About this directory
NutsGrowth is a hand-written directory of 153 startups, SaaS tools and infrastructure providers, filed by what they do, what they cost and what they replace. Every line — the tagline, the country, the product it replaces — was written for this directory rather than copied from a vendor's homepage.
Method
- Why do so many entries say “Not checked”?
- Because nobody has verified that figure yet, and saying so is the only honest option. A blank price reads as free and a stale one reads as current — both are worse than an empty field, because a reader who clicks through to a different number stops trusting every other entry too. Prices and facts appear here with the date a person checked them, and until then the page says so out loud. Corrections are the fastest way to fill one in.
- Does it matter where a company is based?
- Not for getting listed. The country is a fact recorded on the page, not a door: what decides whether an entry belongs here is whether its facts were checked and carry the date somebody checked them. Country pages still group EU and EFTA members, because “based in Europe” and “governed by EU law” are different questions and the second one changes a procurement form. Countries outside the EU and EFTA are shown with no bloc label at all, because a jurisdiction claim this directory cannot stand behind is worse than none.
- What does the country field mean?
- The home base of the company you sign a contract with — not where a given server happens to sit. Data residency and corporate jurisdiction are separate questions, and only the second one survives a change of hosting region.
- How is “replaces” decided?
- Editorially, and deliberately narrowly: it names the product a team is most likely leaving behind, not every tool with overlapping features. That is what makes the alternatives pages worth reading — a list of forty half-matches helps nobody.
- Is this a ranking?
- No. Ordering is alphabetical within a page, and category and country pages are ordered by how much choice exists. The leaderboard is the one ranked list, and it counts readers’ votes: one per account, per listing, per month. No entry has been placed by its vendor or paid for; advertising sits in separate slots marked as ads.
- Open source and self-hostable?
- Two separate flags. Open source means you can read and fork the code. Self-hostable means there is a supported path to running it on your own hardware. Plenty of tools are one without the other.
Why it exists
Most “alternatives to X” lists are affiliate pages: undated, unpriced, and ordered by who pays the most. This one leads with what a thing replaces and what it costs, says when each fact was last checked — or that nobody has checked it — and tells you whether you can take the software with you. Where the company is based is on every row too — it is a filter you can apply, rather than the reason the list exists.
It is also honest about the gaps. Some categories have a dozen credible options; others have one, or none worth listing. The category page ordering makes that visible instead of hiding it behind a uniform grid.