Self-Hosting vs SaaS in 2026: The Actual Numbers

Should a ten-person startup self-host its tools, or pay for SaaS? We priced the five open source apps our customers deploy most, both ways. On paid plans, self-hosting is about $900 a month cheaper. Then we read the free plans, and the two bills land on exactly the same number, to the dollar. Typebot vs Typeform, n8n vs Zapier, Directus vs Contentful, Keycloak vs Auth0, Superset vs Tableau. Three questions for each: what it costs, who controls your data, and how hard it is to leave. We sell managed hosting, so we have a bias. Every price is a public list price checked on 28 September 2026, and every source is below. Check our math. Found a price that moved, or a plan we missed? Tell us in the comments and we will pin the correction. CHAPTERS 0:00 Self-host or pay for SaaS? 0:32 Our bias, and the five apps 1:00 Cost: $996 vs $105, then the free plans 3:43 The costs that are not on the pricing page 5:23 Who controls your data 6:30 How hard it is to leave 8:02 When SaaS is the better call 8:25 Recap ELESTIO Website: https://elest.io Catalog: https://elest.io/fully-managed-services Blog: https://blog.elest.io X: https://x.com/elest_io LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elestio GitHub: https://github.com/elestio SOURCES SaaS column, paid plans, annual billing (total $996/mo) Typeform Plus, 1,000 responses, 3 users: $56/mo, US pricing https://www.typeform.com/pricing Zapier Professional, 2,000 tasks: $49/mo, or $73.50 month to month https://zapier.com/pricing Contentful Lite: $300/mo, 20 users. Free tier: 10 users https://www.contentful.com/pricing Auth0 B2C Essentials, 5,000 MAU: $3,850/yr, about $321/mo. Free up to 25,000 MAU https://auth0.com/pricing Tableau Cloud Standard, 2 Creators at $75 and 8 Viewers at $15: $270/mo https://www.tableau.com/pricing/teams-orgs Free plans wherever they exist (SaaS total $105/mo) Google Data Studio https://cloud.google.com/looker-studio Self-hosted column (total $105/mo) Typebot, n8n, Directus and Keycloak on 2 CPU / 4 GB at $18/mo each, Superset on 4 CPU / 8 GB at $33/mo https://elest.io/pricing Server sizing https://github.com/apache/superset/discussions/33240 https://www.keycloak.org/high-availability/concepts-memory-and-cpu-sizing Growth scenario, 30 people and 10,000 MAU Auth0 about $642/mo on the paid plan, Tableau $630/mo, Contentful moves to Enterprise above 20 users. Self-hosted: about $153/mo. Security: around 16,000 Supabase databases exposing personal data, UpGuard, September 2026 https://www.upguard.com/blog/everything-everywhere-systemic-data-exposure-in-supabase-apps Jurisdiction US CLOUD Act https://www.justice.gov/criminal/cloud-act-resources Salesforce completed its acquisition of Contentful on 1 September 2026 Licenses Keycloak, Apache 2.0 https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/blob/main/LICENSE.txt Superset, Apache 2.0 https://github.com/apache/superset/blob/master/LICENSE n8n, Sustainable Use License https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md Typebot, FSL, becomes Apache 2.0 after two years https://docs.typebot.io/self-hosting Directus, MSCL, free under 50 employees and $5M revenue, becomes GPLv3 after four years https://directus.io/blog/directus-v12-license-change Open Source Initiative definition https://opensource.org/osd Leaving Elestio: root SSH access on every service, bring your own server, move your data out https://elest.io/why-elestio Run any of these fully managed https://elest.io/open-source/typebot https://elest.io/open-source/n8n https://elest.io/open-source/directus https://elest.io/open-source/keycloak https://elest.io/open-source/superset #SelfHosted #OpenSource #SaaS #n8n #Keycloak