i sold 4 saas companies. now i'm canceling saas.

& replaced ~$1,000/month of software with a $36 server

Author

johann sathianathen
November 08, 2026

hey friends,

i've sold 4 saas companies. (took 20+ attempts to get there)

i used to love the business model. build an amazing piece of software, then have people rent it.

but this month, i started cancelling all the saas i pay for…

all my projects.

at cyndra we were paying for a crm, e-signatures, automations, a notion workspace and a recruiting tool.

it was costing us over $1,000/mo for these.

in the age of AI & amazing open source projects, this made 0 sense.

all you need is a well supported open source project + an AI agent to setup the software for you.

the new stack(steal these)

• twenty instead of hubspot or salesforce
github.com/twentyhq/twenty

• n8n self hosted instead of zapier or n8n cloud
github.com/n8n-io/n8n

• documenso instead of docusign
github.com/documenso/documenso

• nocodb + outline instead of notion
github.com/nocodb/nocodb
github.com/outline/outline

• openseo instead of ahrefs or semrush
github.com/every-app/open-seo

• a talent finder we built ourselves instead of linkedin recruiter

all of it runs on 2 servers. about $36 a month with backups.

the honest part

saas isn't dead for everyone.

if you need support, compliance, or someone to call when it breaks, pay for it. self hosting means you own the maintenance.

but if you or your team abuses AI, chances are you can handle the maintenance.

too many teams pay for tools they could run themselves.

do this yourself (10 min)

  1. export your business credit card statement

  2. have claude/codex audit all saas & then find open source alternatives

  3. pick the most expensive one & try the self hosted version for a week (claude/codex does the setup 🙂 )

if you want help mapping it out, i do weekly live calls in AI operators.

i appreciate you reading this.

if something resonated or you have questions, just reply. i read & respond to every email.

i'm rooting for you & hope the best.

→ johann

p.s. if you want me to set something like this up with you, i do 1 hour live builds on your screen. you keep the files & the recording.

book call here

p.p.s. if you run a team & want this done across your company, that's what we do at cyndra: we find where AI fits, build it live with your people & set up the guardrails. book an intro: https://cal.com/team/cyndra-ai/intro-chat