Marketing stack arbitrage, decoded
Every marketing SaaS has a cheaper way. We show the math.
HubSpot Marketing Pro costs $16,680 in year one. EspoCRM on a managed $168/year server does the same core job. That gap is real, and it repeats across the marketing stack. We work out the year-one arithmetic tool by tool, name the alternative worth switching to, and say plainly when switching is the wrong call.
Often that means self-hosting. Sometimes it does not, and we say so. Leaving Mailchimp is worth it, but a hosted competitor beats self-hosted listmonk at every list size we priced. Below roughly 10,000 Zapier tasks a month, n8n Cloud is cheaper than running a server yourself. Most “open-source alternatives” lists never reach those conclusions because they leave the sending bill and the server bill out of the arithmetic. We put them in, which is also why we sometimes tell you to stay put.
Start here
New to self-hosting your marketing stack? These guides answer the most common "should I switch?" questions:
Guides published so far
HubSpot
$16,680/yrPricing scales aggressively with contacts and seats. Onboarding fee is mandatory. Feature bundling forces users to pay for modules they don't use.
Zapier
$1,548/yrBilling counts action steps, not workflow runs, so cost scales with workflow complexity rather than business volume. Adding a filter or formatter step to an existing Zap raises the bill without doing more work.
Intercom
$468/yrSeat pricing plus an uncapped AI meter; the inbox itself is replaceable but the AI resolution cost follows you.
Hootsuite
$1,188/yrPricing multiplies linearly per seat while the underlying job — queueing posts to public social APIs — has no proprietary data moat. Three seats cost roughly six times what the equivalent server does.
Calendly
$360/yrPer-seat pricing multiplies across a team, and the free tier's 1-event-type limit pushes most real users to paid immediately.
Marketing OSS in our index
Snapshot: 2026-09-08| Project | Replaces | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| n8n Source-available workflow automation with a visual editor and 400+ integrations | zapiermake | 203.7k |
| NocoDB Source-available no-code database front end for any SQL database | airtable | 64.9k |
| Twenty Modern open-source CRM, TypeScript + GraphQL | hubspotsalesforce | 56.4k |
| Cal.diy (formerly Cal.com OSS) Community MIT fork of Cal.com with all enterprise code removed | 48.3k | |
| Chatwoot Open-core shared inbox and live chat, positioned directly against Intercom | 36.6k | |
| Postiz AGPL-licensed social media scheduling with an AI-assisted composer | hootsuitebuffer | 35.6k |
Tracking 24 open-source projects against 25 marketing SaaS categories. 5 full guides written so far — greyed-out names are tracked but not yet written up, and we would rather leave a gap than publish arithmetic we have not checked.
How we're different from Zapier's blog
Year-one true cost
We compute onboarding fees, seat overage, contact overage. Not just the sticker price on the pricing page.
Self-host and cheap SaaS, together
We recommend Listmonk when you'll self-host and Brevo when you won't. No one-size-fits-all listicle.
We check the vendor's own documentation
Hardware sizing comes from each project's published system requirements, and server costs from DigitalOcean's and Vultr's live price tables. Where we could not verify a figure, we say that instead of estimating it.