DEV Community: Vikas Singhal

Buffer wanted $100/mo, so I self-host Postiz for $15

Vikas Singhal — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:57:34 +0000

I replaced Buffer with self-hosted Postiz, and here is the bill that pushed me.

The line item that broke me was Buffer charging $6 per channel, per month. We run 10 channels across two brands. That is $60/mo on the Essentials tier. The moment we wanted three people posting with an approval step, Buffer pushed us toward its Team tier at $10 per channel billed annually - about $100/mo at that annual rate to schedule posts. Hootsuite is worse at the entry point: its cheapest paid plan, Standard, is $99/mo billed annually for a single user. Add a second or third person and you are bumped to a pricier tier.

So I moved us to Postiz. It has run on a $15/mo server for a few months. It does not care how many channels or teammates I add. The accounts and post history live on a machine I control, not someone else's dashboard.

Here is the honest write-up: what it replaces, what it costs, where it is cheaper, and where a paid tool still wins.

TL;DR

Postiz is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0, 30k+ GitHub stars) social-media scheduler - the open-source Buffer alternative. It replaces Buffer, Hootsuite, Publer, Later, and SocialBee, posts to 14 networks, and has built-in AI post generation.
The self-hosted core has no per-channel and no per-seat limits - the exact two things paid schedulers charge for.
Paid tools bill per channel (Buffer from $6/channel/mo) or per user (Hootsuite $99/mo per seat, billed annually).
Cheapest way to run it: a $4-5 VPS if you enjoy wiring PostgreSQL, Redis, and Temporal together yourself, or a ~$5-10 one-click PaaS template (Railway, Hostinger, ClawCloud) that you still manage.
Easiest way: a managed Postiz pod. I use InstaPods at $15/mo flat, unlimited channels, unlimited posts, unlimited team members, with Postgres, Redis, and Temporal pre-wired.
That $15 flat is the cheapest managed Postiz option - it undercuts the only dedicated managed-Postiz product (Elestio at $16/mo) and Postiz's own cloud ($29/mo for 5 channels), as of mid-2026.

Postiz vs Buffer, Hootsuite, and Publer: the pricing

Every mainstream scheduler taxes the two axes that grow: how many accounts you connect, and how many people touch them.

Tool	Cheapest paid tier	How it bills
Buffer	Essentials $6/channel/mo ($5 annual)	Per channel. Team adds collaboration at $10/channel annual
Hootsuite	Standard $99/mo per user (billed annually), 10 accounts	Per seat
Publer	Professional from $5/mo (1 account)	+$4 per extra account, +$2 per member
Later	Starter $25/mo ($18.75 annual), 8 profiles, 1 user	Per tier + seats
SocialBee	Bootstrap $29/mo, 5 profiles, 1 user	Per tier
Self-hosted Postiz	~$4-5 VPS, or $15/mo managed	Flat. No per-channel or per-seat charge

Now the worked example. Say you are a small team: three people, 10 connected channels across two brands.

Buffer Team: 10 channels x $10 = $100/mo at the annual rate for the collaboration features.
Hootsuite Standard: $99/mo billed annually covers one user. A three-person team does not fit on Standard, so you climb to a pricier tier - the per-seat model only goes up from here.
Publer Professional: $5 base + roughly $36 for 9 extra accounts + $4 for two extra members = ~$45/mo, climbing with every account.
Self-hosted Postiz: $15/mo flat, and the eleventh channel or the fourth teammate costs nothing.

The SaaS number is a moving target that goes up every time the team does. The self-hosted number sits still.

What is Postiz?

Postiz calls itself an agentic social-media scheduling tool. In practice it is a calendar, a composer, and a team workspace. What it gives you:

Schedule and queue posts, with a shared calendar and an approval flow
Posts to Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, X (Twitter), Mastodon, Bluesky, Dribbble, Slack, and Discord - 14 networks
Built-in AI post generation (optional - it uses your own OpenAI key)
Team members, workspaces, and per-channel scheduling

License and stack: AGPL-3.0, 30k+ GitHub stars. The app is NestJS plus NextJS, and self-hosting it requires PostgreSQL, Redis, and Temporal running alongside it. That last part is the catch, and it drives the whole cost conversation below.

How much does it cost to self-host Postiz?

Three honest paths.

Raw VPS - cheapest. Rent a $4-5 Hetzner or BuyVM box and run Postiz yourself. This is the floor on price, and it is a real option. The cost is your time: Postiz does not run as one process. You need Postgres, Redis, and Temporal wired together and kept alive, plus a reverse proxy, HTTPS, and updates. If you already run a stack like this in your sleep, do it and skip the rest.

One-click PaaS - cheaper and less work. Railway, Hostinger, and ClawCloud all ship one-click Postiz templates in the ~$5-10/mo range. They stand the stack up for you, but you still own the updates, the scaling, and the config. Cheaper than a managed product, more hands-on than one.

Managed pod - easiest. This is what I landed on. Postiz runs on the Grow plan at $15/mo flat, and it needs Grow because Postgres, Redis, and Temporal all come included and pre-wired. The $3 tier cannot run all three. Deploy is one click, about 60 seconds, HTTPS auto-configured, on a real Linux server with SSH access.

The cheapest managed Postiz hosting

Here is the part that made the decision easy. Elestio sells the one purpose-built "Managed Postiz as a Service" I could find, from $16/mo. Postiz's own hosted cloud starts at $29/mo for 5 channels (its Team plan is $39 for 10). A managed Postiz pod on InstaPods is $15/mo flat with no per-channel or per-seat cap, so it lands below Elestio's $16 and Postiz cloud's $29 (prices as of mid-2026).

Flat price, databases included, no bandwidth or usage metering. New accounts get a $10 credit when they add a card, so the first month is covered.

To be clear about the trade: this is not the absolute cheapest way to run Postiz. A $4-5 VPS wins on raw dollars if you want to own the Postgres, Redis, and Temporal maintenance, and a ~$5-10 PaaS template splits the difference. The $15 buys away the setup and keeps the flat, uncapped pricing.

What about Mixpost?

Postiz is not the only self-hostable scheduler. The name that comes up most often is Mixpost. I have not run it in production, so I will not put numbers or specifics on it here - check its own docs and repo before you commit.

I picked Postiz for two reasons: the network coverage (14 platforms, including newer ones like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon) and the momentum behind it (30k+ stars). Both are honest OSS projects. The right one is whichever stack you would rather babysit.

Where self-hosting Postiz is NOT the answer

Three caveats, and the first one is the big one.

You register your own developer app per platform. This is the real friction. To connect X, LinkedIn, Meta, and the rest, you create your OWN OAuth/developer application on each platform and paste the client ID and secret into Postiz. The SaaS tools have already done this for every user; you have not. Worse, platform API approval can be slow - X and Meta reviews in particular can take days and sometimes get bounced. If you need to be posting to six networks by this afternoon, a hosted tool wins on day one.
Lock the door after you move in. After you create your admin account, set DISABLE_REGISTRATION=true so a stranger who finds your URL cannot sign up on your instance. Easy to forget, and it matters.
You are now on call. Backups, updates, and the occasional Temporal or Postgres hiccup are yours. A managed pod absorbs most of this, but even then you own the app-level config. If nobody on the team wants that, pay the SaaS bill and move on.

Postiz FAQ

Is Postiz free? Yes. Postiz is open-source under AGPL-3.0 and free to self-host. You pay only for the server it runs on. There is also a paid hosted cloud at postiz.com if you would rather not self-host.

What does Postiz replace? It covers the same job as Buffer, Hootsuite, Publer, Later, and SocialBee: scheduling and posting to social networks from one calendar. It posts to 14 networks and has built-in AI post generation.

Is Postiz a good Buffer alternative? If you connect more than a handful of channels or add teammates, yes. Buffer bills $6 per channel and Hootsuite starts at $99/mo per user; self-hosted Postiz has no per-channel or per-seat charge.

What is the cheapest managed Postiz option? Among purpose-built managed products, a $15/mo managed pod on InstaPods undercuts Elestio ($16/mo) and Postiz's own cloud ($29/mo for 5 channels). A raw $4-5 VPS or a ~$5-10 PaaS template is cheaper still if you manage the stack yourself.

What I would tell past-me

The per-channel and per-seat math is the whole story. As long as you have one or two channels and one person, Buffer's free tier or its $6/channel plan is fine. The moment you cross into multiple brands, many channels, or a real team, the SaaS bill compounds. Self-hosting Postiz stops being a hobby and starts being a budget decision. Do the OAuth-app legwork once, and after that adding channel number eleven or teammate number four costs nothing.

If you are running social for more than one brand: add up your channels times your per-channel or per-seat rate, then tell me your monthly number in the comments - I want to see how ugly it gets.

Self-Hosting FreeScout in 2026: I Ditched Zendesk's Per-Agent Bill

Vikas Singhal — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:47:19 +0000

The invoice that finally did it was Zendesk asking for $55 per agent per month. We had five people answering support email. That is $275 a month, $3,300 a year, to route a shared inbox. And the second we wanted to add a sixth person, the bill went up again.

So I moved us to FreeScout. It has been running for a few months now, it costs $7/mo flat no matter how many agents I add, and the customer data lives on a server I control instead of someone else's cloud.

Here is the honest write-up: what it replaces, what it actually costs, where it is genuinely cheaper, and where a paid tool still wins.

TL;DR

FreeScout is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0, ~4.4k GitHub stars) help desk and shared mailbox built on PHP and Laravel. Think Help Scout's workflow - shared inboxes, conversations, saved replies - but self-hosted.
The free core has no per-agent, per-ticket, or per-mailbox limits. That is the whole point. Help desk SaaS is priced per seat, so your bill scales with your team; FreeScout does not.
The paid tools it replaces charge per agent per month: Zendesk Suite Team $55/agent, Help Scout Standard $25/user, Freshdesk Growth $19/agent (entry paid tiers, list prices as of mid-2026).
Cheapest way to run it: a $5 VPS if you like doing your own setup and updates. Easiest way: a managed pod - I use InstaPods at $7/mo flat, deployed in about a minute with the database and HTTPS already wired up.

