Self-hosting: guides & tutorials

Auth0 Essentials starts at $23/month for up to 1,000 monthly active users. Beyond that, the pricing scales by MAU in a way that surprises teams that grow: 10,000 MAUs cost roughly $240/month, and adding enterprise features (SAML, custom domains, MFA) pushes you to higher tiers. A self-hosted identity provider on a Liquid Web 4–8 GB Managed VPS eliminates per-MAU pricing entirely.

Calendly Teams costs $20 per user per month for round-robin scheduling, routing forms, and team booking pages. Cal.com — the most feature-complete open-source scheduling platform — covers the same ground on a Liquid Web 4 GB Managed VPS for a flat VPS fee with no per-seat limit.

ChatGPT Team costs $25 per user per month. At 10 users that is $3,000 per year — before you factor in rate limits, data residency concerns, and the fact that every prompt you send trains future OpenAI models unless you opt out. Self-hosting an LLM stack eliminates per-seat costs, keeps prompts on hardware you control, and lets you run models tuned for your domain.

Google Analytics 4 is free, but you pay with your users' data — every pageview ships to Google's servers, GDPR cookie banners become mandatory, and your analytics are subject to GA4's data-retention limits. Self-hosted analytics tools eliminate that tradeoff: your data stays on your VPS, cookie consent banners are often unnecessary, and you own the retention policy.

Google Photos compresses originals on free plans, shares your data with Google's ad systems, and can revoke access or change terms at any time. Self-hosting your photo library keeps originals untouched on hardware you control — no compression, no data harvesting, and no per-photo storage fees beyond your VPS and attached storage.

Heroku's free tier was discontinued in 2022 and paid plans now start at $5/dyno/month — with no included databases, storage billed separately, and costs that compound quickly as you add apps and workers. Self-hosted PaaS tools replicate the Heroku experience (Git push to deploy, automatic SSL, web UI, database provisioning) on a VPS you control, at a fraction of the cost.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro starts at $800/month — and that's before you add Sales Hub or Service Hub. You can replace the entire stack with open-source tools on a Liquid Web Managed VPS for roughly $33–$60/month.

Intercom charges $39/seat/month on the Essentials plan — and that bill grows fast for any team with more than five agents. Every tool on this list is open-source, self-hostable on a Liquid Web VPS, and costs nothing per seat.

Linear charges $8 per user per month on its Standard plan — a reasonable price until your team grows or you want to keep issue data fully under your control. Five mature open-source projects cover Linear's core workflow: issues, cycles (sprints), backlogs, and roadmaps — all self-hostable on a Liquid Web Managed VPS starting at $33/month.

Mailchimp Essentials charges $20/month for 500 contacts and 6,000 sends. Self-hosting removes both caps: a Liquid Web 2–4 GB Managed VPS running Listmonk can send to an unlimited subscriber list at the cost of your SMTP relay — typically $1–3 per 10,000 emails via Postmark or Mailgun.