Ten repos to check before you pay for a tool
Roughly 1.9M combined stars — directories, free tiers, local models and agent scaffolding
Ten repositories in the top tier of GitHub by stars that between them cover a lot of what a small team otherwise buys: an API directory, a free-tier directory, local model hosting, a scraper, a visual agent builder, an MCP index, and two agents that produce real files. Every star count here was checked live rather than copied.
A shortlist, not a reading list
None of these needs an introduction on its own — they are among the most-starred repositories on GitHub. What is worth having is the set: ten things that, between them, answer most of the questions that end with someone opening a pricing page.
So the table below says what each one saves you doing rather than what each one is. Starring them achieves nothing. Knowing which one to open when a specific need appears is the entire value.
Sorted by stars, checked 28 Aug 2026
Every figure above is live-checked, and every one had moved since the list was compiled two weeks earlier — public-apis by roughly 16,000 and open-design by roughly 7,000. Lists like this also tend to arrive with a headline number attached: how many thousands a year the set replaces. That figure is unverifiable and worth ignoring. Half of these are directories, and a directory replaces searching, not spending.
OpenHands moved organisation: All-Hands-AI/OpenHands now redirects to OpenHands/OpenHands. Existing clones and links keep working, but write the new path anywhere you are pinning it.
The order that actually saves time
Directories first
awesome, free-for-dev and public-apis are search replacements. Check them before you scope any build — the answer is frequently something you do not have to write.
Then ask whether it has to leave your machine
Ollama and Scrapling both remove a per-call bill and a third party from the loop. If the data is sensitive or the volume is high, that decision is worth making before the architecture hardens around an API key.
Clone the agent repos, do not read them
awesome-llm-apps and OpenHands earn their place as running projects. Find the closest match, open it in your agent, and describe what it has to do differently.
Keep the two indexes bookmarked, not consumed
awesome-mcp-servers and awesome are reference material. Nobody reads them end to end, and trying is how a shortlist turns into a weekend.
awesome-llm-apps already appears in “Two repos worth cloning before building an agent”, where it gets covered properly alongside ai-engineering-hub. Here it is one of ten — go to that entry if agents are the actual goal.