80% more people are pitching SaaS alternatives on Reddit than a year ago. Fewer are asking for them

Every title here names a real product and uses the word "alternative": "alternative to Typeform", "Calendly alternative?", "I built a free Linktree alternative". We read who is talking. Someone asking for a way out of a tool, or someone with a replacement to sell.

The asking side is flat. Between 200 and 270 accounts asked each quarter, apart from early 2025 (see below). The pitching side more than doubled, from 75 accounts in the first quarter of 2025 to 157 in the third quarter of 2026, and has been above 150 every quarter of 2026.

What counts as asking and pitching

• Asking: the poster wants out. "Looking for Typeform alternatives for customer feedback surveys", "Affordable alternative to ZoomInfo", "CapCut alternative".
• Pitching: the poster offers a specific replacement, usually their own. "I built a Typeform alternative with unlimited responses", "Linktree alternative, would you use it?", and ads dressed as questions ("Looking for a DocuSign alternative? Try...").
• Lists and reviews: "8 Klaviyo alternatives for ecommerce brands in 2026". Counted separately, not as pitching, even though many are affiliate content.
• Other: news, stories after switching, anything unclear.

Counting accounts, not posts, keeps one busy marketer from tilting the numbers. Pitching accounts posted 2.0 pitches each on average, and one account posted 24.

Which tools have more sellers than buyers

Typeform is the clearest case: 12 accounts asked for an alternative, 39 pitched one. Linktree: 34 asking, 86 pitching. Calendly, Trello, Ahrefs and Gumroad also have more people selling a replacement than asking for one.

The other end is where demand has no crowd yet. ZoomInfo: 48 asking, 5 pitching, mostly sales teams balking at the price. Mailchimp: 38 and 7. Adobe and Lightroom: 158 and 113 askers, 23 and 18 pitchers (counted separately, since one post can name both).

The shift is not only in the totals. Linktree had 22 accounts asking in January to September 2025 and 7 in the same months of 2026, while pitches went from 25 to 47. Canva went the other way on demand: 16 asking accounts to 44, and pitches from 4 to 18.

Where it happens

Pitches cluster in builder subreddits: r/SideProject (157 posts), r/SaaS (115) and r/selfhosted (55). Questions are spread out, and the biggest groups are in the product's own subreddit or the user's craft: r/CapCut (87 posts), r/SaaS (51), r/photography (47), r/BuyFromEU (47), r/Notion (46).

So pitches tend to be posted where other builders are, not where the people asking are. For a founder that is the gap: the demand sits in r/photography and r/Notion, and the pitch sits in r/SideProject.

The early 2025 bump

Asking peaked in the first quarter of 2025 at 337 accounts. Most of the bump comes from January, when CapCut went offline in the US along with TikTok: 46 accounts asked for a CapCut alternative that month, against 3 to 14 in every other month. February and March added a wave of "European alternative to..." questions, many in r/BuyFromEU. Without CapCut, asking accounts per quarter ranged from 194 to 275.

Why we don't rank tools by "how often people want to leave"

The obvious ranking would be: of everyone who mentions a tool, how many ask to replace it. That number mostly measures size. Small tools get mentioned almost only when someone wants out; big ones get mentioned for everything. Among tools named in titles by fewer than 500 accounts, the median was 3.0 askers per 100 accounts mentioning the tool. Among tools named by 2,000 or more, it was under 0.5.

So we compare askers with pitchers inside each tool, where size cancels out, and keep the per-100 number in the table for context only.

Method

• Posts: every Reddit post created from January 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, 899 million in total, from public archives plus our own collection. Kept: posts still up (not removed or deleted), not NSFW, not from known bot accounts, and only in subreddits in our directory, which leaves out user profile pages and a few unlisted subreddits (396 posts).
• Tools: a fixed list of 79 marketing, sales, design and creator tools, chosen before counting. List in the CSV.
• Match: the title contains "alternative to X", "alternative for X", "alternatives to X" or "X alternative(s)", where X is the tool name as a whole word. 4,079 posts matched.
• Labels: an AI model (Claude Haiku 5.5) read each title and picked one label: asking, pitching, lists and reviews, other. It ran twice, independently, with the same instructions. The two runs agreed on 3,968 titles (97.3%). For the other 111, a larger model (Claude Opus 5.5) read the title and decided.
• Accounts: counted once per group per period, whatever the number of posts.
• Year-over-year: January to September 2025 against January to September 2026, so the same months are compared.

How we validated the AI labels

AI labels can be wrong, so we validated them three ways, and published all of them.

• A different model, blind. Claude Sonnet 5.5 labeled a random 455 of the titles without seeing the other labels. It agreed with the final label on 96.3% of them, and it marked slightly more titles as pitching than our labels did (182 vs 175), so if anything the pitch counts are low.
• No AI at all. A plain keyword rule: titles with builder words ("I built", "we made", "launched", "my app", "would you use"), and titles with a question mark. Builder-word titles went from 219 in January to September 2025 to 428 in 2026 (2.0x). Question titles went from 571 to 586. The same shift, with no model involved. 98% of the builder-word titles were labeled pitching by the AI.
• Fake questions. An ad written as a question ("Looking for a DocuSign alternative? Try...") would inflate asking. Only 48 of the 1,759 asking accounts also posted a pitch, so at most about 3% of askers look like sellers in disguise.
• Every label is public. The CSV lists each post's Reddit ID, month, subreddit, tool, both AI labels, the final one and the blind check's label where there is one. Open reddit.com/comments/<id> to check any of them.

Limits

• Titles only. A post titled "Typeform alternative" can be either side, and the label goes by the title.
• Removed posts are left out. Moderators remove pitches more often than questions, so the real share of pitches is higher than shown. About 19% of all posts with "alternative" in the title were removed, steady from month to month (18% to 20%), so the year-over-year comparison is not skewed by removals.
• 79 tools is not every tool. They are the ones marketers and creators talk about most; the pattern may differ for developer tools or consumer apps.
• Correlation, not cause. Cheaper and faster ways to build software arrived in the same period, but this data does not show why more people are pitching.

The data

The counts and every label behind this article are in these files. They're free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please credit KissMyPost and link to this page.

• CSVBy tool, all 79 toolsAccounts naming each tool in a title, and accounts asking, pitching, posting lists and reviews or other, for January 2025 to September 2026 and for January to September of 2025 and 2026 separately.
• CSVBy quarter and by monthAccounts and posts by label for each quarter and each month, January 2025 to September 2026.
• CSVEvery label, 4,079 postsOne row per post: Reddit ID, month, subreddit, tools named, both AI labels, the final label and the blind check's label (blank if the post was not in the random 455). No titles and no account names.
• PNGQuarterly chart, 1600 × 1000Accounts asking and pitching, per quarter, as an image.
• PNGBy-tool chart, 1600 × 1500The 20 tools with the most accounts on either side, as an image.

Questions people ask

This study comes from the archive behind KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. It shows what kind of posts do well in a subreddit, who writes there and when, and lets you search posts back to 2005.