The SaaS pricing wave of 2025-2026
According to the Vertice index, SaaS inflation reached 16.4% in June 2026 — the highest monthly rate ever recorded, more than five times the general inflation of G7 countries. In 2025, 73% of SaaS vendors raised their prices, with an average increase of 14.2% (source: blog.elest.io, "The Great SaaS Exodus"). This movement is not uniform: AI/LLM categories grew by 78%, CRM by 52%, project management by 45%.
Some notable increases in the 2024-2026 period:
— Atlassian raised its cloud prices three times: in October 2024, October 2025, and October 2026 (source: empyra.com). On the Enterprise offering, the cumulative increase exceeds 153% (source: elest.io).
— Notion raised the Business plan from $15 to $20/user/month in June 2025, a +33% jump, after having already increased in 2024. A Business plan at $20/seat represents $2,400/year for a 10-person team, versus $1,800 the previous year.
— Google Workspace Business Standard went from $12 to $14/user/month (annual) in March 2025, after a 20% increase in 2023. In 2026, the standard rate reaches $18.40/user/month (source: name.com).
— Asana Advanced increased by 23% over the 2024-2026 period, with a peak of +27% year-over-year on this tier (source: getpricepulse.com).
For a company spending $84,000/year on SaaS, the median increase in H1 2026 represents 34% in additional costs, according to Zylo.
8 signals that it is time to calculate your ROI
- Your aggregated SaaS bill has increased by more than 20% in one year, without usage growing proportionally.
- Several tools in your stack have migrated to a per-seat model, when they were previously on a flat fee.
- You are paying for unused licences: according to Zylo, 47% of SaaS licences are inactive in the average company.
- Your technical team has fewer than 4 hours per week to administer a server — a realistic threshold for a standard Docker stack.
- Your data flows through third-party services whose data processing terms you have not audited.
- You are renewing subscriptions without checking whether the open-source alternative has matured since your last test.
- The sum of your monthly subscriptions exceeds the cost of a VPS running an equivalent stack.
- Your vendor is forcing a migration to the cloud at end-of-support of the on-premise version you use.
The 3-step method to calculate the real cost
Step 1 — Inventory your current stack. List each paid tool, its current price per user, its price at last renewal, and the number of active seats. Only include tools that have a maintained open-source equivalent (Nextcloud, Mattermost, Plane, n8n, Gitea, Docmost, SigNoz, etc.). Calculate the real annual total — multi-seat contracts, taxes included.
Step 2 — Estimate the self-hosted alternative. For each tool, find the RAM/CPU requirements of the open-source solution. Add up the resources needed across the entire stack. A VPS with 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM is generally enough to host 6-8 light to medium applications for a team of 10 to 15 people — this is demonstrated by the migration described on dev.to (15-engineer team, $14,000/year savings, €171/year VPS). Add a line for external object storage (Backblaze B2 or S3 equivalent: $3-10/month for backups).
Step 3 — Include hidden costs. Maintenance time is the most underestimated line item. For a standard stack under Docker Compose: count 1 to 2 hours per month for security updates and backup checks in stable operation, plus 2 to 4 hours during a major version upgrade. One technical hour at €50/h represents €600 to €1,200 per year. This amount generally remains well below the savings achieved once a team exceeds 5 people.
SaaS vs self-hosted stack — 10-person team, total cost over 3 years
Scroll the table
| Category | SaaS (2026 reference) | Self-hosted (VPS included) | 3-year savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Communication (Slack Business+) | $1,500/yr ($15/seat/month) | Shared VPS* | $1,500/yr — Mattermost CE |
| Collaboration/Wiki (Notion Business) | $2,400/yr ($20/seat/month) | Shared VPS* | $2,400/yr — Docmost or AFFiNE |
| Project management (Asana Advanced) | $2,760/yr ($23/seat/month) | Shared VPS* | $2,760/yr — Plane or Kaneo |
| File storage (Google Workspace Std.) | $1,680/yr ($14/seat/month) | Shared VPS* | $1,680/yr — Nextcloud |
| Automation (Zapier Team) | $3,000/yr (flat fee) | Shared VPS* | $3,000/yr — n8n Community |
| Application monitoring (Datadog Pro) | $4,800/yr ($40/host/month) | Shared VPS* | $4,800/yr — SigNoz |
| VPS 4 vCPU / 16 GB (VPS Power) | — | 299 DH/month × 36 months | Infrastructure shared across all tools |
| Total over 3 years | $47,820 | ~$520 (VPS) + ~$1,000 (estimated maintenance) | ~$46,300 savings over 3 years |
The hidden costs of self-hosting — quantified
Self-hosting has real costs that simplistic comparisons ignore. Here they are, honestly quantified.
Maintenance time. In steady state, a well-orchestrated Docker Compose stack (Watchtower or Diun for update alerts, automated backups via cron) requires about 15 to 30 minutes per month of checking. During a major update of a complex tool (Nextcloud, Gitea, n8n), allow 1 to 2 hours of maintenance window. At €50/h, the annual cost is between €150 and €600 depending on the stack size. This figure assumes your technical team agrees to integrate this workload into its schedule — it is not a zero cost.
Backups. External object storage such as Backblaze B2 or AWS S3 Glacier costs between €3 and €10/month to store 50 to 500 GB of compressed data. Backups can be automated (Restic, rclone), but restoration must be tested periodically — allow 1 hour of testing per quarter.