The real problem: per-seat pricing punishes you for growing

Help desk SaaS almost universally charges per agent per month. That sounds reasonable until you do the math on a real team.

Here is what a 5-agent support team pays on each tool's entry paid tier:

Tool	Price model	5 agents / month	5 agents / year
Zendesk (Suite Team)	$55 / agent / mo	$275	$3,300
Help Scout (Standard)	$25 / user / mo	$125	$1,500
Freshdesk (Growth)	$19 / agent / mo	$95	$1,140
FreeScout self-hosted	flat hosting fee	$7	$84

(Numbers are each vendor's list price for their entry paid plan, mid-2026. Zendesk also sells a stripped Support-only plan at $19/agent, and month-to-month billing runs a bit higher than these annual rates - but the per-seat model is the same everywhere.)

The catch nobody puts on the pricing page: that number grows every time you hire. At 15 agents, Zendesk Suite Team is $825/mo. FreeScout is still $7. The gap is not a rounding error, it is the difference between a line item you notice and one you do not.

And the tiers climb fast. Zendesk Suite Professional is $115/agent/mo. Help Scout Pro is $75/user/mo. You are not paying for a better inbox at that point, you are paying for the features they gated behind the higher tier.

What FreeScout actually is

It is a single web app you run yourself that turns a support inbox into a collaborative ticketing system:

Shared mailboxes - the whole team works one inbox without stepping on each other (collision detection shows who is already replying)
Conversations, not tickets - it reads like email, so customers never see a ticket number or a robot
Saved replies, tags, internal notes, auto-replies - the day-to-day stuff you actually use
Email integration including modern Microsoft Exchange OAuth
iOS and Android apps with push notifications

It runs on PHP and Laravel with a MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL database. AGPL-3.0 licensed, actively maintained, ~4.4k stars. This is not a weekend project that will vanish next year.

Honest note on the paid modules: FreeScout's core is free, but the maintainers sell optional add-on modules (Knowledge Base, Workflows, a customer portal, live chat). Those are one-time "lifetime" purchases, roughly $12-15 each - not a subscription. You only buy them if you want that specific feature. Bought a couple once and never paid again, which is a different deal entirely from a per-seat monthly bill.

The cost math

The software is free. The only real cost is the box you run it on. Two honest paths:

Raw VPS - cheapest. A $5/mo Hetzner or DigitalOcean instance, PHP, a database, a reverse proxy, and an afternoon of setup. You own the updates, the SSL renewal, the queue worker, the OS patching. If that is your idea of a good time, this is genuinely the cheapest route and you should take it.

Managed pod - easiest. This is what I landed on. I deploy FreeScout as a 1-click app on InstaPods, pick the Build plan ($7/mo), and it is online with HTTPS in about a minute - the database, the background queue worker, and the per-minute scheduler are all wired up for me. FreeScout needs those pieces running together, which is exactly the part that is annoying to babysit on a raw VPS, so having them handled is the reason I pay the extra couple of dollars over a bare box. New accounts get a $10 credit when you add a card, so the first month is effectively covered.

Either way you are off the per-seat treadmill. The $7 managed option pays for itself the moment you would have added a single Zendesk agent.

The other open-source options (and why I picked FreeScout)

FreeScout is not the only self-hosted help desk. If it does not fit, these might:

osTicket (GPL-2.0, PHP/MySQL) - the classic. Rock-solid forms-and-SLA ticketing, but the UI feels its age and it is more "ticket portal" than "shared inbox."
Zammad (AGPL, Ruby on Rails + Elasticsearch) - the most Zendesk-like feature set: multichannel, triggers, reporting. The cost is real infrastructure - it wants ~8GB RAM and an Elasticsearch node, so it is not a $7 box.
Chatwoot (MIT, Rails) - built for live chat and omnichannel messaging (WhatsApp, Telegram, socials) more than email ticketing. Great if chat is your primary channel; its cloud is ~$19/agent/mo.

I picked FreeScout because our support is email-first, I wanted the Help Scout shared-inbox feel without the Help Scout bill, and it runs comfortably on a small $7 pod instead of needing an 8GB Elasticsearch stack. Match the tool to your channel: email-first, FreeScout; chat-first, Chatwoot; full ITIL/asset stuff, Zammad or GLPI.

Where self-hosting is NOT the answer

I am not going to pretend this is free or zero-effort.

It is a server, not magic. Something has to run it, patch it, and back it up. Even the managed route is a recurring $7, not $0. If you are a solo founder answering ten emails a week, Help Scout's free tier (5 users, capped at 100 contacts a month) is genuinely fine - use it.
The SaaS tools bundle more. Zendesk and Freshdesk prices include AI agents, deep analytics, and phone/chat channels out of the box. FreeScout's $7 is hosting only - you add modules (or your own tooling) for parity. Compare like for like before you quote the savings.
No built-in AI answers yet. The paid tools are pushing AI resolution hard in 2026. FreeScout has modules and integrations, but it is not going to auto-resolve tickets on day one.

If none of those are dealbreakers - and for a small team drowning in per-seat pricing they usually are not - the math is lopsided in favor of self-hosting.

What I would tell past-me

If you run a shared support inbox and you are paying per agent for the privilege, you are paying for the pricing model, not the product. FreeScout gives you the same shared-inbox workflow, unlimited agents, and your data on your own server, for the price of a small server.

I run mine for $7/mo, I have added agents without watching a bill move, and I have not seen a "you have reached your plan limit" banner since.

How does your team handle support right now - paying per seat on Zendesk/Help Scout/Freshdesk, self-hosting something, or living in a shared Gmail inbox? Curious whether anyone has run FreeScout at real scale (50+ agents), because on paper that is where the flat-cost story gets almost unfair.

Self-Hosting Stirling-PDF in 2026: I Ditched Adobe and Smallpdf

Vikas Singhal — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:53:38 +0000

I hit the wall on a Tuesday. I had three invoices to merge, a contract to split, and one scanned page that needed OCR. Smallpdf let me do two things and then told me to come back tomorrow or pay up. Adobe wanted $20 a month for the privilege of editing a PDF I already owned.

So I did what I should have done a year ago: I self-hosted Stirling-PDF. It has been running for a few months now, it costs me $7/mo flat, and I have not thought about a PDF paywall since.

Here is the honest write-up - what it replaces, what it actually costs, where it is genuinely cheaper, and where it is not.

TL;DR

Stirling-PDF is a free, open-source (MIT, ~84k GitHub stars) web app with 50+ PDF tools: merge, split, OCR, convert, sign, redact, compress, the lot.
It is stateless by default - no database, and your files are processed on your own server and deleted right after. Nothing gets uploaded to a third party. That alone is the reason I moved.
The paid SaaS tools it replaces: Adobe Acrobat Pro $19.99/mo, Smallpdf Pro ~$9-10/mo, iLovePDF Premium ~€7/mo. The free tiers are capped hard (Smallpdf is 2 tasks a day).
Cheapest way to run it: a $4-5 VPS if you enjoy doing your own setup and updates. Easiest way: a managed pod (I use InstaPods at $7/mo, deploy in about a minute). It is a Java app, so it wants a little more memory than a static site - that is why it is not a $3 box.

The real problem with SaaS PDF tools

Two things, really.

The paywall is per-task, not per-month. The free tiers are designed to be annoying enough that you upgrade. Smallpdf's free plan gives you 2 tasks per day across all tools combined - merge a file, compress a file, and you are done until tomorrow. iLovePDF's free tier is web-only with per-file size caps and a daily task limit. None of that is a real "free tool," it is a 30-second trial that resets.

Your files leave your machine. This is the part nobody mentions. When you drag a contract, a payslip, a signed NDA, or a medical form into a web PDF tool, that file gets uploaded to a server you do not control. The reputable ones delete it after an hour. You are still trusting a stranger's infrastructure with documents that, by definition, are the sensitive ones - otherwise you would not be editing them in private.

For a one-off, fine. For anything recurring, both of those are a slow tax on your time and your privacy.

What Stirling-PDF is

It is a single web app you run yourself that does nearly everything the paid tools do:

Organize: merge, split, rotate, reorder, delete pages
Convert: PDF to/from images, Office docs, and back
OCR: make scanned PDFs searchable
Security: add/remove passwords, redact, sign, watermark
Optimize: compress, repair, flatten
Plus a REST API and no-code pipelines if you want to automate a recurring job

The important bit: it is stateless. There is no database to set up. Files are processed in memory or temp storage and removed immediately - nothing is stored, logged, or sent anywhere. (It only creates a small embedded file-based store if you turn on the optional login feature, and even then it is a local file, not a separate database server.)

MIT-licensed core, ~84k stars, actively maintained. This is not a weekend project that will disappear.

The cost math

Here is the comparison that made the decision for me. Prices observed June 2026, annual-billed where the vendor pushes it:

Tool	Price	The catch
Adobe Acrobat Pro	$19.99/mo annual ($29.99 month-to-month)	Most expensive; you are renting an editor for files you own
Adobe Acrobat Standard	$14.99/mo annual	Fewer tools than Pro
Smallpdf Pro	~$9-10/mo annual (~$108/yr)	Free tier = 2 tasks/day
iLovePDF Premium	~€7/mo (~€4/mo annual)	Web-only free tier, per-file caps
Stirling-PDF self-hosted	$0 software + your hosting	You run the server (Java, wants ~1-2GB RAM)

The software is free. The only real cost is the box you run it on. Two honest options:

Raw VPS - cheapest. A $4-5/mo Hetzner or DigitalOcean instance, Docker, and 20 minutes of setup. You own the updates, the reverse proxy, the SSL renewal, the OS patching. If that is your idea of a good time, this is genuinely the cheapest path and you should take it.

