I'm a solo operator, so I automate a lot. These five do most of that work, and every one of them is free to start.
n8n: my automations
n8n runs almost all of my automated workflows. It's open source, I host it on my own machine, and it runs 24/7. Self-hosted means no per-run fees. There's a paid hosted version if you'd rather not run it yourself.
Apify: web scraping and data
Scraping and data extraction. My main use is pulling the top videos in my niche, so I'm not guessing what to post. There's a free monthly credit to start; heavy use costs money.
Postiz: posting everywhere at once
It posts to all my social platforms at once. Open source and self-hosted, and every post I publish goes through it.
Whisper: video into text
OpenAI's speech-to-text model. It runs on your own computer, it's free, and it handles 99 languages. On a Mac, mlx-whisper is fast on Apple chips.
https://github.com/openai/whisper
GitHub: undoing my mistakes
Every change I make is saved. When I break something, I roll back to the version that worked and see exactly what changed. The free plan covers this.
Where to start
n8n. It's the one that takes work off your plate. Self-hosting needs a computer that stays on.