SaaS Stack Replacement

Most businesses start with SaaS tools because they solve immediate problems without requiring infrastructure investment. At five employees, this is a straightforward trade-off. At thirty, the economics have shifted materially — and most finance teams haven't run the calculation.

A realistic SaaS stack for a 35-person business commonly includes team communication, project management, document collaboration, CRM, customer support, password management, and video conferencing. Aggregated, per-seat costs across these tools typically land between $80 and $120 per employee per month. At 35 employees, that's $35,000 to $50,000 per year — for infrastructure you don't own, can't modify, and will be charged more for as you grow.

The problem compounds in two directions. Vendor pricing typically increases 8–15% annually through seat-based growth clauses, feature tier expansions, and renewal rate increases. Meanwhile, your dependency on each platform deepens through integrations, accumulated data, and team workflows built around specific interfaces. By the time the cost is visible in budget reviews, migration has become genuinely expensive.

SaaS replacement is not simply installing open-source software on a server. Production replacement requires architectural design, data migration, access control configuration, user onboarding, documentation, and a functioning operational model before any SaaS subscription is cancelled.

Our replacement process begins with an assessment of your current stack: which tools carry the highest per-seat costs, which carry governance risk, which have open-source alternatives with production track records, and which are genuinely irreplaceable at your current scale. The output is a prioritised replacement roadmap — not a recommendation to replace everything at once.

For each system in scope, we design the architecture, deploy to a staging environment, migrate data, configure access controls, and run parallel operation until the replacement is verified. We document the environment completely and assume ongoing operational responsibility. You cancel the SaaS subscription when the replacement is proven, not before.

Cost reduction is often the entry point, but governance is frequently the more durable reason to replace SaaS tools. Consumer-grade SaaS platforms were built for broad adoption, not for the access control requirements, audit trail needs, or data residency obligations of businesses operating in regulated industries or with serious data handling responsibilities.

Self-hosted replacements allow you to define exactly who can access what, log every access event, retain logs for the duration your compliance posture requires, and keep data within the geographic boundary your contracts or regulations specify. These are configuration decisions you make — not features you negotiate with a vendor.

For businesses that have accepted data processing agreements with enterprise clients, the ability to demonstrate data residency and access control architecture is increasingly a commercial requirement, not just a compliance formality.

A replaced SaaS system requires ongoing operational care: version upgrades, security patches, backup verification, monitoring, and incident response. The key question is not whether this work exists, but who does it and how reliably.

When TrySelfHost replaces a SaaS system, we assume that operational responsibility. Monitoring, alerting, scheduled maintenance windows, patch management, and backup verification are included in the ongoing engagement. You are not handed a deployed system and left to operate it. The team that built the replacement continues to run it.

This operational continuity is what separates a production replacement from an experiment. Many businesses have attempted self-hosting, succeeded technically, and failed operationally when the person who set it up moved on or when an upgrade broke something with no documented recovery path. Our engagement model is designed to prevent that outcome.