An example: ffmpeg (which I've used for a long time) is a classic 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 downloader tool out there using it. Users who don't know about it must either rely on the shady tier of online video downloaders or pay for some of the better ones. I used to think there was a hard-coded limit to downloading 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.