Self-hosting: which tools to move out of SaaS first

Why you do not leave everything at once

Which tools should you self-host first? Not all at once. You first move a low-risk tool to learn how to run a server, then the tools where the cost gap is largest, and you keep on subscription whatever is critical and hard to maintain.

The order below is the one we would recommend to a company of 20 to 500 people starting from scratch. It is also the logic of our SaaS exit, where your tools switch over one by one and the old one stays available until the new one has proved itself.

The criteria for choosing the order

Before listing any software, four questions per tool:

1. How much does it cost, and how? A tool billed per user weighs more and more as the team grows. A fixed plan, much less.
2. Is the open-source equivalent mature? An active project, up-to-date documentation, regular releases, a community that answers.
3. What happens if it goes down for a day? A statistics dashboard that stops for a day blocks nobody. A mail system that stops for a day blocks the whole company.
4. Is the data sensitive? Customers, contracts, figures: that is an argument for keeping it with you, but also a reason to demand impeccable backups.

The full financial calculation, tool by tool over three years, is detailed in our article on the real cost of leaving SaaS.

The order we recommend

1. Web analytics, to get operations up to speed

Matomo replaces an audience-measurement tool hosted by a third party. Its FAQ on costs and prerequisites states that no licence is due to run it on your own server, and that it needs a web server with PHP and a MySQL or MariaDB database. It is a good first service: it is not very critical (an hour’s outage loses measured visits, not sales), it forces you to put in place everything the following ones will need (domain name, certificate, database, backup), and it brings back in-house browsing data that you may not want to entrust to a third party. If the first service goes badly, better that it be this one.

2. Process automation

n8n can be deployed self-hosted and connects your tools to one another: form to CRM, invoice to accounting, alert to a messaging tool. The benefit is twofold. Hosted automation plans are often paid by volume: n8n’s own was, in October 2026, by the number of executions per month, according to its pricing page, so the bill rises when processes work well. And an automation tool on the same server as your other tools calls them without going out onto the internet.

Also check the licence: n8n is used under its community licence, officially the Sustainable Use License, and according to the FAQ of that licence, use is unrestricted as long as the automations are created or modified by you or by people in your organisation.

3. The CRM

A hosted CRM is most often paid per user, and the whole sales team uses it: the gap widens with every hire. Twenty is an open-source CRM that you deploy yourself; its pricing page offered in October 2026 a hosted version billed per user, and specified that the open-source core can be self-hosted without a licence, with single sign-on (SSO) and row-level permissions requiring the paid Organization plan. For needs broader than a CRM (invoicing, stock, projects), other open-source software exists, with very different scope and deployment effort.

The CRM comes third and not first because it is a living tool: salespeople use it all day, importing the data takes care, and an interruption shows. Operations need to be up to speed first.

4. Electronic signature and invoicing

Open-source tools exist for getting documents signed and issuing invoices. They plug naturally into the CRM and the automation. Two checks before moving them: the legal value of the signature for your uses (and the level of signature your contracts require), and your country’s electronic invoicing obligations, which are changing. In France, the French tax authority’s page on electronic invoicing sets out the timetable:

1. 1 September 2026

   All companies must be able to receive electronic invoices. Large and mid-sized companies must also issue them.

2. 1 September 2027

   Small businesses and micro-enterprises must in turn issue electronic invoices.

Each company must also choose an approved platform. Before moving your invoicing, check how the chosen tool exchanges with that platform. A tool that does not keep up with these obligations becomes a problem, whatever its cost.

What stays on SaaS

• Email and office software. Email deliverability, spam protection and availability are full professions in themselves. The gain does not pay for the risk.
• Payroll and statutory accounting. The rules change often, and your accountant probably works in a specific tool.
• Any critical tool with nobody to maintain it. If nobody, in-house or at a provider, can step in quickly when something breaks, the subscription remains the right answer.

What you need before the first service

A server is more than a machine switched on. Before putting a first tool on it:

• a router that manages the certificates and domain names of each service;
• backups held off the server, and a restore already tested (we detail what breaks in practice in our guide to backing up your own server);
• scheduled updates, with a way of rolling back;
• monitoring that warns you when a service stops responding;
• operating documentation that someone other than the person who installed everything can read.

These building blocks form the common foundation for all your projects: our guide to the cloud infrastructure foundation details them.

The honest limits

A single server running all your tools is also a single point of failure. We have lived it:

A single server remains acceptable for an SME if the backups and the restore are solid and if an interruption of a few hours does not stop the business. Otherwise you need redundancy, which costs more and requires more operating effort.

And sovereignty comes in degrees: a server rented from a European host is not the same thing as a server on your premises. We discuss this in our article on Europe’s dependence on the American cloud.

Where to start

Start with an inventory of your subscriptions, then a first low-criticality service, such as web analytics, to bed in backups and monitoring before touching the CRM. If you want to know which tools to start with in your own case, our SaaS exit starts with an audit of your subscriptions and their real cost over three years. The other infrastructure choices, from the cost of an exit to backups, are gathered in our Infrastructure and cloud section.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. The FAQ of that licence (new tab)docs.n8n.io
2. Pricing page (new tab)twenty.com
3. The French tax authority’s page on electronic invoicing (new tab)impots.gouv.fr