I run six businesses on a single $24/month VPS.

Here is what that actually costs compared to the managed alternative.

My Stack vs the SaaS Equivalent

Function What I Use Monthly Cost SaaS Equivalent SaaS Cost

Phone system Asterisk + VoIP.ms $29.70 RingCentral $99/user

Database Supabase (free tier) $0 PlanetScale $39

AI agents VAPI + Claude API Usage Bland AI $150+

Content pipeline Custom pg_cron + Edge Functions $0 Buffer Pro $100

Lead scraping CrawlOS on VPS $0 BatchLeads $299

Credit dispute automation Custom FCRA engine $0 DisputeBee $69

Server Vultr VPS (4 vCPU / 8 GB) $24 N/A N/A

My total: ~$75/month

SaaS equivalent: ~$800/month

The Hidden Costs of Self-Hosting

Being honest here.…