10 Self-Hosted Apps That Replace $400 a Month of SaaS

I priced out the standard software stack for a five-person team last month, using nothing but list prices off the vendors' own pages. HubSpot Sales Starter at $20 a seat. Buffer Team at $10 a channel across six channels. Mailchimp Standard at $20. Plausible at $9. Bitwarden Teams at $4 a seat. Dropbox Business at $15 a seat. Better Stack at $27.50. Sentry Team at $26. Zapier at $19.99. Linear at $10 a seat.

That is $407 a month. Just under $4,900 a year, before anyone adds a seat or crosses a usage tier.

Every one of those ten categories has a self hosted SaaS alternative in 2026 that is genuinely good. Not "good considering it's free." Good. I run several of them for Wunderlandmedia and I have put clients on a few more. Here they are, with what they replace, what they cost to actually run, and how much work you are signing up for.

If you want the argument for why any of this is worth doing at all, I already wrote it in Your SaaS Stack Is Bleeding You Dry. Here's What I Self-Host Instead.. This post is the shopping list: ten self hosted SaaS alternatives, tool by tool, with the real prices they replace.

Want the printable version? Download the complete guide as a PDF — 9 pages, 75 checklist items, every price and RAM figure in one reference table. No login required.

1. Twenty replaces a $175-per-seat Salesforce license

Salesforce Sales Cloud Enterprise lists at $175 per user per month in 2026 after last year's 6 percent increase. HubSpot Sales Hub Starter is $20 a seat monthly, Pipedrive runs $14 to $79 a seat depending on tier. Twenty is $0 plus your server.

Twenty passed 56,000 GitHub stars and is one of the fastest-moving open source projects I follow right now. What makes it worth running is that it does not feel like a compromise. Custom objects, a proper record view, keyboard navigation, an API that does not fight you. It reads like Notion and Airtable had a CRM, which is the shape most small teams actually want.

Running it: Docker Compose with a server and worker split, PostgreSQL, and Redis configured for noeviction. Two containers plus two data services. Give it 4GB of RAM and it is comfortable. Difficulty is medium, mostly because the Redis eviction setting bites people who skip the docs.

One licence note worth knowing. Twenty is AGPL-3.0, but individual files are marked as Enterprise and carved out under a separate commercial licence. The core is free forever. A few enterprise features are not.

2. Postiz replaces Buffer, and I have been running it for months

Buffer Team is $10 per channel per month on annual billing. Six channels is $60. Hootsuite starts at $99 per user per month and climbs to $399. Later's Growth plan is $37.50 monthly billed yearly. Postiz is AGPL-3.0 and posts to more than 20 networks including Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and Reddit.

This is the one I use every week, so I will be specific. The scheduling calendar is fine, multi-account handling is fine, and what I care about most is that there is no feature gap between the self-hosted build and the paid cloud. No premium tier dangling analytics behind a wall. What you install is what they sell.

Running it: Docker, 2GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs is the recommended floor, and that is honest. Difficulty is low. The hard part is not the container, it is getting API credentials from each social platform, and that is a tax you pay with any scheduler.

3. Mautic replaces $20 to $350 a month of Mailchimp

Mailchimp prices by contact count across Essentials at $13 and up, Standard at $20 and up, and Premium at $350 and up. ActiveCampaign starts around $29 a month and scales with your list. Mautic charges nothing and does not care how many contacts you store.

Mautic 7.2.0 "Lynx Edition" shipped on 2 September 2026, which answers the only question that matters about whether a project is alive. It is a full marketing automation platform, not a newsletter tool: visual campaign builder, drip sequences, lead scoring, landing pages, segmentation, and a contact timeline showing what a lead actually did on your site.

The economics get absurd at scale. Mailchimp's price is a function of your list size. Mautic's is a function of your server. Cross about 10,000 contacts and the gap stops being a rounding error.

Running it: PHP with MySQL or MariaDB, 4 to 8GB of RAM for comfortable production use. This is the heaviest tool here and the most demanding to operate, mostly because you also have to solve email deliverability yourself. Use a real sending relay. Do not point it at your own IP and hope.

4. Umami replaces $9 to $15 a month of hosted analytics

Plausible Cloud starts at $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews with no free tier. Fathom starts at $15 for 100,000 pageviews. Umami is MIT licensed, self-hosted, with no event limits at all.

