Blog

Monthly data on the OSS half of the self-host market: who's still shipping, who's archived, who quietly went stale. Built off a snapshot we run on the 1st of every month against every alternative we recommend.

• 2026-05-10 When the OSS is alive but the license isn't: Sentry, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis (May 2026) A fourth failure mode for our self-host directory — the code keeps shipping, the license stops being open. Four case studies (MongoDB 2018, Sentry 2019, Elasticsearch 2021, Redis 2024) and what the structural-explainer spine got wrong about half of them.
• 2026-05-10 The Datadog escape hatch is real: observability is the OSS vertical that's actually winning (May 2026) Three of three self-host Datadog alternatives we list are alive and shipped this week. After two posts on OSS dying, observability is the vertical where it's actually winning — and the reason is OpenTelemetry, not the projects themselves.
• 2026-05-10 The link-in-bio OSS market never had a Grafana — and it's quietly dying anyway (May 2026) Two of the three self-host Linktree alternatives we list aren't alive. The third hasn't shipped in 82 days. And unlike on-call OSS, there's no well-funded successor coming — link-in-bio is the OSS failure mode that happens when nobody is fighting to kill you.
• 2026-05-10 We list 3 self-host PagerDuty alternatives. None of them are alive. (May 2026) The OSS on-call market is in trouble. Grafana archived their OnCall project. LinkedIn's Oncall hasn't shipped in 9 months. Cabot's GitHub repo is gone. Here's what we found, and what to self-host instead.
• 2026-05-10 Most self-host SaaS alternatives are alive — but 13 of 118 aren't (May 2026) We scanned every GitHub repo recommended on os-alt as a self-hostable alternative to a paid SaaS. 6 are dead, 4 are stale, 3 we couldn't classify. Here's the full list with last-commit dates, and why a freshness signal matters more than star count when you're picking a self-host target.