Guide
The open-source alternative to every SaaS you pay for
The open-source alternative to a SaaS subscription is usually a mature, actively maintained project you can run yourself or have managed for you — Matomo instead of Google Analytics, Listmonk instead of Mailchimp, Nextcloud instead of Google Drive, Vaultwarden instead of a cloud password manager. Below is a map from eight common SaaS categories to the open-source project we host at opensource.hosting for each one, with what actually changes, what doesn't, and where the savings are real versus where they're a wash.
The map
This isn't an exhaustive list of every open-source project that exists — it's the ten apps we actually run at opensource.hosting, matched to the SaaS category people usually reach for first. If you're paying a monthly seat or subscriber fee for something in the left column, there's a good chance the right column already does the job.
| You're probably paying for | Open-source alternative | What's actually different |
|---|---|---|
| Web analytics (Google Analytics or a paid alternative) | Matomo | Data stays in your own account; first-party by default instead of a third party's ad graph. |
| Email & newsletters (Mailchimp, Kit, a Substack-style list) | Listmonk | Flat hosting fee instead of a per-subscriber rate that climbs as your list grows. |
| File storage & sync (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive) | Nextcloud | Files, calendar and contacts in one place; the seat count doesn't change the tier price. |
| Password management (a cloud vault subscription) | Vaultwarden | Bitwarden-compatible apps and browser extensions, pointed at a vault you or we control. |
| Uptime monitoring & status pages (a commercial monitoring seat) | Uptime Kuma | Nothing about your infrastructure is reported to a third party's dashboard. |
| Git hosting & CI (a commercial code-hosting seat) | Gitea | Repos, issues and CI pipelines without a per-seat license on top of the hosting bill. |
| Team chat (a commercial team-chat seat) | Mattermost | Same channel-and-thread model your team already knows, without message content feeding a vendor's other products. |
| Video calls (a commercial video-conferencing seat) | Jitsi | Guests join a room without creating an account; nothing is recorded or sold by default. |
Two more we run that don't map cleanly to a single SaaS category: Grafana, for dashboards on whatever you're already measuring, and Wiki.js, for internal documentation that isn't a wall of shared documents. Both replace "a paid tool you'd otherwise bolt on" more than one specific competitor.
Is it actually cheaper?
Depends which row you're looking at, and being honest about that matters more than a headline number. The clearest case is the one where SaaS pricing scales with something you don't control:
At 25,000 contacts, Mailchimp's Standard plan runs about $270/month and Kit's Creator Pro plan runs about $279/month — both climb because the price is set per subscriber, not per feature. A flat, self-hosted Listmonk instance doesn't reprice itself when your list grows, which is the entire argument for that category.
Managed self-hosting itself has a real market, too, and it isn't priced the way you'd guess: resource-metered instances start around $2/month, dedicated managed instances start around $11/month plus storage, and per-server panel licensing runs roughly €15–25/month regardless of how many apps that server runs — all as of July 2026. Our own entry tier, one managed app with the 10% upstream pledge included, is €7.90/month net, which sits inside that range rather than trying to undercut every point of it.
For the categories priced per seat — storage, passwords, chat, video, monitoring — the honest answer is "it depends on your headcount and which vendor you're currently on," and we'd rather you compute your own number than trust ours. The SaaS Escape Plan tool on our homepage does exactly that: pick what you're on today, set your team size, and it shows your current annual spend against a flat self-hosted alternative, with every assumption it uses written out next to the result.
Self-hosting vs. managed — the honest version
Every app in the table above is free and open-source. Nothing here requires paying anyone. You can run Matomo, Nextcloud or Vaultwarden yourself on a small server for the cost of your own time, and plenty of people do exactly that, happily, for years.
What that time actually costs is the part people underestimate: applying security patches on a schedule instead of "eventually," renewing TLS certificates before they expire instead of after, restoring from backup under pressure the first time you actually need to, and being the person who gets paged when the disk fills up on a Sunday. Most of these apps run fine unattended for months — then something breaks in a way that costs a weekend to diagnose, usually at the least convenient moment.
Managed hosting doesn't change the software. It's the same vanilla upstream project, unmodified, exporting in its own native format the whole time. What changes is who's on call: patching, backups, TLS and monitoring happen on our schedule, and you get an admin login on day one instead of a server to provision first.
- No telemetry bolted onto any of these apps beyond what the upstream project itself already includes.
- No seat pricing — a Nextcloud instance costs the same whether three people use it or thirty.
- No forked or rebranded builds — if you could run it yourself from the project's own source, it's the same thing here.
The 10% underneath all of this
Every app in the map above carries the same commitment: ten percent of what you pay us for hosting it goes upstream to that project's maintainers, every month, and we publish the total. It's not a separate marketing fund — it's a fixed cut of the same invoice, calculated per project you actually run. The full mechanics — how it's split across apps, where the money goes when a project doesn't have a donation channel yet, and why we do this at all — are laid out on why 10% of every fee goes upstream, or in short form under how the 10% works on our homepage.
Pick an app, we'll run it
Matomo, Listmonk, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Gitea, Mattermost, Jitsi, Grafana or Wiki.js — patched, backed up, TLS-terminated, with ten percent of the fee going upstream every month.
FAQ
Is open-source really cheaper than SaaS?
Sometimes dramatically, sometimes not much at all — it depends on which category you're comparing. Per-subscriber or per-seat SaaS (newsletter tools, cloud storage, password managers) gets more expensive as you grow, while a flat-fee open-source instance doesn't, so the gap widens with scale. For tools you'd pay for regardless of headcount, the honest comparison is closer, and the real saving is time, not just money.
Who maintains my apps if I don't?
We do, if you host with us: patching, security updates, daily backups and TLS renewal are handled on our schedule, not yours. If you self-host instead, that job is yours — which is a completely valid choice, it just means budgeting the hours, not just the euros.
Is self-hosted data safer?
Safer from a specific risk — a vendor mining, reselling or training on your data — because the software simply doesn't have that feature built in. It is not automatically safer from every risk: an unpatched self-hosted instance is worse than a well-run SaaS product. Managed self-hosting is our answer to that gap: vanilla upstream software, patched on schedule, without the data-use terms of a SaaS vendor.
What is the 10% upstream pledge?
Ten percent of the hosting fee for whichever app you run with us goes to that project's maintainers every month, and we publish the total. It applies to every app in this map — Matomo, Listmonk, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Gitea, Mattermost and Jitsi included. The full mechanics are on our dedicated page about it.