Managed pod - easiest. This is what I landed on. I deploy Stirling-PDF as a 1-click app on InstaPods, pick the Build plan ($7/mo), and it is online with HTTPS in about a minute. No Docker, no nginx, no certbot. It is a Java app so it needs more headroom than a $3 static pod, which is why it sits on the $7 tier rather than the cheapest one. New accounts get a $10 credit when you add a card, so the first month-plus is effectively covered.

Either way, you are out of the per-task paywall and your files stay on a server you control. Even the $7 managed option pays for itself the moment you would have hit a single Adobe Acrobat Pro month.

Where self-hosting is NOT the answer

I am not going to pretend this is free or zero-effort.

It is a server, not an app on your laptop. Something has to run it. Even the managed route is a recurring $7, not $0. If you edit a PDF twice a year, use the free Smallpdf tier and move on - self-hosting is for people doing this weekly.
OCR and big conversions eat RAM. Stirling-PDF idles light but ramps up during heavy OCR. Size your box accordingly; a 256MB toy instance will choke.
No mobile app. It is a web UI. Great on a desktop, fine on a phone browser, but there is no polished native app like the SaaS tools ship.

If none of those are dealbreakers, the math is lopsided in favor of self-hosting.

What I would tell past-me

If you touch PDFs more than a couple of times a month, and especially if those PDFs are the kind you would not want sitting on a stranger's server, run your own Stirling-PDF. The tooling caught up to Adobe years ago. The only thing standing between you and unlimited private PDF editing is one server, and that part is now a one-minute deploy.

I run mine for $7/mo and I have not seen a "you have used your 2 free tasks" banner since.

How do you handle PDFs right now - still paying a SaaS tool, self-hosting something, or just living with the free-tier limits? Curious whether anyone has found a lighter self-hosted option than Stirling-PDF, because the Java memory footprint is the one thing I would change.

Self-Hosting LiteLLM in 2026: The OpenRouter Alternative You Own

Vikas Singhal — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:39:49 +0000

TL;DR

If you want a managed LLM gateway with zero ops, use OpenRouter: one credit balance, instant access to every model, nothing to run. The trade is a platform fee on credit purchases (5.5% on card top-ups) and the fact that your prompts and usage flow through their infrastructure.

If you want to own your keys, your data, and your routing with no per-call markup, self-host LiteLLM (open source, ~50k stars, MIT). The cheapest hands-off way to run it is a one-click managed pod: InstaPods at $15/mo flat, with bundled PostgreSQL, managed TLS, and daily backups. You bring your own provider keys, so you pay providers directly with nothing added on top.

Both are good. They are just different trades. Table below.

What LiteLLM is

LiteLLM is the open-source LLM gateway. It exposes one OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of 100+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, Azure, and more) and adds:

Provider routing, load balancing, and fallbacks
Virtual keys (scoped sk- keys per user or project, each with a budget and rate limit)
Per-key and per-team spend tracking
An admin UI

It is what sits behind a lot of self-hosted AI stacks. If you run n8n, agents, or your own apps, every model call can go through one LiteLLM endpoint.

OpenRouter vs self-hosted LiteLLM

	OpenRouter (managed)	Self-hosted LiteLLM (on InstaPods)
Pricing model	Provider cost + 5.5% credit-purchase fee	Provider cost (paid directly) + $15/mo flat hosting
Markup on inference	None on inference; fee is on credit top-ups	None - you use your own provider keys
Your prompts and logs	Flow through OpenRouter	Stay on your own pod
Provider API keys	Held by OpenRouter (or BYOK with a fee)	Yours, on your pod, encrypted at rest
Virtual keys + budgets	Yes	Yes
Spend tracking	Yes (their dashboard)	Yes (your own Postgres)
Model access	Huge list, one balance, instant	Whatever providers you add keys for
Ops burden	None	One click to deploy, then it is yours
Best for	Zero-ops convenience, fast model coverage	Data control, no markup, your own keys

The fair read: OpenRouter is excellent if you never want to run anything and you value instant access to a long model list under one balance. Self-hosting wins once you care about where your data goes, want your own provider keys, or do enough volume that a percentage fee adds up.

The catch with self-hosting (and how the managed pod removes it)

Self-hosting a gateway used to mean a Docker compose file, a Postgres you babysit, TLS, secrets, and backups. LiteLLM specifically also needs its Prisma client generated and its schema migrated, which is easy to get wrong on a first run.

A one-click pod removes that. On InstaPods a LiteLLM deploy gives you:

A private, single-tenant gateway with its own master key (generated per pod, never shared)
Bundled PostgreSQL for keys and spend, with daily backups
Your provider keys encrypted at rest with a per-pod salt
No public sign-ups - the admin UI is gated by a per-pod login
Managed TLS and a public URL

You get the admin login and master key by email on first boot, add your providers, mint virtual keys, and point your apps at the URL.

Deploy it

One-click deploy: https://instapods.com/apps/litellm
Full side-by-side: https://instapods.com/apps/litellm/vs/openrouter

It runs on the Grow plan ($15/mo: 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 50 GB), which has headroom for real production traffic.

Your turn

Are you routing LLM calls through a managed gateway like OpenRouter, or self-hosting? And if you self-host, what made you switch - cost, data residency, or control? Curious what tipped the decision.

The Cheapest Way to Self-Host Fider in 2026

Vikas Singhal — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:54:31 +0000

Last updated: June 2026

Fider is the open-source feedback board a lot of teams reach for once Canny or UserVoice sends the renewal invoice. Public roadmap, feature voting, status updates, your own subdomain - the stuff you actually need to run "tell us what to build next," without the SaaS price tag.

The reason to self-host it is two things: keeping your customers' feedback on infrastructure you own, and escaping a monthly subscription that climbs every time you add an admin or unlock a feature. Canny starts at $79/mo and jumps to $359/mo on the next tier. UserVoice starts around $899/mo. Fider is the same job - voting, boards, roadmap - for the cost of a small server.

I have run Fider on a few setups. Here is every option I found, ranked by actual monthly cost, plus the one thing that decides it: Fider needs a Postgres database and an SMTP sender, so "static cheap" does not apply the way it does for a notes app.

TLDR: For a managed Fider you never babysit, InstaPods is my pick at $3/mo flat - one-click deploy with SSL, the Postgres it needs already wired up, and SSH to a real server. PikaPods is in the same range (~$2-3/mo metered) but gives you no SSH. The cheapest self-managed route is a $4-5/mo Hetzner VPS with Docker Compose, if you do not mind running the database and mail config yourself. And every one of these beats Canny ($79/mo) or UserVoice ($899/mo) from day one.

Every Way to Host Fider, Ranked by Cost

Method	Monthly Cost	You Manage	Setup Time
Oracle Cloud free tier	$0	Everything (DB, SMTP, OS)	~1 hr
PikaPods	~$2-3 (metered, no SSH)	Nothing	~1 min
InstaPods	$3 flat (SSH, Postgres included)	Nothing	~30 sec
Hetzner VPS + Docker	~$4-5	Everything (DB, SMTP, OS)	~30 min
Coolify on Hetzner VPS	~$5-8	VPS + OS	~15 min
Elestio	~$15-19	Nothing	~3 min

For contrast, here is what the hosted SaaS versions of "feedback board + roadmap" cost - and the catch is the price climbs as you add admins, boards, and features:

Hosted SaaS	Starting Price	Billing
Frill	~$25/mo	Monthly subscription
Nolt	~$29/mo	Monthly subscription
Featurebase	~$49/mo	Monthly subscription
Canny	~$79/mo (Starter), $359/mo (Growth)	Monthly subscription
UserVoice	~$899/mo	Monthly subscription

A self-hosted Fider does the core job - voting, public roadmap, status updates - for one flat server cost. That gap is the whole reason this post exists.

Fider needs a database and a mailer (read this first)

This is the part that trips people up, so get it straight before you pick a host:

Postgres. Fider stores every post, vote, and user in Postgres. There is no SQLite mode. So unlike a static whiteboard or a notes app, "cheapest" here means "cheapest place that also runs a database" - either bundled in the same pod or as a managed add-on.
SMTP. Fider sends email for sign-in links, notifications, and digests. You point it at any SMTP provider (a free Brevo or Mailgun tier is plenty for a small board). Skip this and logins will not work.

Both are light. Fider itself is a single Go binary that idles at a few dozen MB of RAM, and Postgres for a feedback board is tiny. So even with the database in the same pod, the cheapest plan on any platform handles it. The trade-off is purely how much of that wiring you want to do yourself.

InstaPods ($3/mo)

InstaPods has Fider as a one-click app. Click deploy, get a running board with HTTPS in about 30 seconds, with the Postgres it needs already provisioned in the same pod. $3/mo on the Launch plan.

Full disclosure: I built InstaPods. I am including it because Fider is exactly the kind of light app it is good at, and a "cheapest way to host X" post that left out the thing I built would not be honest. I will be straight about the limits.

Cost: $3/mo flat (Launch plan: 1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 5 GB storage). Fider plus its Postgres fit comfortably, and the price does not climb when your board gets popular or you add admins.

Pros: Fastest setup, and you do not stand up a separate database - it is wired in. SSL and a URL included. SSH access on a real server, so you can edit the env file to point Fider at your SMTP, or pull a backup by hand. Flat price - the per-tier SaaS math that makes Canny expensive does not apply.

Cons: Newer platform (launched 2026). Single region (EU - Nuremberg) for now. You still bring your own SMTP credentials (every self-host option does).

Best for: Most teams. A managed feedback board in under a minute, on a real server you control, at a price that stays flat as the board grows.

