← The AI Hype Audit — all 227 verdicts
PARTLY “5 free repos that run a side hustle automatically” — five real repos, accurate star counts, and a ‘free’ that costs you every weekend
The claimA 7-slide carousel: ERPNext (38k stars) gives you “invoicing, stock and payroll in one free install,” Plane (57k) replaces Jira/Linear/Monday/ClickUp “with no per-seat pricing,” Trigger.dev (16k, Apache 2.0) “runs your recurring jobs so the invoices go out at 3am without you opening a laptop,” Lago (10k) meters usage into “pricing, credits, invoices and payments,” and Relaticle (1.5k) is “the CRM built for right now” with a 32-tool MCP server. Closer: “Stand up ERPNext this weekend and see how much of your stack it swallows.”
This poster’s 15th appearance on the audit (14 prior entries), and the pattern holds: the repos are real and the numbers are honest, the verbs are not. We pulled every repo from the GitHub API on Aug 29 — ERPNext 38,635 stars, Plane 58,497, Trigger.dev 16,156, Lago 10,442, Relaticle 1,566 — so the slides are accurate to the rounding. The oversell is in what they do. Payroll is not in ERPNext; it was split out into the separate frappe/hrms app at version 14, a second install. Plane’s cloud is entirely per-seat ($6 and $13 per seat per month) — “no per-seat pricing” only holds if you self-host the AGPL community build. Lago’s payment-provider integrations and dunning sit on the Premium tier. And Trigger.dev’s own self-hosting guide says the words “unlikely to result in a production-ready deployment” and asks for two machines plus Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse and object storage. Nothing here “runs a side hustle automatically” — you would be the unpaid sysadmin for roughly four databases and five Docker stacks, and the CRM you’d bet your pipeline on has one real contributor.
What holds up
- All five repos exist, were pushed within the last 48 hours, and every star count on the slides matches the GitHub API within rounding
- Licenses are as implied: Trigger.dev is Apache 2.0; ERPNext (GPL), Plane, Lago and Relaticle (AGPL) are real, self-hostable open source
- ERPNext genuinely does accounting plus inventory in one app and is the most credible ‘stack swallower’ of the five
What doesn’t
- Payroll is NOT in ERPNext — it’s the separate frappe/hrms app (split off at v14, installed separately)
- Plane’s cloud is per-seat ($6/$13 per seat/mo); Lago’s payment integrations and dunning are Premium-only; Relaticle’s README says 37 tools and it’s a one-developer project (1,387 of ~1,400 commits)
- Trigger.dev’s own docs call self-hosting “unlikely to result in a production-ready deployment” — two 6–8 GB machines and seven services; the honest path is its cloud free tier, capped at 10 schedules
The catch
The repos are real; the “free” is your weekends, forever. Five self-hosted stacks don’t run a side hustle — they become one.
How to actually do it
- Want ERPNext without the bench install? Frappe Cloud (the official host) has a 14-day trial and sites from $5/mo
- Just need invoicing? Zoho Books Free (under $50K/yr revenue) or Wave’s free tier beats standing up Lago — QuickBooks Simple Start is $38/mo if you want the brand
- If you already write code, run ONE scheduled job on Trigger.dev Cloud’s free tier before you touch a Docker Compose file
Five real repos with honest star counts — but no payroll in ERPNext, per-seat pricing at Plane, Premium-gated payments at Lago, and a self-host burden the tools’ own docs warn you about.
- Confidence
- High
- Posted by
- @ty.prompts.ai (Ty AI)
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