Replace Your Expensive Cloud Tools With Self-Hostable Alternatives
Author / channel: Simon Høiberg Format: video Source: Original Published: 2025-03-03
Summary
Høiberg replaced six paid SaaS tools with free open-source self-hostable alternatives, saving >$10K/yr for a small bootstrapped team. The replacements: Notion → Docmost (wiki) + Plane (PM) + Strapi (CMS); Zapier/Make → n8n; Airtable → NocoDB; PostHog → Postgres + Grafana; OpenAI hosted → deepseek on Hetzner GPU (€84/mo). The wiki-relevant signal is the n8n + DeepSeek + GPU-rental stack — adjacent to the self-hosting / local-AI thread already in the wiki.
Key Points
- Notion replacement is a tri-split — no single tool replaces it well. Docmost for docs/wiki, Plane for project management ($799 lifetime upgrade for cycles + time tracking), Strapi for CMS-style blog/newsletter content.
- Zapier + Make → n8n — Høiberg’s claim: n8n has the best AI-agent implementation of any automation platform. Self-hosted = unlimited workflows.
- Airtable → NocoDB — Community Edition self-hostable. Side benefit: data privacy on your own servers.
- PostHog → Postgres + Grafana — manual event logging into Postgres, SQL queries through Grafana for visualization. ChatGPT writes the SQL. Frame: “I have never had better analytics than this.”
- DeepSeek on rented GPU — Hetzner GPU instance at €84/mo for a fixed-cost hosted DeepSeek deployment. The fixed-cost AI premise that excited him most: “AI at a fixed cost.”
Sponsorship & Bias Notes
Promotes his own FounderStack lifetime deal throughout. The recommendations themselves are independent and the cost-savings claim is plausible for a small team.
Connected Pages
- self-hostable-alternatives — the running map this source anchors
- n8n — primary wiki-relevant tool
- docmost, plane, strapi — the three-way Notion split
- nocodb — Airtable replacement
- grafana — analytics replacement (+ Postgres event logging)
- deepseek — fixed-cost local-hosting use case
- saas-death-spiral — adjacent thesis (per-seat pricing → bypass)
- ollama, vllm — local-AI thread
- Simon Høiberg — author hub