MIT matters here. Of the ten tools on this list, Umami has the most permissive licence, which means nobody can rug-pull it. It is also genuinely pleasant: one dashboard, cookieless tracking, a script a fraction of the weight of Google Analytics, and reports that answer the three questions you actually have instead of the forty you do not.

I put this on client sites where the alternative was Google Analytics 4 and a consent banner argument. Nobody has asked to go back.

Running it: a Node app plus PostgreSQL or MySQL. It runs happily in about 512MB. Difficulty is low, this is the easiest install on the list, and it is the one I would tell a nervous first-timer to start with.

5. Vaultwarden replaces $4 to $8.99 per seat of password management

Bitwarden Teams is $4 per user per month and Enterprise is $6. 1Password Business is $8.99 per user monthly on annual billing. Vaultwarden is a flat server cost for everyone in the building.

Vaultwarden is a Rust reimplementation of the Bitwarden server API at nearly 67,000 GitHub stars, and the detail that matters is that all the official Bitwarden clients work against it. Browser extension, iOS, Android, desktop, CLI. You are not adopting a knockoff client, you are pointing the real ones at your own server. Premium features Bitwarden gates behind a subscription, like TOTP storage and file attachments, are just on.

Running it: a single Docker container, in Rust, on roughly 100MB of RAM. It is the smallest thing on this list by a wide margin. Difficulty is low, with one non-negotiable: you back it up, and you test the restore. This is the one tool where a lost volume is genuinely catastrophic.

6. Nextcloud replaces $15 to $24 per seat of Dropbox Business

Dropbox Business runs about $15 per user monthly on Plus and $24 on Business. Google Workspace is $6 to $18 a seat, with Business Standard at $14. Nextcloud self-hosted is free, and the per-user fee simply does not exist.

Nextcloud is the veteran here and has quietly turned into a suite rather than a file locker. Sync clients on every platform, collaborative editing through Collabora or OnlyOffice, calendar, contacts, shared team folders, and public share links with expiry dates and passwords. For agencies handing files back and forth with clients, that last one alone earns it.

The storage math is the real story. Dropbox sells you a per-seat plan with a ceiling. Nextcloud sells you nothing, and your ceiling is whatever disk you attached.

Running it: PHP, a database, Redis for caching, and this one wants real disk. Difficulty is medium and the tuning matters. An untuned Nextcloud feels sluggish and people blame the software when they should blame the PHP settings.

7. Uptime Kuma replaces $18 to $27.50 a month of uptime monitoring

Pingdom's cheapest plan is $18 a month. Better Stack is $16.50 for 10 monitors and $27.50 for 25. Uptime Kuma monitors as many endpoints as you like for the cost of the smallest box your provider sells.

Version 2.5.3 landed on 22 August 2026, and the 2.x line brought MariaDB support, rootless Docker, and a refreshed UI. My favourite detail from this year: 2.5.0 added a 14-day cooldown before trusting a new npm package, which is a maintainer thinking hard about supply chain attacks on a free tool. That is the kind of signal I look for.

It does HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, certificate expiry, keyword matching and now NTP, pushes alerts to more than 90 notification services, and builds public status pages. For a one-person agency watching a dozen client sites, it replaces a real recurring bill with about twenty minutes of setup.

Running it: one Docker container, under 512MB, an embedded database by default. Difficulty is low. Just run it somewhere other than the server you are monitoring.

8. GlitchTip replaces Sentry's $26-a-month floor

Sentry's Team plan starts at $26 a month and Business at $80, and both include 50,000 errors before pay-as-you-go kicks in. GlitchTip is MIT licensed, has no per-seat and no per-event billing, and speaks the Sentry protocol.

That last part is the whole pitch. Your existing Sentry SDK keeps working: change a DSN and your errors land on your own server. Django, Celery, PostgreSQL and Redis, about four containers, against the forty-plus that self-hosted Sentry expects you to babysit.

I care about error tracking cost more than most people, because I once watched my own error tracker go off at 2 AM over what turned out to be a crawler. I wrote that one up in My Error Tracker Blew Up at 2 AM. The Attacker Was an SEO Tool.. Bot noise burns event quota fast, and on a self-hosted tracker burning quota costs you nothing but disk.