PikaPods (~$2-3/mo)

PikaPods offers managed Fider hosting with the database handled for you. Set your resource sliders, deploy, done.

Cost: ~$2-3/mo at minimum resources. Fider is light enough that the floor works. PikaPods shares revenue with the projects it hosts, which is a genuinely good thing.

Pros: Low price. Zero maintenance. Database included. Supports open source financially. The welcome credit covers months of a light app.

Cons: Meters by resource, so the price creeps up if you bump the allocation. No SSH, so you are limited to what the dashboard exposes - editing Fider's env directly is harder.

Best for: People who want a low price and the database handled, and who do not need SSH.

Hetzner VPS + Docker (~$4-5/mo)

The classic DIY route. Rent a Hetzner CX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, ~$4.50/mo), install Docker, and run Fider plus Postgres with a Docker Compose file. Fider's own docs ship one.

Cost: ~$4.50/mo for the server. The board, the database, and the reverse proxy all share it.

Pros: Full control. SSH, obviously. One box can host other side projects too, so the real per-app cost drops if you are already running a VPS.

Cons: You own all of it - the Postgres backups, the SSL renewal, the nginx config, the OS updates, the SMTP wiring. Budget ~30 minutes for the first setup and a few minutes a month forever after. The $4.50 server is cheap; your time is not.

Best for: People who already run a VPS, or who want to learn the Docker Compose plumbing.

Elestio (~$15-19/mo)

Elestio offers fully managed Fider with automated backups and updates.

Cost: ~$15-19/mo at the entry tier.

Pros: Fully managed, backups and updates handled, good support. Still cheaper than Canny.

Cons: Several times the price of InstaPods or PikaPods for the same light app. You pay for the white-glove management.

Best for: Teams that want hands-off managed hosting with formal backups and do not mind paying for it.

So which one?

If you just want a feedback board running today without thinking about a database, InstaPods at $3/mo flat is the fastest path - Postgres wired in, SSL included, SSH on a real server, and a price that does not move as the board grows. If you want rock-bottom and do not need SSH, PikaPods is a dollar or two less. If you already run a VPS and like owning the plumbing, Hetzner + Docker Compose is the cheapest server but the most work.

Whatever you pick, the math against the SaaS tools is not close. Canny's $79/mo is $948 a year. A self-hosted Fider is one flat server and your SMTP, owned end to end - the same voting, the same public roadmap, none of the renewal anxiety.

What are you running your feedback board on - a SaaS tool, or self-hosted? And if you self-host, did the Postgres requirement change which host you picked? Curious what people landed on.

The Cheapest Way to Self-Host Excalidraw in 2026

Vikas Singhal — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:46:06 +0000

Last updated: June 2026

Excalidraw is the open-source whiteboard a lot of people reach for once Miro or FigJam starts billing per seat. Hand-drawn-style diagrams, infinite canvas, live collaboration, and an export that does not lock you into anyone's format. The editor is a static React app, so the basic version runs on almost nothing.

The reason to self-host it is not the editor (excalidraw.com is free). It is two things: keeping your diagrams off someone else's cloud, and escaping per-user pricing. Miro, FigJam, and Excalidraw+ all charge per person per month. A self-hosted instance is one flat server cost for the whole team.

I have run Excalidraw on a few setups. Here is every option I found, ranked by actual monthly cost, plus the one trade-off that decides it: whether you need real-time collaboration or just the editor.

TLDR: For a managed Excalidraw you never babysit, InstaPods is my pick at $3/mo flat - one-click deploy with SSL, SSH to a real server, and unlimited users on a price that does not move as your team grows. PikaPods is a bit cheaper (~$1-2/mo metered) but gives you no SSH. The cheapest self-managed route is a $4-5/mo Hetzner VPS with Docker. And every one of these beats Miro ($8/user/mo) or Excalidraw+ ($7/user/mo) the moment you have more than one person on the board.

Every Way to Host Excalidraw, Ranked by Cost

Method	Monthly Cost	You Manage	Setup Time
Oracle Cloud free tier	$0	Everything	~1 hr
PikaPods	~$1-2 (metered, no SSH)	Nothing	~1 min
InstaPods	$3 flat (SSH, real server)	Nothing	~30 sec
Hetzner VPS + Docker	~$4-5	Everything	~30 min
Coolify on Hetzner VPS	~$5-8	VPS + OS	~10 min
Elestio	~$15-17	Nothing	~3 min

For contrast, here is what the hosted SaaS versions cost - and the catch is they are per user:

Hosted SaaS	Price	Billing
FigJam	Free tier, then ~$3-5/user/mo	Per user
Excalidraw+	Free tier, then $7/user/mo	Per user
Miro	Free tier, then ~$8/user/mo (Starter)	Per user

A 5-person team on Miro Starter is ~$40/mo. The same team on a self-hosted Excalidraw is one $3 server. That gap is the whole reason this post exists.

Editor-only vs collaboration (read this first)

Excalidraw has two modes, and which one you need changes the hosting math:

Editor only. The static app. Each person's drawings live in their own browser (localStorage) until they export. No server-side state, no real-time sync. This runs on the cheapest plan anywhere and is plenty for solo use or "send me the .excalidraw file."
Live collaboration. Real-time multiplayer needs the excalidraw-room socket server running alongside the editor, and a storage backend if you want shared scenes to persist. Still light, but now you are running a small Node service, not just static files.

Most people who self-host want collaboration - that is the point of a whiteboard. The good news: even with the room server, Excalidraw barely uses memory, so the cheapest plan on any platform handles it.

InstaPods ($3/mo)

InstaPods has Excalidraw as a one-click app. Click deploy, get a running instance with HTTPS in about 30 seconds. $3/mo on the Launch plan.

Full disclosure: I built InstaPods. I am including it because Excalidraw is exactly the kind of light app it is good at, and the comparison would not be honest without it. I will be straight about the limits.

Cost: $3/mo flat (Launch plan: 1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 5 GB storage). The editor plus the collaboration server fit comfortably, and the price does not climb when you add teammates.

Pros: Fastest setup. SSL and a URL included. SSH access on a real server, so you can tweak config or grab a backup by hand. Flat price for unlimited users - the per-seat math that makes Miro expensive does not apply.

Cons: Newer platform (launched 2026). Single region (EU - Nuremberg) for now. Smaller community than the established names.

Best for: Most teams. A managed whiteboard in under a minute, on a real server you control, at a price that stays flat no matter how many people draw on it.

PikaPods (~$1-2/mo)

PikaPods offers managed Excalidraw hosting. Set your resource sliders, deploy, done.

Cost: ~$1-2/mo at minimum resources. Excalidraw is light enough that the floor works fine. PikaPods shares revenue with the projects it hosts, which is genuinely nice.

Pros: Lowest price. Zero maintenance. Supports open source financially. $5 welcome credit covers months of a light app.

Cons: Meters by resource, so the price creeps up if you bump the allocation. No SSH, so you are limited to what the dashboard exposes.

Best for: People who want the rock-bottom price and do not need SSH or a real server.

Hetzner VPS + Docker (~$4-5/mo)

The DIY route. Rent a cheap VPS, install Docker, run the editor and the room server:

services:
  excalidraw:
    image: excalidraw/excalidraw:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    restart: always
  excalidraw-room:
    image: excalidraw/excalidraw-room:latest
    ports:
      - "5000:80"
    restart: always

Cost: Hetzner CX22 at ~$4.51/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM). Overkill for Excalidraw, but it is the cheapest real VPS and you can run other apps on it.

What you also set up: a reverse proxy (nginx or Caddy) for HTTPS, a Let's Encrypt certificate, firewall rules, and auto-updates. Budget 30 minutes the first time. If you want shared scenes to persist server-side, add a storage backend too.

Pros: Full control. Run other apps on the same box. Cheapest real server if you already live in a terminal.
Cons: You are the sysadmin forever. SSL renewal, OS patches, and updates are now your job.

Coolify on a Hetzner VPS (~$5-8/mo)

Install Coolify (free, open source) on a VPS and deploy Excalidraw from its catalog. You get a web UI and auto-updates, but Coolify itself wants ~2 GB of RAM, heavier than the app it is managing. Worth it only if you are already running Coolify for other things.

Elestio (~$15-17/mo)

Elestio deploys Excalidraw on a dedicated managed VM with backups and patching handled. True zero-maintenance, but ~$15-17/mo for a whiteboard this light is hard to justify unless you are standardizing a whole stack on one provider.

The Real Comparison

Here is what it comes down to:

The managed pick for most teams: InstaPods at $3/mo flat - one-click Excalidraw with SSL, SSH to a real box, and a flat price for unlimited users. PikaPods is a bit cheaper at ~$1-2/mo if you want the lowest floor, but it meters by resource and has no SSH.

If you want full control: a Hetzner VPS + Docker at ~$4-5/mo. You own every layer and can run other apps on the same server, in exchange for being the sysadmin.

The thing that actually decides it: seats. The hosted SaaS options are fine for one or two people on a free tier, but the moment a team needs the paid plan, you are paying $7-8 per person every month. A self-hosted instance is one flat server bill for everyone. For any team of three or more, self-hosting pays for itself in week one.

FAQ

How much does it cost to self-host Excalidraw?
Between $0 and ~$5/mo for almost everyone. Free on an Oracle Cloud always-free instance, ~$1-2/mo on PikaPods, $3/mo flat on InstaPods, or ~$4-5/mo on a Hetzner VPS you manage yourself. Excalidraw itself is free and open source.

Is self-hosted Excalidraw free?
The software is free and open source (MIT). You only pay for the server it runs on, which starts at $0 on a free tier or ~$1-3/mo on a cheap managed host. There are no per-user fees the way Miro, FigJam, and Excalidraw+ charge.

