When I launched three programmatic directory sites in April 2026, the open-source alternatives site had the most interesting data model. The AI tools directory indexes HuggingFace models — that's a pull from one API. The indie games directory reads Steam. But the OSS alternatives site has to answer a different question: for this SaaS product, which open-source repos actually cover the same use case, and how do they compare?
Getting that right required a two-phase ETL approach, a careful UPSERT strategy I initially got wrong, and some deliberate choices about where to use Claude Haiku and where to use a fallback template.
What the data model looks like
Three tables in Turso libSQL:
saas — the SaaS tool being replaced (Datadog, Notion, Figma, etc.)
