In 2025, I spent $5K/month on enterprise DevOps tools. In 2026, I spent exactly $0—and my team is more productive.
The shift wasn't about compromise. It was about finally discovering open-source and free tools so good that paying for proprietary alternatives became indefensible.
Here are the 7 free tools that replaced my entire SaaS stack—and will likely replace yours too.
Grafana + Prometheus: Replaced $2,500/month Datadog
Datadog is beautiful. It's also $2,500/month for mid-scale teams.
- Grafana + Prometheus delivers 95% of the functionality at zero cost. My team now runs the full observability stack (metrics + logs + traces) on self-hosted infrastructure. Setup took a weekend. Migration from Datadog took two weeks. Savings: $30K/year.
What Grafana doesn't have: Some advanced ML-based anomaly detection. What Prometheus doesn't have: Sometimes we miss Datadog's superior UX. Worth it? Absolutely.
- Loki: Replaced $800/month Splunk Logs
Log aggregation was the next casualty. We moved to Loki (built for Grafana). Simple query language, incredible performance on large datasets, $0 cost.
Savings: $9.6K/year. Lost: Advanced log parsing (we built this in-house in 2 days).
- Jaeger: Replaced $1,200/month New Relic APM
Distributed tracing is non-negotiable for microservices. Jaeger (open-source from Uber) handles our 50K+ requests/day with zero cost.
Setup: 3 days. Savings: $14.4K/year.
- OpenSearch: Replaced $1,500/month Elastic Cloud (SaaS)
OpenSearch is Elastic's open-source fork. Same power, zero licensing fees. We self-host on Kubernetes.
Savings: $18K/year. Trade-off: We manage upgrades ourselves.
- Vault: Replaced $300/month HashiCorp Cloud
Secrets management matters. Vault (open-source) is production-grade and zero-cost. We self-host it.
Savings: $3.6K/year.
- ArgoCD: Replaced $400/month GitLab Premium (for CI/CD)
GitLab's native GitOps was convenient. ArgoCD is better. It's free, cloud-agnostic, and declarative. Our deployments are now 10x more reliable.
Savings: $4.8K/year. Bonus: Better than what we paid for.
- Minio: Replaced $600/month AWS S3 + backup service
Not everyone needs this, but if you're S3-heavy, Minio is S3-compatible object storage you can self-host.
Savings: $7.2K/year. Note: Only makes sense if you're comfortable managing object storage infrastructure.
The Real Cost: Infrastructure Management
Savings summary: $5K/month → $0/month. Annual savings: $87.6K
But here's the honest part: we traded subscription costs for infrastructure costs.
Estimated infrastructure spend:
Kubernetes cluster (3 nodes for staging + prod): $300-400/month
Dedicated DevOps engineer (2 hours/week): ~$500/month (allocated)
Domain, backups, misc: ~$100/month
Total: ~$900-1,000/month. Still a 80% cost reduction.
The Hidden Wins You Don't Calculate:
Complete data ownership (no vendor lock-in)
Ability to customize tools to your exact needs
Faster incident response (we control everything)
Better security posture (no third-party access to your observability data)
Who Should Make This Switch?
✅ Do it if:
Your team has 2-3 DevOps engineers
You're comfortable with Kubernetes
You care about data sovereignty
You can afford the upfront setup time (3-4 weeks)
❌ Skip it if:
Your team is <5 people and already lean
You don't have DevOps expertise
You need support SLAs from vendors
You want zero maintenance overhead
The Future?
We're not stopping here. Next on our roadmap:
Cilium for advanced networking
Falco for runtime security
KubeOps for policy management
The open-source DevOps ecosystem is at an inflection point. Tools that were once considered "good-enough" alternatives are now best-in-class. The days of paying enterprise premiums for proprietary tools are numbered.
If you haven't audited your DevOps spend recently, now's the time.
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