How much RAM does Excalidraw need?
Very little. The editor is a static app, and the collaboration room server is a small Node service. The whole thing runs comfortably in 512 MB, so the cheapest plan on any platform is plenty.

Does self-hosted Excalidraw support real-time collaboration?
Yes, but you need to run the excalidraw-room server alongside the editor. Managed one-click deploys handle this for you. On a VPS you add it as a second service in your Docker Compose file.

Where does Excalidraw store my drawings?
By default each drawing lives in your browser's localStorage until you export it as an .excalidraw file. For shared, persisted scenes you add a storage backend. This is why backups matter less than with a database app - but export anything you cannot afford to lose.

Is self-hosting Excalidraw hard?
On a managed platform it is one click and about 30 seconds. On a VPS it is a Docker Compose file with two services plus a reverse proxy and SSL - roughly 30 minutes if you have done it before.

Wrapping up

Excalidraw is one of the easiest wins in self-hosting: the software is free, it runs on almost nothing, and self-hosting it sidesteps the per-seat pricing that makes Miro and FigJam add up for a team. The only real decision is how much of the server you want to babysit. If you want it running in a minute on a real server you control, a flat $3/mo managed plan is the sweet spot. If you enjoy the terminal, a Hetzner box is hard to beat on raw price.

If you are also running other open-source apps, I wrote up the cheapest way to self-host Memos and a broader 6-platform comparison using the same cost lens.

What are you running Excalidraw on - and do you have collaboration set up, or just the editor? Drop it in the comments.

The Cheapest Way to Self-Host Memos in 2026

Vikas Singhal — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:00:31 +0000

Last updated: June 2026

Memos is the lightweight, open-source notes app a lot of people land on after getting tired of flomo, Google Keep, or a paid Notion seat they barely use. It is a single Go binary with a clean timeline UI, Markdown support, tags, and an API. It runs on basically nothing and your notes stay in a SQLite file you own.

But "self-hosted" means you need somewhere to run it. And a notes app has one quiet requirement: it has to stay up, because the moment you trust it with your second brain, a server that sleeps or loses data is worse than useless.

I have run Memos on a handful of setups. Here is every option I found, ranked by actual monthly cost, with the trade-offs that matter for a notes app specifically.

TLDR: For a managed Memos you never have to babysit, InstaPods is my pick at $3/mo flat - one-click Memos with SSL, the SQLite database on the same server, and SSH access to a real server, at a price that does not move as your notes pile up. PikaPods is marginally cheaper (~$2/mo) but meters by resource and gives you no SSH. The cheapest self-managed route is a $4-5/mo Hetzner VPS with Docker if you want to run the server yourself. Memos itself is free and open source on every option.

Every Way to Host Memos, Ranked by Cost

Method	Monthly Cost	You Manage	Setup Time
Oracle Cloud free tier	$0	Everything	~1 hr
PikaPods	~$2 (metered, no SSH)	Nothing	~1 min
InstaPods	$3 flat (SSH, real server)	Nothing	~30 sec
Hetzner VPS + Docker	~$4-5	Everything	~30 min
Coolify on Hetzner VPS	~$5-8	VPS + OS	~10 min
Elestio	~$17	Nothing	~3 min

Let me walk through the ones that matter.

Why self-host Memos at all?

Memos is the kind of app self-hosting was made for. It is tiny, it has no real SaaS upsell pulling you toward a subscription, and the whole appeal is that your notes live somewhere you control instead of in a cloud account that can change its terms next quarter.

The catch: a notes app is sticky. Once you have a few hundred memos in it, you do not want to migrate, and you really do not want a host that wipes the SQLite file on a redeploy. So the hosting choice is less about raw price and more about "will this still be running, with my data intact, a year from now."

InstaPods ($3/mo)

InstaPods has Memos as a one-click app. Click deploy, get a running instance with HTTPS in about 30 seconds. $3/mo on the Launch plan.

Full disclosure: I built InstaPods. I am including it because Memos is exactly the kind of light app it is good at, and the comparison would not be honest without it. I will be straight about the limits.

Cost: $3/mo flat (Launch plan: 0.5 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 5 GB storage). Memos barely touches 80 MB of RAM, so the $3 plan is plenty for years of notes.

Pros: Fastest setup. SSL and a URL included. The SQLite database lives on the same server, so there is no separate database bill. SSH access on a real server if you ever want to grab a backup of the .db file by hand. Flat price that does not climb as your notes grow.

Cons: Newer platform (launched 2026). Single region (EU - Nuremberg). Smaller community than the established names.

Best for: Most people. A managed Memos in under a minute with zero maintenance, on a real server you can SSH into. The recommended pick unless you specifically want the absolute lowest floor.

PikaPods (~$2/mo)

PikaPods offers managed Memos hosting. Set your resource sliders, deploy, done.

Cost: ~$2/mo for Memos at minimum resources. Memos is light enough that the floor works fine. PikaPods shares revenue with the projects it hosts, which is a genuinely nice thing.

Pros: Lowest price. Zero maintenance. Supports open source financially. $5 welcome credit.

Cons: Meters by resource, so the price creeps up if you bump the allocation. No SSH access, so you are limited to what the dashboard exposes.

Best for: People who want the rock-bottom price and do not need SSH or a real server.

Hetzner VPS + Docker (~$4-5/mo)

The DIY route. Rent a cheap VPS, install Docker, run Memos:

services:
  memos:
    image: neosmemo/memos:stable
    container_name: memos
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "5230:5230"
    volumes:
      - ./memos:/var/opt/memos

Cost: Hetzner CX22 at ~$4.51/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM). Massive overkill for Memos, but it is the cheapest real VPS and you can run other things on it.

What you also set up: a reverse proxy (nginx or Caddy) for HTTPS, a Let's Encrypt certificate, firewall rules, auto-updates, and a backup job for the SQLite file. Budget 30 minutes the first time.

Coolify on a Hetzner VPS (~$5-8/mo)

Install Coolify (free, open source) on a VPS and deploy Memos from its catalog. You get a web UI and auto-updates, but Coolify itself wants ~2 GB of RAM, which is heavier than the app it is managing. Worth it only if you are already running Coolify for other apps.

Elestio (~$17/mo)

Elestio deploys Memos on a dedicated managed VM. True zero-maintenance with backups and patching handled, but ~$17/mo for a notes app this light is hard to justify unless you are standardizing a whole stack on one provider.

The Real Comparison

Here is what it comes down to:

The managed pick for most people: InstaPods at $3/mo flat - one-click Memos with SSL, the database on the same server, SSH to a real box, and a price that stays put. PikaPods is marginally cheaper at ~$2/mo and a fine choice if you want the lowest floor, but it meters by resource and has no SSH.

If you want full control: a Hetzner VPS + Docker at ~$4-5/mo. You own every layer and can run other apps on the same server, in exchange for being the sysadmin.

The one thing that actually matters: back up the SQLite file. Whatever you pick, your notes are one memos_prod.db file. On a managed platform that is handled for you. On a VPS, set a cron job to copy it offsite. A notes app you do not back up is a notes app you will lose.

FAQ

How much does it cost to self-host Memos?
Between $0 and ~$5/mo for almost everyone. Free on an Oracle Cloud always-free instance, ~$2/mo on PikaPods, $3/mo flat on InstaPods, or ~$4-5/mo on a Hetzner VPS you manage yourself. Memos itself is free and open source.

How much RAM does Memos need?
Very little. It runs comfortably in under 100 MB even with thousands of notes. It is one of the lightest self-hosted apps you can run, so the cheapest plan on any platform is plenty.

Where does Memos store my notes?
In a SQLite database file (memos_prod.db) by default, plus any uploaded resources. Back up that file and you have backed up everything. Memos also supports external Postgres or MySQL if you want it.

Can I host Memos for free?
Yes, on an Oracle Cloud always-free ARM instance, but availability is hit or miss and instances have been reclaimed without warning. Fine for testing, risky for the notes you actually rely on.

Is self-hosting Memos hard?
On a managed platform it is one click and about 30 seconds. On a VPS it is a Docker Compose file plus reverse proxy, SSL, and backup setup - roughly 30 minutes if you have done it before.

Wrapping up

Memos is the easy case for self-hosting: light, free, and yours. The only real decision is how much of the server you want to babysit. If you want it running in a minute with the data on a real server you control, a flat $3/mo managed plan is the sweet spot. If you enjoy the terminal, a Hetzner box is hard to beat on raw price. Either way, set up that backup.

If you are also running other open-source apps, I wrote up the cheapest way to self-host Uptime Kuma and a broader 6-platform comparison using the same cost lens.

What are you running Memos on? And what is your backup setup - or do you not have one yet? Drop it in the comments.

I Priced 10 SaaS Tools vs Self-Hosting in 2026 (3 Cost More, Here's Which)

Vikas Singhal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:55:12 +0000

Every "self-hosting saves you thousands" post pulls the same two moves: it quotes the most expensive SaaS tier it can find, then pretends the server you run the open-source replacement on is free. Both of those are lies of omission, and they make the whole genre hard to trust.

So I did the boring version. I opened the actual pricing page for 10 popular SaaS tools in June 2026, wrote down the cheapest plan that honestly matches what the open-source equivalent does, and put it next to what it costs to run that open-source app on a flat monthly pod. No cherry-picked tiers, no hand-waving about hosting.

The short answer

Self-hosting the open-source version of a typical SaaS tool runs about $36 to $84 a year in hosting. The software itself is free and open source, so the honest framing is "$0 software plus a hosting bill." The commercial equivalents come in at a median of roughly $138 a year per tool, and a lot more once they start billing per seat, per host, or per task.

But that median hides the interesting part. For 3 of these 10 apps, self-hosting actually costs more at small scale. I'm going to show you exactly which, because that's the whole point of doing the math instead of repeating a slogan.

