We Replaced $8K/Month in SaaS with Open Source
Last year we sat down with a 40-person professional services firm and listed every SaaS tool they were paying for. CRM, project management, time tracking, analytics, document signing, marketing automation, email campaigns, form builders. The total came to $8,200 per month. Nearly $100K a year, and the number was climbing with every new hire.
Six months later, their stack costs $1,100 per month — mostly infrastructure — and they have more control over their data than they ever did with the SaaS tools.
The Starting Point: Death by a Thousand Subscriptions
The firm's stack was typical for a growing services business. Salesforce for CRM ($1,800/mo). HubSpot Marketing Hub ($800/mo). Harvest for time tracking ($400/mo). DocuSign for contracts ($250/mo). Google Analytics 360 ($1,040/mo). Jotform for lead capture ($100/mo). Zapier for automation ($600/mo).
None of these tools were bad. Most were excellent. The problem was threefold:
- Cost scaled with headcount, not with value delivered
- Data lived in silos, requiring expensive integration middleware
- The business did not own its data — every tool was a rental agreement with an exit tax
What We Replaced
Salesforce ($1,800) → Twenty CRM ($0 self-hosted) HubSpot Marketing ($800) → n8n + custom workflows ($0 self-hosted) Harvest ($400) → Kimai ($0 self-hosted) DocuSign ($250) → DocuSeal ($0 self-hosted) GA 360 ($1,040) → Umami + Clarity ($0 self-hosted + free) Zapier ($600) → n8n ($0 self-hosted) Jotform ($100) → Custom Next.js forms ($0)
Infrastructure cost: ~$900/month for a well-provisioned VPS with automated backups, monitoring, and SSL.
Net savings: $7,100/month. $85,200/year.
What Actually Happened: The Good
Data unification became trivial. With everything self-hosted, the database is yours. Building a unified dashboard that pulls time-tracking data alongside CRM pipeline data is a SQL query, not a $500/month integration platform.
Customization went from weeks to hours. The firm needed a custom field in their CRM that calculated projected revenue. In Salesforce, that is a multi-week engagement. With Twenty CRM, it was a few hours of configuration.
Per-seat pricing disappeared. The 40-person firm grew to 55 over six months. Their SaaS bill would have increased by $2,000/month. Their Open Source Software infrastructure cost did not change.
The Hard Parts
Migration took longer than planned. We budgeted four weeks. It took seven. The CRM data migration required careful field-by-field validation.
Self-hosting requires operational maturity. You need to handle updates, security patches, backups, and uptime. The firm needed internal DevOps capability or outsourced infrastructure management.
Some SaaS tools are genuinely better. We kept Google Workspace for email and docs, Slack for communication, and Stripe for payments. The goal is not Open Source Software-only, but owning critical business data.
Considering a migration? Learn more about our digital transformation services or use our cost comparison tool to estimate your savings. You can also read our Open Source Software migration guide for a step-by-step framework.