The speaker replaced six paid SaaS tools with free, open-source, and self-hostable alternatives, resulting in over $10,000 in annual savings and increased team productivity.
Replacing Notion #
- Notion was previously used for internal wiki, project management, and content creation.
- Notion was becoming expensive due to per-seat pricing and attempting to be an everything app, leading to chaos.
- Notion's responsibilities were branched out to three separate tools:
- Internal Wiki and Documentation: Dogmo - Free, open-source, easy to deploy, focuses on notes and documentation.
- Project Management: Plane - Simple, minimalistic, covers essential collaboration needs. Free self-hosted version available. A lifetime deal ($799 one-time) offers additional features like Cycles, time tracking, and real-time collaboration.
- Blogs and Newsletters: Strapi - An actual CMS suitable for small teams. Free self-hosted version available if single sign-on and support are not required.
Replacing Zapier and Make #
- Zapier became slow and clunky.
- Make, initially a faster and more affordable alternative, also started to feel sluggish and clunky as workflows became complex, and prices increased.
- Both Zapier and Make were replaced with n8n.
- n8n offers unlimited workflows when self-hosted.
- n8n is described as a powerful automation tool with a strong AI agent implementation.
Replacing Airtable #
- Airtable is considered a wonderful tool with fair pricing, but an alternative was sought as part of moving away from cloud services.
- Replaced with NocoDB.
- NocoDB is a simpler, free, self-hostable alternative (Community Edition available).
- Self-hosting NocoDB allows for keeping data private on owned servers.
Replacing Analytics Tools (Amplitude and Posthog) #
- Expensive analytics tools like Amplitude and Posthog were used, but were clunky, slow, frustrating, and struggled with accurate reporting.
- A decision was made to set up a PostgreSQL database for manually logging events.
- Grafana is used to visualize the data from the PostgreSQL database.
- This setup provides faster, customizable analytics with accurate reporting using SQL queries.
- ChatGPT is helpful for users who are not proficient in SQL.
Bonus Alternative: Deep Seek (AI Model) #
- Deep Seek is an open-source AI model performing at a similar level to ChatGPT but requiring fewer resources.
- Models can be downloaded from Hugging Face.
- Can be run locally with sufficient computer specs or hosted on a GPU line (e.g., Hetzner for €84/month) for serving users at a fixed cost.
- This is seen as a significant step towards achieving AI at a predictable cost, important for businesses offering lifetime deals with products using AI extensively.
Summary #
- Replaced six cloud tools with free, open-source, self-hostable alternatives, saving over $10,000 annually and increasing productivity.
- Notion was replaced by Dogmo (documentation), Plane (project management), and Strapi (CMS).
- Zapier and Make were replaced by n8n (automation).
- Airtable was replaced by NocoDB (database).
- Expensive analytics tools were replaced by a combination of a PostgreSQL database and Grafana.
- Deep Seek is highlighted as a promising open-source AI model for fixed-cost AI implementation.
- Links to all mentioned tools are provided in the video description.
- Encourages starring these projects on GitHub to show support.
- Recommends watching another video on building an AI agent using n8n and FeedHive.
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