Bitly's free plan gives you basic short links but gates custom domains and full analytics history behind paid tiers starting around $8/month. Self-hosting the shortener means the domain was always yours anyway — and you lose Bitly's link-in-bio pages and QR-code UI polish in the trade.
Toggl's free plan caps out at 5 users and strips out reporting features. Past that you're paying per seat for a stopwatch — a self-hosted tracker removes the seat count entirely, though you lose Toggl's native mobile apps and one-click integrations.
Typeform's free plan caps you at 10 responses a month. Past that you're paying around $25/month (billed annually) for a response counter to go away — a self-hosted form builder removes the counter entirely, though it won't plug into as many payment/integration providers out of the box.
Miro and FigJam's free tiers cover a handful of boards. Past that you're paying per seat for real-time collaboration a self-hosted whiteboard gives you for free — with a smaller feature set, and I'll say plainly where it falls short.
Sentry's Team plan is $29/month for 50,000 errors — fine until a bad deploy or a noisy dependency blows past that in a day. GlitchTip speaks the same Sentry SDK protocol with none of the per-event metering.
HubSpot's Starter plan lists at $20/seat/month — the $7 rate you see everywhere is a promotional annual price that renews higher later. Twenty is a genuinely young open-source CRM, and I'd rather say that plainly than oversell it.
Calendly's Standard plan is $10/seat/month — fine for one person, real money for a team where everyone needs their own booking page. Cal.com is the same product, open source, running on the same $12/month tier as most of this stack.
Slack's free tier caps message history at 90 days, which is what actually pushes most small teams to a paid plan. The savings here are more modest than most of what's on this site — worth saying upfront.
Zoom's 40-minute limit is only on the free plan — Pro removes it for $16.99/host/month. For a small team, that adds up fast per host, and self-hosted Jitsi Meet removes both the time limit and the per-host bill.
GitHub's free tier already includes unlimited private repos and collaborators, so this isn't really a repo-hosting savings story. The real bill shows up in CI minutes — and that's where self-hosting actually changes the math.
Intercom's per-seat pricing adds up fast for a small support team, and that's before their $0.99-per-resolution AI fee. Chatwoot is the one tool in this whole stack that genuinely needs its own dedicated VPS — here's whether that trade is still worth it.
Mailchimp bills on your list size, not how often you actually email people — a quiet subscriber costs the same as an engaged one. Self-hosted Listmonk flips that: you only pay for what you actually send.
Self-Hosted Stack
UptimeRobot's free tier is genuinely fine for basic checks. What you're actually paying for past that is faster check intervals and real status pages — both of which a self-hosted monitor gives you for free, with one ironic catch.
Self-Hosted Stack
For typical small-team file sharing — tens of gigabytes, not a personal 2TB photo archive — Nextcloud fits on the VPS you're probably already running for free. Here's when that math holds and when it stops.
Self-Hosted Stack
Unlike most posts on this site, this isn't really a savings story at small scale — 1Password's team plan is already a flat, cheap rate. Here's where self-hosting a password manager actually pays off, and the security trade-offs you're taking on if you do it.
Self-Hosted Stack
I'm going to be straightforwardly biased here in one way and honest in every other: I run this whole stack on Vultr, but Hetzner is objectively the cheapest option for raw specs. Here's the real comparison, trade-offs included.
Self-Hosted Stack
Pushover is honestly cheap for individuals — $4.99 once, no subscription. The real problem shows up once your homelab is noisy: 10,000 free messages a month sounds like a lot until every workflow, alert, and backup job is pinging you.
Self-Hosted Stack
Every self-hosting post on this site so far has been about renting a small VPS. Here's when buying a physical mini PC and running it at home actually beats that — and when it doesn't, with the real breakeven math.
Self-Hosted Stack
Confluence's per-user pricing looks cheap until your team crosses 10 people and loses the free tier. I moved our internal docs to BookStack on a $6/month VPS instead - here's what it actually costs and where it falls short.
Self-Hosted Stack
Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue plus Stripe fees. Ghost(Pro) charges a flat platform fee instead. Self-hosting Ghost drops the platform fee to whatever your VPS costs. Here's the breakeven math, using this site's own numbers.
Self-Hosted Stack
I added up what I used to pay for Zapier, Datadog, and Notion, then compared it to what I actually pay now running the self-hosted equivalents on one small VPS. Here's the real math.
Self-Hosted Stack
I moved my task tracking off Notion and Asana onto self-hosted Vikunja. Here's what it actually costs, what it can't do yet, and how it holds up day to day.
Self-Hosted Stack
Datadog's per-host pricing adds up fast. Here's what it actually costs to run your own monitoring stack instead, and what you give up.
Self-Hosted Stack
A real cost comparison between Zapier and self-hosted n8n, plus the actual automation I run on it.