I have been on a mission to reduce my monthly SaaS spending and wanted to hear what has worked for others.

So far, self-hosting dev tools on a cheap VPS has saved me about $145/month:

  • Replaced UptimeRobot Pro with a self-hosted monitor
  • Ditched paid SSL monitoring for a simple cert checker
  • Stopped using expensive API testing tools in favor of a self-hosted toolkit
  • Swapped ad-filled online tools (JSON formatter, QR gen) for my own endpoints

The biggest revelation was how little resources these tools actually need. Everything runs on a single 2GB VPS.

What tools or services have you replaced with self-hosted or free alternatives? Looking for ideas to cut more costs.