I saved $14,000 a year by switching to these free cloud tools
I run a small consulting firm. We are five people. Our annual software bill used to be around $32,000. I am not exaggerating. I keep the receipts.
The number that mattered was not the $32,000. It was the $14,000 I cut in 18 months by replacing the cloud tools we were paying for with free or self-hosted alternatives. Some of the replacements are better than what we replaced. Most are slightly worse in one specific way. None of them cost me a paying client. That is what I want to talk about.
What we were paying for
I went through the credit card statement line by line. I am not going to name every vendor, because some of them are still in business and I do not want to be unkind, but the categories are familiar.
- Project management and time tracking. Two subscriptions. One for project management, one for time tracking, both of which we used for maybe 40% of their features.
- Internal wiki and knowledge base. A monthly bill for a hosted wiki that we updated about twice a year.
- File sync and storage. A per-seat business plan that was costing us about $15 per user per month for what is, in the end, a folder that syncs.
- CRM (customer relationship management, software for tracking leads, contacts, and deals). A “starter” plan that was going to be $1,800 per year once we crossed 5 users, which we were about to.
- Video conferencing for client calls. A per-host plan that we used about twice a month.
- Password manager. A business plan that was, honestly, fine but cost us $400 per year.
Total: about $32,000 per year for tools that mostly did their job and partly did not. The partly-did-not is the important part.
What I replaced and what I saved
Here is the short list. I will explain the “what I gave up” column because that is the part nobody else writes about.
- Project management and time tracking → two open-source tools. We use one open-source project tracker and one self-hosted time tracker. Combined cost: $0. What I gave up: the polished mobile app on the project tracker. We work at laptops, not phones, so the loss was theoretical.
- Hosted wiki → a Git repo with markdown files. The wiki we were paying for was updated twice a year. The repo gets updated every week. Cost: $0. What I gave up: the search. We added a free search index that took me two hours to set up.
- File sync → self-hosted on our existing server. The $15 per user per month was the painful one. We already had a server for other things. Adding a self-hosted file sync cost me a Saturday. What I gave up: the polished desktop client. The self-hosted alternative is functional and ugly.
- CRM → a spreadsheet. I am not kidding. A shared Google Sheet with conditional formatting and a few pivot tables. We have 47 active contacts. The spreadsheet is faster than the CRM was. Cost: $0. What I gave up: the automation. The CRM used to send me a “deal stalled” email. I now notice stalled deals on my own. I have not yet missed the email.
- Video conferencing → a free tier on a different platform. We moved to a platform that has a free tier for 40-minute calls, which is enough for the kind of discovery calls we do. Cost: $0. What I gave up: the recording. The platform we left used to record calls. We replaced it with a free open-source recorder that I run on my laptop. I now have to remember to start the recording. I forget about once a month.
- Password manager → a different free password manager. The password manager we were paying for was, honestly, the best of the bunch. The free alternative I switched to is not as polished. It is also $0. What I gave up: a few nice-to-have features like shared folders with role-based access. I work around the gap with a shared vault that everyone in the company has access to.
Annual savings: about $14,000. Annual cost of the replacements: about $200 for the domain name that points at the self-hosted services.
The two replacements I almost did not make
There are two tools on the list I almost kept paying for. I want to name them because the temptation to keep them was real.
The first was the CRM. I have a personal attachment to CRMs as a category. They make me feel like a real business. The spreadsheet does not make me feel like a real business. It makes me feel like I am running a small business, which I am, and the spreadsheet is the right tool for the size of business I run. I switched anyway, and I am not going back.
The second was the video conferencing platform. The one we used to use was reliable and the recording feature saved me once a quarter when a client forgot what we agreed to. The free alternative is also reliable. The recording feature is something I now handle on my laptop with a small open-source tool. I lost the auto-transcription. I kept everything else. The trade-off was worth it for the $1,200 per year.
What I would tell past me
If I could send a message back to the version of me that was paying $32,000 a year for cloud tools, I would say three things.
- Go through the credit card statement line by line. The $32,000 was not a number I had in my head. It was a number I learned by reading the statement. Your software bill is bigger than you think it is, and you have been paying it on autopilot.
- Replace one tool at a time, not all of them at once. I started with the project tracker. Then the file sync. Then the wiki. Each replacement took about two weeks to settle in. Doing them all at once would have been chaos.
- Keep a list of what you gave up. The free alternative is rarely a strict improvement. There is always one feature you used to use. Knowing which features those are, before you commit, makes the loss easier to absorb.
Trade-offs
The $14,000 I saved came with about 30 hours of setup time, plus about 5 hours per month of maintenance. That maintenance is the part nobody else writes about. Self-hosting a file sync server means the server goes down sometimes, and “the server is down” is now my problem to solve at 8 PM on a Tuesday.
Switching to a free password manager means giving up some polish. I have had to reset my master password twice in the last 18 months because the free tier does not have the same recovery flow the paid tier had. Both resets took about 20 minutes. I would rather have the polished password manager, but the $400 per year is a real number, and the 20-minute reset is also a real number, and the 20-minute number wins.
A spreadsheet CRM is a real trade-off. If we grow to 15 active clients instead of 5, the spreadsheet will not scale. I will probably have to buy a real CRM at that point. The $1,800 per year I avoided by using a spreadsheet is real, but it is a deferral, not a permanent saving. That is worth saying out loud.
Bottom line
If you are a small team paying for tools you only use a fraction of, there is probably $10,000 to $20,000 a year on your credit card statement that does not need to be there. The free alternatives are rarely a strict improvement. They are a trade. The trade is dollars for time, and for a small team, that trade is usually worth it.