2026-07-01

Why I'm Rebuilding 100 Free Software Tools

Let me start with a scene you’ve almost certainly lived through.

You want to strip a watermark off a PDF. You find a free tool, download it, install it. The next day it starts popping ads at you, three times a day. A couple of days later you notice it quietly changed your browser’s homepage, and there’s a background process phoning home to some server you’ve never heard of. And when you finally need to export the high-res version, it tells you — upgrade to premium.

This isn’t a problem with one particular piece of software. This is the biggest pain in using free software. And that pain isn’t one layer, it’s three — each one deeper than the last.

Layer one: if you’re not paying, you’re the thing being sold

The oldest rule in the book: if a piece of software is free and you’re not paying, then someone is paying to reach you.

That free phone-cleaner app survives by popping three ads a day. That free keyboard may be shipping off every character you type. That free cloud drive throttles your speed until you buy a membership. You think you’re getting something for nothing — but the product being sold is you: your attention, your data, your time.

Free was never free. The cost just isn’t printed on the price tag.

Layer two: even if it doesn’t screw you, nobody’s paid to polish it

There’s a kind of free software that’s clean — open source, no ads, no data selling. But it has a different pain: nobody is paid to make it good.

An open-source tool is often maintained by one person in their spare time. Hundreds of issues pile up unanswered, the interface looks the same as it did ten years ago, and just getting it installed can eat an afternoon of wrestling with dependencies. It’s not that the author is bad — it’s that there’s nothing inside the word “free” that drives anyone to sweat the hundred small details that make software genuinely nice to use. You can use it, but every day you use it, it grates.

Layer three: free is just the hook — get hooked and you either pay or use the crippled version

There’s a smarter kind still. It’s completely free at first. Then, once you’ve gotten used to it, stored all your stuff in it, and made moving away expensive — the one feature you actually need suddenly requires a membership.

Exporting costs money. Removing watermarks costs money. Opening more than three at once costs money. More than five files costs money. The free version isn’t unfinished — it’s deliberately crippled, crippled just enough to reel you in. You’re not using a free piece of software; you’re inside a carefully designed funnel, being nudged step by step toward the paywall.

For years you just put up with these three layers — because building a good replacement was too expensive

Sold as a product, no one to polish it, hooked and reeled in — why did everyone put up with this for so many years? Because the only way out — “build a good one yourself” — used to be absurdly expensive. You needed a team, a budget, months or even years. However much an ordinary user hated it, all they could do was hold their nose and keep using it, or hack together a half-broken thing for themselves.

So it’s not that nobody saw these three layers of pain. People saw them and still couldn’t do anything about it.

Now the cost of doing it has collapsed

The shift only happened in the last couple of years: AI cut the cost of turning an idea into software that actually works down to something one person can carry.

I don’t need to be able to write code for the rest of my life. I only need to be clear on two things — exactly which layer this free software is screwing you on, and what a version that doesn’t screw you should look like — and the rest of the implementation, I just have to describe it clearly and AI can build it. This is exactly what I’ve spent the past year proving out: take a free tool I use every day but have always just tolerated, and rebuild it into what it should have been all along. No ads, no touching your data, the features that should be free genuinely free, an interface that’s actually good to use.

Over this past year-plus, I’ve done this six times, all of them sitting right there on doaipm.com — go click them, use them, poke holes in them yourself:

SoloMD — a minimalist Markdown editor, one file, one window, just write;
Unterm — a terminal that an AI agent can drive directly;
unfetch — a download manager with no ads and no bundled bloatware, for humans and AI alike;
Unflick — a video player built for both people and AI;
Ziplark — a 1.4 MB archive tool that unpacks ZIP, RAR, 7z, tar, and ISO, built to replace those bloated, ad-riddled free compression tools that have been nagging you to “please purchase” for twenty years;
FreeID Photo — a phone app that processes ID photos entirely on-device, built to replace the free ID-photo tools that charge you to export what you just shot and drown the screen in ads.

None of them are perfect yet, but six of them sitting here prove one thing: this path is one a single person can actually walk.

So I’ve decided to make it a real thing: rebuild 100 free software tools

Not to crank out 100 new gimmicks. To pick the ones you use every day and have been tolerating through these three layers of pain, and rebuild them one by one — into versions that don’t treat you as the product, that someone actually cared enough to polish, that keep free what should be free.

How do you judge whether it worked? The standard is simple — use those same three layers to measure it: does the version I rebuilt have ads, does it quietly ship off your data, is it good to use, is what should be free actually free? If it falls short, that’s on me, and you can say so straight to my face.

Six are here already. There are ninety-four more to go.

Of all the free software you use every day, which one do you most wish someone would rebuild for you?