Running it: about 512MB of RAM will do it. Difficulty is low to medium. Set a retention policy on day one or the database grows forever.

9. n8n replaces $19.99 a month of Zapier, and usually much more

Zapier starts at $19.99 a month on annual billing for 750 tasks and bills per step. Make starts at $9 and bills per module. n8n self-hosted bills per nothing, and an execution is one complete workflow run no matter how many nodes it contains.

That billing difference is where the money actually is. A ten-step Zap consumes ten tasks. The same workflow in n8n is one execution. Complex automations are exactly where hosted platforms get expensive and exactly where n8n gets cheap. At 203,000 GitHub stars it is also the most widely adopted tool on this list by a distance.

One honest flag: n8n is not open source in the strict sense. It ships under a Sustainable Use Licence, which lets you self-host and use it freely for internal business purposes but restricts reselling it as a hosted service. For running your own automations that is a non-issue. For building a product on top of it, read the licence properly.

Running it: Docker, PostgreSQL, roughly 1 to 2GB of RAM depending on workflow weight. Difficulty is low to install and medium to operate well, because the failure modes live in your workflows rather than the container.

10. Plane replaces $8 to $30 per seat of Jira, Linear and Asana

Jira Standard is $7.91 per user monthly and Premium is $14.54. Linear moved to $10 per seat on Standard and $16 on Plus. Asana raised prices in January 2026, with Advanced jumping from $67 to $85. Plane is AGPL-3.0 and self-hosts for the price of a container.

Plane sits at nearly 59,000 GitHub stars and it surprised me most. Issues, cycles, modules, a proper backlog, docs attached to projects, an intake queue for triage. It is fast the way Linear is fast, which is not something most open source trackers manage.

For anyone still weighing Jira, remember that the sticker price is not the price. Common add-ons like Tempo or BigPicture stack another $3 to $10 per user each, and a Jira deployment with three or four of them lands at $30 to $40 per seat. That is where self-hosting stops being a hobby and starts being a budget line.

Running it: Docker Compose, PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO for file storage, around 2GB of RAM. Difficulty is medium. It is the most moving parts of anything here after Nextcloud.

The part nobody puts in the listicle

A €5 VPS does not run all ten of these. It will not come close. Add up the RAM alone and you are at 12 to 16GB before caching, which in practice means a €25 to €40 box, or two smaller ones split sensibly.

And the hours are real. Initial setup, TLS certificates, backups you actually verify, updates you actually apply. My honest estimate is a day to stand up a sensible subset and a couple of hours a month to keep it healthy. If your hourly rate is high and your patience is low, some of these are a bad trade for you specifically.

The good news is the shape of that cost. It is flat. It does not scale with your headcount, your contact list, or your event volume. The €4,900 SaaS bill grows every year on its own, sometimes because a vendor decided to grow it. I wrote about why that keeps happening in Your Favorite Tool Is Getting Worse. That's Not Bad Product Management, That's Panic., and the same break-even logic shows up when you price hardware against API calls in When Does Buying Hardware for Local LLMs Actually Pay Off?.

Where to start if you only start once

Do not do all ten. Pick the one where you are paying the most for the least, and move that.

For most small agencies that is analytics or password management, because Umami and Vaultwarden are the two easiest installs here and they both delete a bill on day one. Get one running, live with it for a month, and notice that nothing bad happened. Then take the next one.

That is the actual pattern, by the way. Not a heroic weekend migration. One tool, then another, the same way you replace bloated plugins with a few lines of code in 20 WordPress Plugins You Can Replace With a Few Lines of PHP or drop a JavaScript dependency once you learn the CSS in Replace Your JavaScript Animation Library With CSS. Small, boring, compounding.

The best thing about self hosted SaaS alternatives in 2026 is that you no longer have to talk yourself into them. Twenty is a good CRM. Postiz is a good scheduler. Umami is a good analytics tool. The fact that they are free and yours is the bonus, not the excuse.

If you would rather have someone else stand this stack up and hand you the keys, that is a chunk of what I do at Wunderlandmedia. Either way, go price your own stack first. The number is usually worse than you think.