Stop paying for SaaS
SaaS is trash, replace your Asana, Figma, Slack, Firebase etc etc with free self-hosted stuff.
For the last 6 months, I’ve been working with some friends together on OpenSe. Although it started as a solo project, it quickly grew to 15, and we needed some professional tools to manage our workload, progress etc. With this in mind, it came with a realization that the operational cost would be too high before a single dollar goes into my pocket.
Cost
I did some quick math, this is what it would’ve costed me (estimate):
| 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 do some simple sh*t, before having a single real user.
Although not everyone needed these licenses, I wasn’t going to pay for these stuff if I could avoid it anyways. Afterall, I am broke, and ecnonomy right now is NOT great at all. So, I started researching for free alternatives.
Opensource Projects
I replaced every SaaS tool with a self-hosted alternative, running the whole stack on a handful of old laptops with Kubernetes:
- Asana → Plane.so
- Figma → Penpot
- Lucidchart → draw.io
- Firebase → Supabase
- Slack → Mattermost
How much did this cost?
I would’ve said “electricity”, but I got solar panels, so literally nothing. You might ask: “What about the hardware? didn’t you have to pay for VPS?” well, no. All of these were lightweight enough to all fit on a old repurposed hardware that I already had. And especially since I have MULTIPLE old hardware, setting up K3S to ensure redundency & high-avaliability wasn’t hard at all either, dropping our operational cost to litearlly 0.
The open-source ecosystem right now
Self-hosting tools in 2026 is actually a great choice. More and more opensource projects are becoming so polished that it can rival existing popular products like asana, jira etc. And the AI era also made it extremely easy for you to make your own tools for you to use.
So why keep paying for SaaS? You lose control over your data, you lose privacy, and not only that you’re paying for all of these to happen too. Stop, STOP paying these big cooperations for their services that you can run with virutally 0 cost. You, don’t, need, them.