I replaced Claude, ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Perplexity with these free open source tools

ChatGPT answered my daily questions and is excellent for images and infographics. Claude handled research, brainstorming, and my occasional coding endeavors.

NotebookLM indexed and summarized my own documents, and Perplexity handled anything that needed live sources because I don't trust any of the others for proper fact-checking. As you can imagine, managing these subscriptions can become complicated.

What Happened

That's not including the one-off token purchases for when I exceed my usage limits. After a few months, the total stopped making sense.

• Close Vane is the project formerly called Perplexica, renamed by its maintainer in March 2026.

• What I gained in return was data ownership and privacy, offline access, and fewer subscriptions to manage.

• Each tool is a Docker command and a config screen, which is about the same effort as replacing paid subscriptions with open source apps in any other category.

Key Details

So I went looking for open source replacements, one for each job, running on hardware I own. The most important part for me is that it works properly in Chrome on Android.

• Setup isn't difficult, though it isn't nothing either.

• A Raspberry Pi hosts these interfaces without issues, but it generates text slowly, so the heavy lifting happens on a machine with a proper GPU or through an API key.

• Long analysis, tricky code, and multistep tasks quickly reach the limits of these free tools.

Why It Matters

I added it to my home screen, and it opens like an app, with my full chat history already loaded. I can also drop documents into a knowledge collection and attach that collection to a chat, so the model answers questions based.

• Anything that needs heavy reasoning still goes to a paid model.

• Typing a question in the address bar now sends it to my computer instead of Google, which is a smaller version of what happens when you run a local LLM on Android for offline.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by Android Police as more details emerge