At 40 people, a realistic SaaS stack costs $100 per seat per month — $48,000 a year for tools you don't own. Here's where the break-even point sits, which tools are worth replacing, and what actually stops people from switching.
At five employees, SaaS tools are a good deal. Fast to set up, someone else handles the infrastructure, and the per-seat cost is easy to ignore. At thirty or forty employees, the math has changed completely — but most companies don't notice until they're staring at a budget line that's hard to explain.
The cost that compounds quietly
Per-seat pricing scales with vendor revenue, not yours. A tool that costs $12 per seat at ten employees costs $600 at fifty. And you don't have one tool — you have a stack.
Here's what a realistic 40-person company is paying across the tools they actually use:
- —Team messaging: $8/seat
- —Project management: $15/seat
- —Document collaboration: $12/seat
- —CRM: $25/seat
- —Customer support: $20/seat
- —Password manager: $4/seat
- —Video calls: $16/seat
That's $100 per seat per month. For 40 people, that's $4,000 a month — $48,000 a year — for tools your team generates data inside, doesn't own, and can't export cleanly without a fight.
None of those tools are bad. But collectively, they're a material cost that scales directly against every hire you make.
Where the break-even point usually sits
For most tool categories, the financial case for self-hosted alternatives becomes clear somewhere between 20 and 50 employees. Below that, the cost is manageable and the work of keeping those systems running isn't worth it. Above it, you're often paying more in monthly subscriptions than a proper self-hosted setup would cost to run for a year.
Mailchimp is a good example. At 5,000 subscribers it costs around $50/month. At 50,000 subscribers you're over $350/month. At 150,000 subscribers — entirely possible for a company that's been doing email marketing for a few years — you're paying over $800/month to send email to a list you built. A self-hosted Listmonk setup costs $15/month in server fees and roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails in sending costs. Same list, fraction of the cost.
Zapier is another one. The per-task billing model works fine when you have a handful of automations running occasionally. When automation becomes part of how you actually run your business, the costs are $100-200/month or more — for workflows that run on a $20 server.
Why people don't switch even when the math is obvious
The main reason is migration fear. Moving 40 people off Google Workspace feels risky. Rebuilding Zapier automations somewhere else sounds like weeks of work. The current tools work well enough, and switching has a cost that's visible immediately even if the savings take months to materialise.
This is a real concern, not an irrational one. Bad migrations do happen. Data gets lost. Teams get confused. Email stops working. These failures are almost always the result of rushing the migration or skipping steps — not the result of self-hosting being inherently risky.
A phased approach handles this. You don't migrate everything at once. You identify the highest-cost tool with the most straightforward replacement, migrate that one first, and build confidence before touching the rest. A 40-person company that moves off Google Workspace first — and gets that right — typically saves enough in the first three months to cover the cost of the next migration.
Not every tool is worth replacing
Some SaaS tools make sense to keep. If the per-seat cost is low, the self-hosted alternative is operationally complex, and your team size doesn't generate enough usage to justify the maintenance overhead — keep paying the subscription.
The right analysis isn't "should we self-host everything?" It's: which tools are we paying the most for, which have solid open-source alternatives, and can we run those alternatives reliably? For most 30-100 person companies, the honest answer is that two or three tools account for the majority of the SaaS spend. Replacing those is often enough.
What "operationally reliable" actually requires
This is the part most assessments skip. Self-hosted tools need deployment, configuration, upgrades, backup verification, and monitoring. That's not optional — it's the difference between a system that runs for three years without incident and one that quietly fails when you need it most.
For teams without internal DevOps capacity, managed deployment handles this. Someone else deploys the system, keeps it current, monitors it, and responds when something goes wrong. The economics of self-hosting still work — your infrastructure cost is still a fraction of the SaaS equivalent — and you're not absorbing the operational responsibility yourself.
Where to start
If you're looking at a $40,000+ annual SaaS bill and wondering whether some of it is replaceable, a good starting point is to look at your three most expensive tools and ask: is there a self-hosted alternative with a track record, and is managed operation available for it? For most companies, at least one of the three answers is clearly yes.
Ready to run the numbers on your stack?
Our Workspace & Productivity and Business Automation & AI solutions cover the two categories where the cost case is usually strongest. If you want to see what the numbers look like for your specific team size and tool mix, a free assessment is the right place to start.