PrivateBin
Pastebins
Minimalist pastebin/discussion board where the server has zero knowledge of hosted data.
Actively maintained
Real momentum
Zlib
Every open-source pastebins project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Pastebins has 21 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 9 show real momentum and 2 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is PrivateBin with 8.5k stars against a category median of 605 — roughly 14x the typical project. Saturation score 44/100: Contested. Several maintained alternatives exist, but no one owns the category.
Winnable, but differentiation is not optional. Pick one underserved segment and be visibly better for it rather than competing feature-for-feature with a free tool.
The practical test in this category: PrivateBin is the reference implementation at 8.5k stars, and 9 of 21 projects are still shipping. A buyer evaluating you will find at least one maintained free option, so your pricing and positioning have to answer "why not self-host PrivateBin?" in the first minute.
Pastebins
Minimalist pastebin/discussion board where the server has zero knowledge of hosted data.
Pastebins
Pastebin powered by Git.
Pastebins
Dead-simple application to securely communicate passwords (or text) over the web. Passwords automatically expire after a certain number of views and/or time has passed.
Pastebins
Secure sharing of secrets, passwords and files.
Pastebins
Pastebin and file storage service with a simple web interface. Supports syntax highlighting, optional user authentication and public sharing.
Pastebins
Share encrypted secrets cross organizations, or as private persons.
Pastebins
Minimal file upload/pastebin service.
Pastebins
Lightweight, minimal and fast pastebin with an SQLite backend.
Pastebins
Simple pastebin with multiple text and code option, with short url result easy to remember.
Pastebins
Very simple (to deploy and to use) secret message service using Hashicorp Vault as a secrets storage.
Pastebins
End-to-end encrypted pastebin built with the objective of simplicity.
Pastebins
Store and share text snippets and files within your local network.
Pastebins
Beautiful, simple and easy to deploy Pastebin with optional client encryption, multitab pastes, an API, a highlighted editor and more.
Pastebins
Pastebin with API, client-side encryption, user accounts, syntax highlighting, markdown rendering, and more.
Pastebins
Lightweight, self‑hosted snippet manager for saving and organizing code and text snippets with folders, tags, API, and GitHub Gist sync.
Pastebins
Zero-knowledge one-time secret sharing. Create a one-time link for a password, API key, or file. Encrypted client-side in the browser, never reaches the server in plaintext, self-destructs after the a
Pastebins
Minimal pastebin supporting client-side encryption, fulltext search, one-time messages. Intended for one to few users looking for a simple pastebin deployment.
Pastebins
Simple paste sharing platform, with client side encryption, featuring the monaco browser-based code editor.
Pastebins
Simple paste app friendly with browser and command line.
Pastebins
Super-minimal pastebin and file upload service focusing on small executable size, portability, and ease of configuration.
Pastebins
Open source on-prem code snippet manager.
Existence is not competition. A project competes with you only if it is maintained, findable, deployable by your buyer and licensed for their use. Most projects fail at least one of those tests. Run all four before you shelve an idea — or before you assume you have a clear run.
Stars are a lifetime counter with no decay, so a project abandoned in 2022 still looks like a leader in 2026. In this dataset 149 projects are dormant, abandoned or archived, and several of them sit in the top decile by stars. Sort by momentum and commit activity instead — popularity tells you the project was once interesting, maintenance tells you whether it will still be there when your customer needs a bug fixed.
When a prospect says 'we could just self-host the free one', they are usually comparing your price against zero. The real comparison is your price against hosting, upgrades, backups, security patching, integration work and the engineer hours behind all of it. Quantifying that number is the single most effective response to a free-alternative objection — and it is more persuasive coming with a spreadsheet than with a feature list.
Founders treat licensing as a legal footnote and then discover it dictates strategy. Permissive licences allow closed commercial forks, which is why so many managed services exist around MIT and Apache projects — and also why your differentiation cannot be the code itself. Copyleft licences, especially AGPL, remove the closed-wrapper option entirely, which reduces competition but restricts you too. Source-available licences exist precisely to stop the wrapper business.
Search this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.
A project has momentum when it committed code in most of the last twelve months, shipped a release recently and is not archived. 736 of 1665 projects qualify. This is the single most useful filter here — it strips out the popular-but-dead repositories that make a category look more competitive than it is.
It depends entirely on the licence. MIT, Apache and BSD let you build and sell closed products on top. GPL and AGPL require derivative work to stay open, and AGPL extends that to network use, which blocks most SaaS wrappers. BSL, SSPL and Commons Clause are source-available, not open source, and usually restrict competing commercial use outright.
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