Twenty: A Self-Hosted CRM Alternative to HubSpot/Salesforce
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.
HubSpot CRM Starter is $20 per seat per month on standard monthly billing. The $7/seat number you'll see in a lot of marketing is a promotional annual rate — real, but worth knowing it typically renews at a higher rate later, the same pattern I flagged in the 1Password post. I'll use the $20 list price here since that's what you're actually committing to without a promo.
The actual numbers
| HubSpot Starter | Self-hosted Twenty | |
|---|---|---|
| 5-person team | $100.00/month (5 × $20) | $24.00/month (dedicated VPS) |
That's a 76% reduction at list price — though if you're actually paying the promotional $7/seat rate, the gap is much smaller ($35/month vs $24/month) until that promo expires.
What Twenty actually is — and how young it is
Twenty is an open-source CRM built to look and feel like a modern alternative to the expensive, lock-in-heavy incumbents. I want to be straightforward about maturity here, more than I usually need to be: Twenty only marked its self-hosted deployment as production-ready in its 2.1.0 release in April 2026. That's recent. For most of the tools on this site, I'm comparing against mature, years-old open-source projects. Twenty is not that yet — it's real and usable, but newer, with less production track record than something like Gitea or Vaultwarden.
Resource-wise, it runs four services — app server, background worker, Postgres, and Redis — similar in shape to Chatwoot. Idle usage is under 1.5GB, but for reliable production use under real load, plan for the same $24/month, 4GB Vultr tier rather than trying to squeeze it onto a smaller shared box.
Who should actually do this
If your CRM holds your entire pipeline and losing data would be a genuine business problem, I'd want more production maturity before betting the business on it — or at minimum, back it up aggressively and test your restore process before you trust it with real deal data. If you're a small team just getting a CRM started and the SaaS pricing is what's stopping you, this is a reasonable place to begin, with eyes open about what a young project actually means in practice.
I run mine on the same kind of dedicated Vultr instance as Chatwoot — see the full cost roll-up for how it all fits together.
Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Vultr. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to providers I actually use.