While I don't condone a business for wanting to make money, I would personally prefer a FOSS alternative rather than have to sign up for another monthly subscription.
Are there any alternatives to Docker Desktop and Docker Compose that people have had luck with? Drop-in compatibility would be great, but I'm willing to make changes as well.
There are Docker container management plugins for some of the major IDEs. JetBrains IDEs offer that, for example. It works about as well as Docker Desktop.
I think you should be prepared to learn that Docker Desktop is the best (dedicated) container management GUI for macOS, because it might be. Podman is available for Macs, but it's CLI-only as far as I know. minikube is another, but again -- CLI-only to my knowledge.
I personally have Docker Desktop installed, but I rarely use it because I mostly use `docker-compose up` and `docker-compose down` commands.