I Replaced 5 Paid SaaS Tools with Free APIs (Saving $200/Month)

The SaaS Tax Is Real I was paying $200/month for tools that do what free APIs do better. Here's what I replaced and the exact code. 1. Weather API: $40/mo → $0 (Open-Meteo) Replaced: OpenWeather Pro ($40/mo for 16-day forecast + historical data) import requests # 16-day forecast + history back to 1940 — completely free resp = requests . get ( " https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast " , params = { " latitude " : 40.71 , " longitude " : - 74.01 , " hourly " : " temperature_2m,precipitation_probability " , " forecast_days " : 16 }) data = resp . json ()[ " hourly " ] print ( f " { len ( data [ ' time ' ]) } hourly forecasts loaded " ) Open-Meteo gives me 80+ weather variables, no key, no rate limits. The paid API gave me 20 variables with a rate limit. Full Open-Meteo tutorial → 2. Research Database: $100/mo → $0 (OpenAlex + Semantic Scholar) Replaced: Scopus API ($100/mo for institutional access) # OpenAlex: 250M+ papers, no key papers = requests . get ( " https://api.openalex.org/works