Security. VPS servers exposed on the internet must receive OS security patches promptly. On Debian/Ubuntu with unattended-upgrades, this item is partially automatable. What remains is monitoring application CVEs (Nextcloud, n8n, etc.): 20 to 30 minutes of monitoring per week is sufficient if you subscribe to project announcement lists.
Incidents. An unexpected incident (full disk, expired TLS certificate, breaking update) statistically occurs 2 to 4 times per year on an active stack. Allow 2 hours per incident on average. This cost is difficult to plan but rarely catastrophic if the base infrastructure is correctly configured.
From how many people is self-hosting profitable?
The threshold rule rests on a single calculation: the annual cost of the equivalent SaaS stack must exceed the annualised VPS cost plus the opportunity cost of maintenance.
In practice, in 2026:
5 people. Self-hosting is marginal. For a 3-tool stack (communication, wiki, storage), the SaaS bill at 5 seats reaches $2,700 to $4,500 per year depending on tools. A VPS at 99 DH/month and 2 hours of monthly maintenance at €50/h comes to about €1,600/year all in. Profitability is there, but it remains modest: $1,000 to $2,000 in annual savings. This threshold only justifies migration if data control or scalability are also in the balance.
10 people. The calculation shifts clearly. The full stack (communication, wiki, project, storage, automation) costs $12,000 to $18,000/year in SaaS. The shared VPS and maintenance represent €1,500 to €2,500/year. The saving exceeds $10,000/year — this is the threshold at which the initial migration investment (10 to 20 hours of configuration) is recouped in less than 3 months.
25 people. Self-hosting is clearly dominant. The same stack in SaaS represents $30,000 to $45,000/year with the 2025-2026 increases. Two redundant VPS (high availability) and a part-time maintenance budget remain far below the SaaS cost. At this level, the breakeven point is no longer financial but organisational: do you have a technical person who can maintain the infrastructure?
Practical rule: if your annual SaaS stack exceeds €6,000, you probably have an economic basis for exploring self-hosting. If it exceeds €12,000, it is a priority.
5 tools not to self-host
Some tools are technically self-hostable but the effort-to-gain ratio is unfavourable, or even risky.
1. Production email (outbound SMTP). Since 2024, Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo issue permanent SMTP-level rejections for senders without an established reputation. A new VPS IP can take weeks to build up a sending reputation. For transactional or newsletter email, a managed relay (Postmark, Resend, Amazon SES) costs a few euros per month and guarantees deliverability. Internal messaging, however, self-hosts well (Stalwart, Mailcow).
2. Large-scale acquisition CRM. Open-source CRMs (Twenty, EspoCRM, Dolibarr) work well for 10 to 100 active contacts in internal management. Once volumes grow or telephony/marketing automation integration becomes complex, the maintenance cost exceeds the savings.
3. High-traffic video conferencing tools. Jitsi Meet self-hosts easily for internal meetings. But beyond 20 simultaneous participants, the bandwidth and CPU required on a standard VPS push costs up — sometimes above the Google Meet or Zoom rate.
4. Payment processing. Stripe, Mollie, CMI: these services carry PCI-DSS compliance, dispute management and fraud prevention. Attempting to replace them with a self-hosted gateway is a high legal and technical risk decision, for a marginal gain.
5. Tools with critical proprietary integrations. If your workflow depends on a native integration with Salesforce, HubSpot or SAP, and your open-source alternative only partially implements it, the compensation cost (custom development, API mapping) can exceed the 3-year savings.
Where to start — minimum stack for a team of 5 to 10
A migration does not happen all at once. The pragmatic sequence for a team starting from scratch in self-hosting:
Week 1 — The base infrastructure. Provision a VPS with 4 vCPU and 8 to 16 GB RAM. Install Docker Compose and a reverse proxy (Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager) with automatic Let's Encrypt certificate management. Set up automated backups from day one (a Restic script to S3 storage).
Week 2 — The most expensive tool. Migrate first the tool that represents the largest line item in your SaaS bill. For most teams, this is Notion (wiki/documentation) or Jira/Asana (project management). Docmost, AFFiNE and Plane offer native importers.
Weeks 3-4 — Communication and storage. Mattermost (Slack) and Nextcloud (Google Workspace) are the two most documented migrations. Nextcloud supports import from Google Drive via its OAuth application. Mattermost imports Slack history.
Month 2 — Automation and monitoring. n8n replaces Zapier/Make for inter-application workflows. SigNoz or Grafana/Loki replace Datadog for observability. These two tools are the most resource-intensive — reserve them for a second VPS if your base stack is already at 60% load.
Stop criterion. If a tool resists migration after two attempts (integration complexity, non-exportable data, critical third-party dependency), leave it on SaaS. Partial self-hosting remains profitable — and not migrating everything is not a failure.
What this calculation does not cover — and resources to go further
This comparison stops at direct costs and standard maintenance costs. It does not cover contractual service continuity (guaranteed SLAs), sector-specific regulatory compliance (healthcare, finance, defence) that may require specific certifications, or multi-site disaster recovery scenarios.
To go further in selecting a VPS suited to your stack, the related articles below detail VPS alternatives in 2026, migration from Google Workspace to Nextcloud, and Atlassian's October-December 2026 price increases with corresponding open-source alternatives.
The final decision is not purely financial: it commits your team's operational responsibility for an infrastructure that no one else will maintain for you. That is not a constraint in every case — for many technical teams, it is exactly the control they were looking for.
