I get that this is tempting but it just means you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix. And disaster recovery is most certainly a manual task.
If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.
Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.
But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.
If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.
If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.
If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.
Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.
Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.
So much this. Each subscription is literally a small percentage of your revenue. You can't reinvest it ... it's just gone. Hopefully it enables more productivity ... but most likely, it is only marginal.
In what situation would a simple script or helper app just suddenly rot away and stop working?
Of course it's POSSIBLE to vibe together a massive monstrosity of an everything-app, but that's not what the author is doing here (nor me).
With a agentic llms I can just tell it to fix it. With a commercial solution I'm fucked and either have to find something else or pay for a license (or keep paying every month).