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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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The $847/year Developer Tool Stack That Replaced My $4,200 SaaS Subscriptions

#discuss #webdev #programming #devops

Two years ago I was paying for:

  • Postman Teams ($180/yr)
  • GitHub Copilot ($100/yr)
  • Datadog ($600/yr)
  • Sentry ($312/yr)
  • LogRocket ($1,188/yr)
  • Vercel Pro ($240/yr)
  • Netlify Pro ($228/yr)
  • CircleCI ($600/yr)
  • New Relic ($720/yr)

Total: ~$4,200/year

Then I started replacing them with free alternatives and self-hosted tools. Here's what I ended up with.

What I Replaced

Postman → Hoppscotch (Free)

Hoppscotch is open-source, runs in the browser, and does everything I used Postman for. Collections, environments, WebSocket testing — all there.

For CLI testing, I use httpie or plain curl. No desktop app needed.

Saved: $180/year

GitHub Copilot → Cody + Continue.dev (Free)

Sourcegraph Cody and Continue.dev both offer AI code completion using open models. Cody works with Claude, Continue works with local LLMs via Ollama.

Neither is as polished as Copilot, but for 90% of autocomplete tasks, they're fine.

Saved: $100/year

Datadog → Grafana + Prometheus (Free, self-hosted)

This was the biggest savings. Grafana Cloud's free tier gives you 10K metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces. For a small team, that's plenty.

# docker-compose.yml — full observability stack
docker compose up -d prometheus grafana loki
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Saved: $600/year

Sentry → GlitchTip (Free, self-hosted)

GlitchTip is an open-source Sentry alternative. Same SDK, same error grouping, fraction of the cost.

docker pull glitchtip/glitchtip
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Saved: $312/year

LogRocket → OpenReplay (Free, self-hosted)

OpenReplay does session replay, performance monitoring, and error tracking. Self-hosted, so your data stays with you.

Saved: $1,188/year

Vercel/Netlify → Coolify (Free, self-hosted)

Coolify is a self-hosted PaaS. Deploy from git, automatic SSL, databases — basically Vercel/Heroku but on your own $5/month VPS.

Saved: $468/year (Vercel + Netlify)

CircleCI → GitHub Actions (Free for public repos)

GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 minutes/month free. For open-source projects, it's unlimited.

Saved: $600/year

New Relic → Uptrace (Free, self-hosted)

Uptrace is an open-source APM built on OpenTelemetry. Distributed tracing, metrics, logs — all in one.

Saved: $720/year

What I Still Pay For

I kept a few paid tools where the free alternatives weren't good enough:

  • Cloudflare Pro ($240/yr) — DDoS protection, WAF rules worth every penny
  • 1Password ($36/yr) — tried Bitwarden, kept 1Password for UX
  • Tailscale ($60/yr) — free for personal, paid for team features
  • Linear ($96/yr) — tried everything, Linear is just better for issue tracking
  • Plausible ($108/yr) — privacy-respecting analytics, simple and clean
  • Railway ($60/yr) — for databases I don't want to manage
  • Resend ($247/yr) — transactional email that actually works

Total remaining: $847/year

The Catch

Self-hosting isn't free — it costs time. I spend about 2 hours/month on maintenance. For a solo developer or small team, that's fine. For a 50-person company, just pay for the SaaS.

The sweet spot: teams of 1-10 developers where one person can own the infrastructure.

What Would You Replace?

What's the most overpriced developer tool you're paying for? Any self-hosted alternatives I missed?

I maintain a list of 200+ free APIs and build supply chain security tools.

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