How I measured it

A few ground rules so the comparison is fair:

All prices are USD list price, billed annually, checked against each vendor's own pricing page in June 2026.
The SaaS number is the cheapest plan that reasonably matches the open-source tool's feature set, at one unit (one user, one host, or one channel) unless I say otherwise.
The self-host number is the flat plan the app actually needs: $3/mo ($36/yr), $7/mo ($84/yr), or $15/mo ($180/yr). That's the hosting bill, full stop. SSL, a subdomain, SSH, a web terminal, and bandwidth are included; the app is free.
Where a SaaS tool bills per seat or per host, I note how it scales, because that's where flat pricing pulls away hard.

The 10-app comparison

Self-hosted app	Replaces	Basis	SaaS / year	Self-host / year	Verdict
n8n	Zapier (Professional)	1 user, task-metered	$240	$84	Cheaper, and far more so as task volume grows
Beszel	Datadog (Infra Pro)	per host	$180/host	$36	Far cheaper, one pod watches many servers (5 hosts on Datadog = $900/yr)
Uptime Kuma	Pingdom	entry, 10 checks	$198	$36	Cheaper (note: UptimeRobot is $108/yr with a free 50-monitor tier)
Stirling PDF	Adobe Acrobat Standard	1 user	$156	$84	Cheaper (Acrobat Pro is $240/yr)
Fider	Canny (Core)	flat entry	$228	$36	Much cheaper
Memos	Notion (Plus)	1 seat	$120	$36	Cheaper
Excalidraw	Excalidraw+	1 editor	$72	$36	Cheaper (Miro Starter is $96/seat/yr)
Vaultwarden	Bitwarden Families	up to 6 people	$48	$36	Roughly a wash, do it for ownership not savings
AFFiNE	Notion (Plus)	1 seat	$120	$180	Costs more solo; wins for a team of 2+
Postiz	Buffer (Essentials)	1 channel	$60	$180	Costs more for 1-2 channels; wins at ~4+

Median commercial tool: ~$138/year. Median to self-host: ~$36/year. Nice gap, but the median isn't the lesson. The lesson is how SaaS bills you.

Where self-hosting wins big

The headline price barely matters. What matters is pricing that scales with your usage while your hosting bill stays flat:

Per host (Datadog). Datadog Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host per month. Monitor 5 servers and that's $900 a year. Beszel watches all 5 from a single $3/mo pod. The more servers you run, the more absurd the gap gets.
Per seat (Hootsuite, Notion, Miro). Hootsuite Standard is $99 per user per month. That's $1,188 a year for one seat and $5,940 for five. A flat self-hosted tool does not care how many people log in.
Per task (Zapier). Zapier's entry plan is $240 a year for a low task cap, and heavy automation walks you up the tiers fast. Self-hosted n8n runs unlimited executions on a $7/mo pod.

If your usage grows in any of those dimensions, flat pricing wins by a mile and keeps winning.

Where it doesn't (the part nobody admits)

Self-hosting is not free money everywhere. Three apps in this list cost more than their SaaS rival at small scale, and pretending otherwise is exactly how these posts lose credibility:

Postiz vs Buffer. Postiz needs a $15/mo pod, so $180 a year. Buffer is $60 a year for one channel. For 1 or 2 channels, Buffer is straight-up cheaper. Postiz only pulls ahead once you're managing roughly 4 or more channels, or comparing against a per-seat tool like Hootsuite.
AFFiNE vs Notion. AFFiNE also wants a $15/mo pod. Notion Plus is $120 a year for one seat. Solo, Notion is cheaper. AFFiNE wins for a team, because it's flat while Notion bills per head, so the math flips somewhere around the second or third user.
Vaultwarden vs a password manager. A $3/mo pod is $36 a year. Bitwarden Families is $48 a year, and an individual Bitwarden Premium plan is about $20. On price alone this is a wash at best. You self-host a password vault to own your data, not to shave a few dollars.

None of these are dealbreakers. They're just honest. If someone tells you self-hosting is always cheaper, they didn't check Postiz, AFFiNE, or Vaultwarden.

Quick FAQ

Is self-hosting actually cheaper than SaaS?
For tools that meter by host, seat, or task, yes, often by a wide margin once you scale. For cheap single-user tools it's roughly break-even, and the real win there is flat pricing and owning your data, not raw savings.

Why do n8n, AFFiNE, and Postiz cost more than $3/mo to host?
They need more memory than the $3 plan provides, so they run on the $7 or $15 plan. The lightweight apps (Beszel, Uptime Kuma, Memos, Fider, Excalidraw, Vaultwarden) all fit fine on the $3 plan.

Do I need DevOps chops to run these?
No. They deploy as 1-click apps and come up with a live URL, HTTPS, and a subdomain. You don't touch nginx, certs, or a build pipeline.

Are these prices going to drift?
SaaS pricing moves constantly. Everything here was verified against the vendors' own pages in June 2026. Treat the relative picture as the takeaway, not the exact dollar two years from now.

I kept the per-tool breakdown short here. If you want the full math, including how each SaaS plan was picked and where the break-even point lands for the per-seat tools, the complete per-tool math is in the original study.

And if you just want to try one of these without the server setup, you can deploy your first app from $3/mo flat. Flat plan, free open-source software, live URL in seconds.

How to Monitor Proxmox with Beszel in 5 Minutes (2026)

Vikas Singhal — Sat, 23 May 2026 10:27:06 +0000

To monitor a Proxmox VE host with Beszel: install the Beszel Hub on any internet-reachable server, then run the Beszel agent on the Proxmox host with a one-liner installer (curl -sL https://get.beszel.dev | bash). The agent uses about 10MB of RAM, exposes port 45876, and reports CPU, memory, disk, network, temperature, and Docker container metrics to the Hub. No license. No telemetry. No per-host pricing.

I run Beszel across two Proxmox hosts and a handful of LXC containers in my homelab. Total monthly cost: $0 (Hub on a free-tier pod) or about $3/mo if you want a managed Hub. Total RAM footprint per machine: 10MB. Total time to set up the first host: under 5 minutes once the Hub is running.

This guide walks through the full setup, including the LXC-vs-host decision, the systemd service config that survives Proxmox reboots, and the gotchas that trip people up.

What is Beszel?

Beszel is an open-source server monitoring tool built by Henry Doss. It has two parts:

Beszel Hub: a web dashboard you self-host once. It receives metrics from every agent and renders the charts, alerts, and history.
Beszel Agent: a tiny binary you install on each machine you want to monitor. It reports CPU, RAM, disk usage, network throughput, swap, temperature, and Docker container stats.

The agent uses about 10MB of RAM. For comparison: Netdata's agent uses 200-500MB. Datadog's agent uses 500MB+ and starts at $15/host/month. Beszel is free and self-hosted.

For Proxmox VE specifically, Beszel gives you per-host load, memory pressure, ZFS pool usage, and a per-container view if you run Docker on the host. It does not replace the Proxmox cluster manager (you still want that for backups and migrations), but it gives you the historical graphs and alert hooks Proxmox itself does not.

Step-by-Step: Install Beszel on Proxmox

The setup has two phases. Phase 1 is one-time. Phase 2 you repeat for every Proxmox host or LXC container you want to monitor.

Phase 1: Set up the Beszel Hub

The Hub needs to live somewhere reachable from your Proxmox hosts. Options:

A cheap VPS (Hetzner CX11 at $4/mo, InstaPods Launch plan at $3/mo, or any small Linux box).
An LXC container on your Proxmox host itself (free, but you lose monitoring if the host goes down).
A Raspberry Pi on the same network (zero cloud cost, but no remote alerts).

For most homelabs I recommend option 1 or 3. If you only have one Proxmox host, option 1 wins because you can still see metrics when the host reboots.

For a one-click Hub on a $3 pod with HTTPS handled: deploy the Beszel app on InstaPods. Otherwise, pull the official Docker image:

docker run -d \
  --name beszel \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -p 8090:8090 \
  -v ./beszel_data:/beszel_data \
  henrygd/beszel

Open http://<hub-host>:8090/ in a browser. The first request prompts you to create an admin account. Save the URL - the agents need it.

Phase 2: Install the Beszel Agent on the Proxmox host

SSH into the Proxmox host as root:

ssh root@your-proxmox-host

In the Beszel Hub web UI, click Add System. Copy the public key it generates - the agent needs this to authenticate.

Run the installer one-liner:

curl -sL https://get.beszel.dev -o /tmp/install-agent.sh && \
  chmod +x /tmp/install-agent.sh && \
  /tmp/install-agent.sh

The installer prompts for:

Public key: paste from the Hub
Port: leave default (45876)
Hub URL (optional): if your Hub is on a different network, paste the full URL
Token (optional): only needed for advanced multi-tenant setups

The installer creates a systemd service at /etc/systemd/system/beszel-agent.service and starts it. Verify:

systemctl status beszel-agent

Output should show active (running). Within 30 seconds, the host appears in the Beszel Hub dashboard with live charts.

Phase 3 (Optional): Monitor LXC Containers Individually

Proxmox LXC containers do not appear automatically as separate systems in Beszel - they share the host's namespace. If you want each LXC monitored independently, install the agent inside the container:

pct enter <container-id>
curl -sL https://get.beszel.dev | bash
exit

For privileged LXC containers this works directly. For unprivileged containers you may need to enable the mount=cgroup feature in the container's .conf file at /etc/pve/lxc/<id>.conf. Most monitoring metrics (CPU, RAM, network) work without this; full Docker stats inside the LXC need it.

