Age of selfhosting
Replacing Asana, Figma, Slack, and Firebase with open-source alternatives — self-hosted on old laptops running Kubernetes.
For the last four months, I’ve been collaborating with a group of friends on a side project. What started as a handful of people quickly grew to 15 — and with that growth came a familiar tension: our operational costs were about to explode before we’d even shipped anything.
The math that made us pause
If we’d reached for the standard startup toolkit, here’s what the per-seat pricing would have looked like:
| Tool | Cost per user/mo |
|---|---|
| Asana | $27.49 |
| Figma | $55.00 |
| Lucidchart | $48.00 |
| Firebase | ~$50+ |
| Slack | $25.26 |
Across 15 people, that’s roughly $2,400 per month — just to communicate, design, and track tasks. Before a single user touched the product.
That number didn’t sit right. So we asked: what if we just… didn’t pay?
The open-source swap
We replaced every SaaS tool with a self-hosted alternative, running the whole stack on a handful of old laptops with Kubernetes:
- Asana → Plane.so — project tracking that feels polished, not like a compromise
- Figma → Penpot — browser-based design tool, native SVG, no seats to count
- Lucidchart → draw.io — diagrams that just work, zero friction
- Firebase → Supabase — managed Postgres with auth, storage, and realtime; self-host when you’re ready
- Slack → Mattermost — team chat that doesn’t hold your history hostage behind a paywall
What we actually paid
Nearly nothing. The services run on repurposed hardware we already had. Electricity and the occasional reboot are the only line items. Our monthly operational cost dropped from a projected $2,400 to effectively zero.
The less obvious win
Cost was the trigger, but the real payoff was something else: control. No vendor suddenly changing their pricing model. No features gated behind a plan upgrade. No scrambling when a free tier evaporates. The tools are ours, the data is ours, and the stack stays up as long as we want it to.
The open-source ecosystem right now
The quality of self-hostable tools in 2026 is genuinely surprising. Plane’s UI rivals linear. Penpot handles multi-page design files without breaking a sweat. Mattermost has threads, emoji reactions, and integrations that make the switch from Slack almost invisible.
If you’re bootstrapping something with a small team, it’s worth looking at what the open-source community has built before you start signing up for per-seat licenses. You might find you don’t need them at all.