Startup cuts $14,000 annual SaaS bill by self-hosting seven open-source tools

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A small engineering team in 2026 replaced seven paid cloud services — including Datadog, Zapier, Slack, and Notion — with self-hosted open-source alternatives to dramatically reduce costs. Tools such as n8n, SigNoz, Mattermost, and self-hosted Supabase were deployed on a single dedicated VPS costing roughly €14.28 per month. The original stack was costing the team between $1,200 and $1,800 per month, or up to $21,600 annually, before any business logic was written. Each replacement was chosen for feature parity, with savings per tool ranging from $1,500 to $4,800 per year. The team published its full Docker Compose configuration as a replicable blueprint for other startups facing similar SaaS cost pressures.

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