Phase 4: Make it Reboot-Proof

The installer already enables the service via systemctl enable beszel-agent.service. To verify after a reboot:

sudo reboot
# wait, SSH back in
systemctl is-enabled beszel-agent
# expected: enabled
systemctl is-active beszel-agent
# expected: active

If the agent does not come up, the most common cause is firewall. Check that port 45876 is open between the host and the Hub:

iptables -L | grep 45876
# or for nftables
nft list ruleset | grep 45876

Beszel vs Other Proxmox Monitoring Options

Tool	RAM per agent	Setup time	Cost	Best for
Beszel	10 MB	5 min	$0 (self-hosted)	Homelabs, small fleets, Proxmox + Docker
Netdata	200-500 MB	10 min	$0 (free tier) or $69/mo (cloud)	Granular per-second metrics, ML anomaly detection
Datadog Agent	500+ MB	30 min	$15+/host/month	Large enterprise fleets, compliance
Grafana + Prometheus + Node Exporter	200+ MB stack	60+ min	$0 (self-hosted), complex	Customizable dashboards, alerting flexibility
Proxmox built-in graphs	0 (already there)	0 min	$0	Single-host CPU/RAM at-a-glance only
Zabbix	50-200 MB	60+ min	$0 (self-hosted), enterprise pricing	Network device monitoring, large fleets

For most Proxmox homelabs running 1-10 hosts, Beszel hits the sweet spot. It is more lightweight than Netdata, simpler than Grafana + Prometheus, and free vs Datadog. The trade-off is fewer metrics types - if you need per-second granularity or ML anomaly detection, Netdata is the better pick.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Beszel work on Proxmox VE 8?

Yes. The agent is a standalone Linux binary that runs on any modern systemd-based Linux distribution. Proxmox VE 7 and 8 (both Debian-based) work without modification.

Will the Beszel agent interfere with Proxmox's own monitoring?

No. Beszel reads from /proc and /sys, the same places Proxmox's built-in graphs read from. There is no conflict and no measurable performance overhead.

Can I monitor ZFS pools with Beszel?

Beszel reports disk usage for mounted filesystems including ZFS. It does not report ZFS-specific metrics like ARC hit ratio or scrub status. For those, pair Beszel with zpool status cron alerts or use zfs-mon.

How do I add alerts when a Proxmox host goes down?

In the Beszel Hub, open any system and click the bell icon next to the metric you want to alert on. Beszel supports email, Discord, Slack, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify, and webhook notifications. The Hub watches for missing agent heartbeats and fires a "system down" alert automatically.

What if I run Proxmox in a cluster?

Install the agent on each cluster node. Each node reports independently to the Hub. The Hub does not currently aggregate cluster-level views (per-cluster RAM, per-cluster VM count), so you get a per-node dashboard rather than a cluster overview.

Is there a Beszel agent for Windows Server?

Yes, as of Beszel 0.8+. Same install pattern with a PowerShell installer instead of bash. Most Proxmox users do not need this, but it is there if you have a mixed-OS homelab.

Cost Comparison: One Year of Proxmox Monitoring

For a 3-host Proxmox cluster monitored over 12 months:

Setup	Year 1 cost
Beszel + Hub on InstaPods $3/mo Launch plan	$36
Beszel + Hub on Hetzner CX11 €4/mo	~$56
Beszel + Hub self-hosted on existing Pi/VPS	$0
Netdata Cloud Pro (3 hosts)	$99
Datadog Pro (3 hosts)	$540

Beszel pays for itself the first month if you were paying for Netdata or Datadog. The license is open source. There is no per-host or per-metric pricing.

Wrapping Up

Beszel on Proxmox is the lightest-weight serious monitoring you can get. 10MB of RAM per host, a real web UI with charts and alerts, and Docker container visibility for free. The setup is two phases - Hub once, agent per host - and the agent ships its own systemd service so it survives reboots.

If you want zero-config Hub hosting with HTTPS and a real backup story, Beszel runs as a 1-click app on InstaPods for $3/mo. You can also see how it stacks against Netdata, Datadog, and Prometheus in our comparison cluster.

What does your Proxmox monitoring stack look like? Drop a comment - I'm especially curious about anyone running Beszel alongside Netdata or Grafana to see if they're worth the combined overhead.

I Tested 7 Self-Hosted Monitoring Tools on a $3 VPS in 2026 (Here's the One I Kept)

Vikas Singhal — Sat, 16 May 2026 03:38:40 +0000

I was paying around $84/year for UptimeRobot's Pro plan plus another $20/month for a Datadog free-tier-with-overage thing on a side project. None of it made sense. The side project does maybe 200 requests an hour. I'm not running Netflix.

So over a long weekend in 2026 I spun up a $3/mo VPS, installed 7 self-hosted monitoring tools one after the other on the same box, and kept whichever one didn't make me reach for rm -rf at the end.

Same hardware for all of them: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 25 GB disk, Ubuntu 24.04. Same workload: 4 production websites pinged from outside + the host itself.

The 7 tools (and how I ranked them)

Tool	Memory at idle	Setup time	First-time UX	Notes
Beszel	12 MB (hub) + 8 MB (agent)	4 min	"Wait, this is it?"	Single binary, agent + hub. Zero config.
Netdata	320 MB	6 min	Overwhelming	Auto-detects everything. So many charts.
Grafana + Prometheus	410 MB combined	35 min	Painful	You install one to be useful, the other to make the first one useful.
Pulse (Proxmox VE)	95 MB	8 min	Niche	Lovely if you run Proxmox. Empty otherwise.
Glances + InfluxDB	240 MB	20 min	Average	Glances is fine. InfluxDB is the tax.
Prometheus only	180 MB	15 min	Terminal-grade	You're querying PromQL or you're nothing.
Dozzle	18 MB	3 min	Logs only	Brilliant at one thing. Not a monitoring tool.

The memory column matters more than it looks. On a 2 GB VPS, Netdata's 320 MB is 16% of your RAM gone before you've shipped any user code. Beszel's 12 MB is a rounding error.

Why I uninstalled the obvious choices first

Netdata. Auto-detects PostgreSQL, nginx, Docker, journalctl, every interface, every cgroup. Great. Also: 320 MB at idle and a dashboard so dense I scrolled for 90 seconds and gave up. It's the Salesforce of self-hosted monitoring - extremely capable, exhausting to use casually.

Grafana + Prometheus. I love Grafana. I do not love that the answer to "how is my server doing" is "let me first configure scrape targets in a YAML file, then write a PromQL query, then build a dashboard, then realize the dashboard library on GrafanaLabs has 600 versions of CPU usage." 35 minutes to first chart. On a side project.

Pulse. I don't run Proxmox. It told me so within 90 seconds. Fair.

Glances. Glances itself is great as a CLI. The moment you want web UI + history + alerts, you need InfluxDB or some other time-series store, and now you've got a moving-parts problem on a 2 GB box.

Dozzle. Spectacular for tailing Docker logs. Doesn't pretend to be monitoring.

Prometheus alone. PromQL is wonderful if you live in it. I don't. I want to glance at my phone in the queue at the coffee shop and know whether prod is up.

The one I kept: Beszel

Beszel is two binaries:

The hub runs on one server. Web UI, history, alerts, push notifications.
The agent runs on every server you want to watch. Reports back to the hub over an encrypted channel.

Setup, end to end:

# On the hub server
mkdir beszel && cd beszel
curl -L https://github.com/henrygd/beszel/releases/latest/download/beszel_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz
./beszel serve

# On every agent server
curl -L https://github.com/henrygd/beszel/releases/latest/download/beszel-agent_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz
KEY="$(cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub)" ./beszel-agent

# Add the agent in the hub web UI, paste the public key, done

That's 4 minutes if you've made a single typo, 3 minutes if you haven't.

The web UI shows CPU, memory, disk, network, temperature, Docker container stats, and a clean event log. Alerts go to email, Discord, ntfy, Pushover, Telegram - the usual stack. History as far back as you tell it to keep.

What sealed it for me: the same setup works for 1 server or 50. I started with the one VPS, then added the agent to my home homelab box (an old laptop running Debian under the TV), then to a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. Same dashboard. Same alerting. No reconfiguration.

What I'd actually pay attention to

Three things matter on a small server: memory headroom, disk filling up overnight, and "did the process I care about die." Beszel covers all three out of the box. Netdata covers them too, but you'll need to learn the dashboard. Grafana covers them once you've spent a weekend wiring it together.

If you run multiple boxes - even just "VPS + home lab + Pi" - the single-hub model is the unlock.

Costs (real numbers)

Setup	Monthly cost	What you give up
UptimeRobot Pro	$7	External-only checks, no resource metrics
Datadog Pro	$15+ per host	Per-metric overage. The trap.
Grafana Cloud Free	$0	10K metrics ceiling, then it scales fast
Beszel on a $3 VPS	$3	Hosting it yourself, owning your data, no per-host fee
Beszel on a managed pod	$3	Setting it up yourself

The last row is shameless - I work on InstaPods and we ship a pre-baked Beszel image for people who don't want to run the install commands above. If you'd rather not touch a VPS, that path exists. If you'd rather own the box, the install commands above are the whole guide.

What I'd skip

Don't self-host monitoring on the same box you're monitoring if it's a one-server side project. If that box goes down, your monitor goes down with it. Beszel's hub is small enough to run on a different cheap VPS, a Raspberry Pi at home, or a free-tier Oracle box.
Don't pay for SaaS monitoring on a side project. The pricing model assumes you're running 10 production hosts and have a budget. You're running one production host and a budget of "ramen tonight or not." The math never works.
Don't pick the tool with the prettiest dashboard until you've tried the tool with the smallest memory footprint. The prettier dashboard you can grow into. The 320 MB you can't grow into on a 2 GB box.

Try-this list (15 minutes total)

Spin up the cheapest VPS you can find. Beszel's hub needs maybe 50 MB and a few MB of disk.
Install Beszel hub. Open the web UI.
Install the agent on whatever server you care about. Paste the SSH public key into the hub. Done.
Set one alert: "CPU > 90% for 5 minutes." That's the single alert that catches the most "something is wrong" cases.

