As someone who only recently started getting their feet wet thanks to vibe coding, I am kind of amazed at all the free tools out there.
Like how ffmpeg (which I've used for a long time) was the original case of "if you can figure it out, it's free; if you can't, I can sell you a shovel" with virtually every video down tool out there using it. I used to think there was a hardcoded limit to down files in 4K until I realised yt-dlp and ffmpeg existed.
Another example: TIL the Bluesky Jetstream protocol is completely free, which is amazing to me because of all the data and inference you can get from it (similar APIs, albeit from much larger social datasets like Google Maps and X, are not free.
It seems that the entry barrier to a lot of useful tools over the last two decades has been a minimal ability to code. Since that barrier has now dropped, would you share the best things out there for those of us willing to experiment with code, data or just out of curiosity?
OFC I'm not against paying a developer for adding convenience for us noobs. But I would like to better understand the free-tier world because it does change some of my notions about economics in this space.
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294288)
Points: 1