Best of, pick by what you're trying to do
Hand-curated use-case head pages. Each one ranks the top open-source self-hostable tools in its category by health score with the cheapest VPS plan that runs it.
If you don't want to feed your visitor data to Google Analytics or pay per-event for Mixpanel, you can self-host an analytics tool on a $5/mo VPS and own the da…
Tableau and Looker bill per seat, fast. Self-hosted Metabase or Apache Superset gives unlimited seats on a single VPS and reads the same SQL warehouses. These a…
Salesforce charges per seat and locks your data into its ecosystem. Self-hosted CRMs like Twenty and SuiteCRM give the same lead/contact/pipeline features with …
Jira charges $7-15 per user per month. Self-hosted Plane, OpenProject, and Focalboard give kanban, issues, and roadmaps for unlimited team members on a single V…
Slack charges $7-12 per user per month and locks message history behind paywalls. Self-hosted Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and Zulip give the same channels, threads…
Bitwarden's hosted plan is fine, but if you want full data sovereignty you can self-host Vaultwarden (a Rust-rewrite of Bitwarden's server) on a $4 Hetzner VPS …
Zendesk and Intercom both charge $50+/agent/month. Self-hosted Chatwoot and Zammad give multi-channel ticketing, live chat, and customer history without per-sea…
Typeform's pricing scales with submissions. Self-hosted Formbricks, OhMyForm, and Tally-style alternatives give unlimited forms and submissions on a $5/mo VPS.
Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana Cloud all charge per host or per metric. Self-hosted Grafana + Prometheus + Loki gives the same dashboards on infra you already …
Heroku, Render, and Vercel are convenient but pricey. Coolify, Dokploy, and CapRover give the same one-click git-deploy + auto-SSL + buildpack experience on a $…
Dropbox and Google Drive bill per gigabyte forever. A single Hetzner storage box runs Nextcloud or Seafile with TB of capacity for a flat ~$10/mo.
GitHub Enterprise and GitLab Premium are pricey for small teams. Gitea and Forgejo give the same repos + CI + issues on a $5 VPS.
Google Photos quietly raised prices in 2021 and now charges $1.99-9.99/mo above 15GB. Self-hosted Immich and PhotoPrism give the same face recognition, geo-tagg…
Plex monetizes through Plex Pass and integrates ads in their app. Jellyfin is the fully free fork. These are the open-source media servers that stream your own …
Spotify pays artists fractions of a cent per stream and locks your library into their app. Self-hosted Navidrome, Funkwhale, and Jellyfin let you stream your ow…
Commercial VPNs charge $5-15/mo per device and you trust them with all your traffic. Self-hosted WireGuard, OpenVPN, and Headscale (Tailscale alternative) give …
Gmail charges $6-18/user/mo for Workspace and reads your mail for ad targeting. Self-hosted Mailcow and Mailu give a full Postfix + Dovecot + Roundcube + spam f…
GitHub Actions starts billing at $0.008/minute past the free tier. Self-hosted Drone, Woodpecker, and Concourse run unlimited pipelines on hardware you already …
Pocket got bought by Mozilla and is now a Firefox-tax. Pinboard charges $22/yr for archival. Self-hosted Linkding, Wallabag, and Shaarli give the same save-and-…
Feedly Pro is $8/mo, Inoreader Pro is $10/mo. Self-hosted FreshRSS and Miniflux give the same multi-device sync, sharing, and full-text search on a $4/mo VPS, n…
Confluence is $6-11/user/mo. Notion Enterprise is $20/seat. Self-hosted Outline, BookStack, and Wiki.js give the same shared docs and team-knowledge UX on a $5/…
Typeform charges $25-83/mo. SurveyMonkey is $25-99/mo. Self-hosted LimeSurvey and Formbricks give the same conditional logic and response analytics on a $5/mo V…
Pingdom is $15-369/mo. UptimeRobot Pro is $7-99/mo. Self-hosted Uptime Kuma gives the same beautiful dashboards, status pages, and Discord/Slack alerts on a $4/…
Mailchimp starts at $13/mo and scales with list size. ConvertKit is $25-79/mo. Self-hosted Listmonk and Sendy let you run unlimited subscribers on a $5/mo VPS w…
Zoom Pro is $14-22/host/mo with 100-participant cap. Self-hosted Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton give unlimited participants and full HD on a $10-30/mo VPS. The op…
Box is $5-25/user/mo. SharePoint is $5-23/user/mo. Self-hosted Paperless-ngx, Docspell, and Mayan EDMS give OCR, full-text search, and document workflows on a $…
NetSuite starts at $999/mo per company plus $99/user. Odoo SaaS is $24-37/user/mo. Self-hosted ERPNext, Dolibarr, and Odoo Community give CRM, accounting, inven…
ChatGPT Plus is $20/mo per user. Claude Pro is $20/mo per user. Self-hosted Open WebUI, LibreChat, and ChatGPT-Next-Web give the same chat UX with multi-model s…
Toggl Track is $9-18/user/mo. Harvest is $11-13.75/user/mo. Self-hosted Kimai and TimeTagger give project-level tracking, timesheets, and invoicing for unlimite…