The whole thing costs less than one month of UptimeRobot Pro and tells you more.

What's your monitoring stack right now? And how many alerts do you actually act on vs. silently ignore? Curious how this lands with people running multi-box homelabs - the agent/hub model seems made for it but I've only run it on three boxes so far.

Why I Stopped Paying for n8n Cloud (And Switched to a $4 VPS in 2026)

Vikas Singhal — Thu, 14 May 2026 02:31:10 +0000

I was paying n8n Cloud $20 a month for the Pro tier. Eight workflows, mostly daily syncs. Nothing crazy.

Then I looked at the execution counter. I was at 14,200 executions for the month. Pro caps at 10,000. Next tier up: $50 a month. For workflows that mostly just call APIs and write to a database.

So I spent a Sunday afternoon migrating to self-hosted. Here's what I learned.

n8n Cloud pricing in 2026 (the math nobody shows you)

n8n Cloud's pricing is execution-based, not user-based. Real numbers from their site:

Tier	Price	Executions	Active workflows
Starter	$20/mo	2,500	5
Pro	$50/mo	10,000	15
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Unlimited

The catch is that "executions" counts every workflow run. A daily sync that runs 30 times a month uses 30 executions. A webhook-triggered workflow that fires 50 times a day uses 1,500. Eight workflows running a few times a day each adds up faster than you'd think.

If you have AI-heavy workflows (LLM calls, embeddings, vector search loops), executions stack even faster. Each LangChain agent step counts.

I crunched my own numbers: at Pro tier ($50/mo, 10K executions), I'd burn through the quota in 22 days. The next overage tier was disproportionate. Self-hosted made sense.

The self-host options in 2026

Three real paths:

1. Raw VPS (Hetzner CX22 at $4.51/mo)

You rent a 2 vCPU / 2GB RAM box from Hetzner, install Docker, and run n8n with Docker Compose:

services:
  n8n:
    image: n8nio/n8n
    ports:
      - "5678:5678"
    environment:
      - N8N_HOST=n8n.yourdomain.com
      - WEBHOOK_URL=https://n8n.yourdomain.com
    volumes:
      - ~/.n8n:/home/node/.n8n

Then nginx in front for SSL, certbot for a Let's Encrypt cert, fail2ban for SSH, ufw for firewall, automated backups for the data volume. Maybe 90 minutes of setup if you've done it before. Multiple hours if it's your first time.

Total monthly cost: $4.51 for the VPS. You handle everything else.

2. Managed PaaS (Coolify, Dokploy, InstaPods, Sevalla)

These sit between raw VPS and n8n Cloud. You get a control panel that handles SSL, backups, and updates, but the n8n instance is yours. Pricing is flat, not execution-based.

I tried Coolify (self-installed on the same Hetzner VPS) and InstaPods (which has a pre-baked 1-click n8n image). The InstaPods approach was faster because the image is pre-configured: deploy n8n in under a minute, SSL auto-provisioned, terminal access in the browser. $3/mo on their Launch tier.

The Coolify approach takes longer to set up but you own the entire stack. Both are valid; the choice depends on whether you want to manage the platform itself.

3. Docker on a Raspberry Pi or home server

If you already have a Pi 4 or a homelab box, you can run n8n on hardware you own. Zero monthly cost beyond electricity. The trade-off is exposing it: you need Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale, or a public IP plus dynamic DNS.

I considered this but my Pi was already running Plex and Home Assistant. Adding n8n was one container too many for the SD card.

What I actually do now

I'm on a $3/mo InstaPods pod with n8n pre-installed. Total monthly bill: $3. That's a savings of $17/month versus n8n Cloud Starter, or $47/month versus Pro.

The workflows that mattered:

Stripe webhook -> Postgres -> Slack (30-50 executions/day)
RSS feed monitor -> Discord (4 daily)
GitHub issue triage -> Linear (5-20 per day depending on day)
OpenAI summarization of long emails -> Notion (10-30 daily)

None of them needed n8n Cloud's SLA. The whole point of self-hosting was: I control the database, I control the credentials, I can SSH in and debug, and the bill is fixed.

Migration took 90 minutes total. Export workflows as JSON from n8n Cloud, import into self-hosted, re-add credentials (n8n encrypts them, so they don't export). Done.

When NOT to self-host

To be fair, self-hosting isn't always the right call:

If your workflows handle critical production traffic with strict uptime requirements, n8n Cloud's SLA is worth the premium.
If your team isn't comfortable with Linux/Docker, the setup time eats the cost savings.
If you're below 2,500 executions/month forever, the $20 Starter tier might genuinely be cheaper than your time.

Self-hosting wins clearly above 5,000 executions/month or when you want to own the data.

Discussion

Are you self-hosting n8n right now? What was the breaking point that made you migrate (or kept you on Cloud)? Curious how others crunch the math.

I Replaced Datadog With a 10MB Monitoring Tool (Here's What Happened)

Vikas Singhal — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:43:35 +0000

I have 4 servers. Nothing enterprise-grade - a couple of app servers, a database box, and a staging machine. Datadog was costing me $60/month to show me CPU graphs and disk usage.

That felt wrong.

So I tested alternatives. Grafana + Prometheus was the obvious choice, but the stack itself uses 500MB+ of RAM. On a $4/mo VPS with 2GB total, that's 25% of my resources just for monitoring.

Then I found Beszel. Its agent uses less than 10MB of RAM. The entire monitoring stack - hub and agents across 4 servers - runs on a $3/mo server and barely touches 50MB.

Here's what happened when I switched.

What Beszel Actually Monitors

Beszel tracks the basics well:

CPU usage and load average
Memory and swap usage
Disk usage and I/O
Network throughput
Docker container metrics (CPU/memory per container)

It does NOT do:

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Distributed tracing
Log aggregation
Custom metrics/dashboards beyond server basics
Alerting with complex conditions (basic alerts only)

If you need APM and tracing, Beszel isn't for you. If you need "is my server healthy?" at a glance, it's all you need.

The Setup (5 Minutes)

Hub (runs on one server - I used a $3/mo InstaPods server):

The hub is the web dashboard that collects and displays metrics. One-click deploy gives you a running instance with HTTPS in about 60 seconds.

Agent (runs on each monitored server):

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/henrygd/beszel/main/supplemental/scripts/install-agent.sh -o install-agent.sh
chmod +x install-agent.sh
./install-agent.sh

Enter your hub URL when prompted. The agent starts reporting metrics immediately.

Total setup time across 4 servers: about 5 minutes. Compare that to Prometheus + Grafana (30-60 minutes for the stack, then configuring dashboards, then setting up node_exporter on each server).

Resource Usage Comparison

I measured actual resource usage across monitoring tools on identical VPS instances (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM):

Tool	Agent RAM	Hub/Server RAM	Total (4 agents + hub)
Beszel	<10MB	~50MB	~90MB
Netdata	200-500MB	N/A (each instance is standalone)	800-2000MB
Prometheus + node_exporter	50-100MB (exporter)	300-500MB (Prometheus)	500-900MB
Grafana (if you add it)	N/A	200-400MB	adds 200-400MB on top
Datadog agent	200-500MB	N/A (cloud)	800-2000MB

Beszel's total footprint across my entire infrastructure (hub + 4 agents) is less than what a single Netdata or Datadog agent uses on one server.

What I Lost

Switching from Datadog means losing:

APM traces - I can't see request latency broken down by endpoint. For debugging slow API calls, I now SSH in and check logs manually.
Log search - Datadog's log search was convenient. I now use grep and journalctl on the servers directly.
Custom dashboards - Datadog lets you build anything. Beszel's dashboard is fixed (server metrics only).
Integrations - Datadog connects to everything (AWS, Kubernetes, databases). Beszel monitors the server, not specific services.
Alerts - Datadog's alerting is sophisticated (anomaly detection, composite conditions). Beszel has basic threshold alerts.

For my 4-server setup, none of these losses mattered. I wasn't using APM. My logs are small enough to grep. My dashboard needs are basic.

What I Gained

$57/month savings - $60/month (Datadog) vs $3/month (Beszel hub hosting). That's $684/year.
No data leaving my infrastructure - monitoring data stays on my servers. No third-party data processor.
Lower server overhead - freeing up 200-500MB per server means my apps have more headroom.
Simpler mental model - one dashboard, server metrics, done. No 47-tab Datadog interface.
No per-host pricing anxiety - adding a 5th server to Beszel costs $0 extra. Adding it to Datadog costs $15/month.

When Beszel Is Wrong

Don't switch to Beszel if:

You're running 50+ servers (you need the scalability of Prometheus/Grafana or a cloud solution)
You need APM with distributed tracing (use Datadog, New Relic, or self-hosted Jaeger)
You need log aggregation (use Loki, Elasticsearch, or a cloud logging service)
Your compliance requires specific monitoring certifications
You have a team of SREs who need advanced dashboards and runbooks

When Beszel Is Right

Switch to Beszel if:

You're monitoring 1-20 servers
You need CPU, memory, disk, network metrics
You want Docker container monitoring
Budget matters (your credit card, not the company's)
You value simplicity over features
You want to self-host your monitoring data

My Setup Now

Beszel hub: $3/mo managed server (InstaPods, one-click deploy)
4 agents: installed in ~1 minute each, <10MB RAM each
Total cost: $3/month
What I check daily: CPU load, memory %, disk space, network throughput
Time saved vs Datadog: I spend less time in the monitoring UI because there's less to get distracted by

The honest answer: Beszel gives me 80% of what I used Datadog for at 5% of the cost. The other 20% (APM, logs, custom dashboards) I handle with SSH and grep when I need them, which is rarely.

What monitoring tool are you running? Curious if anyone else has downsized from Datadog/New Relic to something lighter - and whether you regret it.