed SQLite (libSQL) at the edge, with branching and very low cold-start latency.

The default SMS API for US business texting — reliable but layered with mandatory A2P 10DLC compliance fees.

The underlying telephony carrier most voice-agent platforms run on; ConversationRelay adds a managed WebSocket bridge for building your own AI voice agent on Twilio's PSTN network.

Polished, conversational form/survey builder; the premium-priced, most recognizable name in the category.

ETL platform for unstructured data - parses PDFs, images, Office docs into clean chunks for LLM/RAG pipelines.

Developer-friendly file upload SDK for Next.js apps — handles the upload flow, you keep your own auth.

Hosted platform for building voice AI agents that make/receive phone calls with your choice of STT/LLM/TTS.

IMPORTANT PIVOT: Vectorize.io has moved away from being a RAG-as-a-service pipeline product and now ships "Hindsight," an open-source agent-memory system — a different product category, not a drop-in Ragie competitor anymore.

Git-connected hosting for Next.js and other frontend frameworks, built by the Next.js team.

TypeScript toolkit for calling LLMs and building agents/chat UIs, made by Vercel.

Retrieval-focused embedding and reranking models (now owned by MongoDB) that top quality benchmarks for RAG.

Open-source vector database with built-in hybrid search, reranking, and an agent-oriented Query Agent.

LLM tracing and evals bolted onto W&B's established ML experiment-tracking platform.

Developer-first, code-based workflow/internal-tools platform; genuinely free to self-host with unlimited executions.

Cognition's AI-native editor (formerly independent Windsurf) now folded into the Devin product line.

Field service software with a genuinely open, self-serve REST API — the most developer-friendly of the FSM tools checked.

API-first auth focused on enterprise SSO/SAML add-ons for B2B SaaS selling into big companies.

Elon Musk's xAI model API; Grok 4.6 is the current flagship for code and chat with long-context pricing tiers.

Serverless Postgres platform built for instant, cheap database branching at scale.

Cloud accounting software, popular as a QuickBooks alternative; free for small integrations (under 5 connections) but now charges once you scale past that.

The original no-code automation tool; huge app library, simple task-based pricing, cloud-only.

A fast, Rust-built code editor with AI agent features and a generous free tier for solo devs.