Cost of SaaS for small business: the UK renting trap

You don't own any of this

Add up every software subscription your business pays this month. Accounting tool. CRM. Booking system. Automation layer. Chat widget. CMS. Payment gateway mark-ups on top of Stripe. Write them all down. Now multiply by 36.

That number — your three-year SaaS spend — is money you handed to vendors and got nothing permanent back. No equity. No asset. No code you can inspect or move. When any one of those vendors decides to raise prices, kill your plan, or get acquired, you are at their mercy. You are a tenant in your own system.

This is not a niche problem. It is the default operating model for small businesses in the UK, and the cost of SaaS for small business has quietly become one of the largest untracked line items on a P&L. Research from industry analysts suggests UK SMBs now use between 25 and 40 SaaS applications at any one time, and SaaS subscription prices have been rising at 8–25% annually — well ahead of general inflation.

Nobody sat down and chose this. It happened one £15-a-month trial at a time.

This piece lays out what that really costs, names the specific tools that are eating your budget, and shows you the alternative stack — open-source, self-hosted, owned.

What £1,247 a month actually buys you

Pull together a realistic stack for a ten-person UK service business: a CRM to track leads, an automation layer to join systems together, a booking tool for client calls, a live chat for the website, a CMS to manage content, and a handful of productivity tools to fill the gaps. Price it at honest current rates.

You land somewhere between £900 and £1,500 a month. The brief from this team puts the midpoint at £1,247/mo.

Over three years: **£44,892**.

Not £44,892 in infrastructure you can inspect. Not £44,892 in code you own. £44,892 paid to seven or eight separate vendors — each with their own terms of service, their own deprecation schedule, their own right to raise prices next January.

And none of those tools talk to each other without Zapier in the middle. So add another £30–80 a month for the glue layer. Then add the time your team spends debugging the gaps when a webhook breaks on a Sunday night.

The hidden multiplier: Shopify's transaction tax

Shopify deserves its own paragraph. The Basic plan costs £25 a month and charges 2.0% + 25p on every online transaction processed via Shopify Payments. On a modest e-commerce store turning over £30,000 a month, that is £600+ in processing fees alone — on top of the subscription. At scale, that per-transaction cut is not a small-print detail. It is a meaningful percentage of your margin, extracted every single month, building no equity for you whatsoever.

HubSpot's onboarding tax

HubSpot's Starter CRM runs around £16–18 per seat per month — affordable enough that most teams sign up without thinking. The problem arrives when you need actual automation. That requires Professional tier, which runs approximately £85 per seat per month. HubSpot also charges a mandatory onboarding fee for Professional and Enterprise customers, frequently starting at £1,200 or more. You pay to be onboarded to software you are already paying to use.

The replacement stack: open-source, self-hosted, owned

Every tool in that stack has a viable open-source replacement. Not a compromise. A replacement that, in several cases, does more.

n8n replaces Zapier

[n8n](https://n8n.io) is an open-source workflow automation tool with over 400 native integrations. Self-hosted on a VPS — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, whatever you prefer — the software itself costs nothing. Infrastructure runs to £5–12 a month. For context, a comparable Zapier Professional plan (with meaningful task volume) costs £30–100+ a month depending on how many automations you run, with per-task pricing that scales against you as your business grows.

n8n's self-hosted edition has no task limits. You run as many workflows as you need. Your data stays on your server, which matters when your automation is processing customer PII.

Frappe CRM replaces HubSpot

[Frappe CRM](https://crm.frappe.io) is a fully-featured, open-source CRM built on the ERPNext framework. Pipelines, deal tracking, email sequences, lead scoring, call logs — the category parity with HubSpot Starter is strong, and with HubSpot Professional you are paying £85/seat/mo for features that Frappe delivers for the cost of a small server. STACKD builds on Frappe CRM as the default CRM layer for the systems we architect. See [our services page](/en/services) for more detail.

Cal.com replaces Calendly

[Cal.com](https://cal.com) is open-source scheduling software with round-robin routing, team availability, CRM hooks, and a clean API. Calendly's Teams plan costs $16 per seat per month — which adds up fast across a five-person sales team. Cal.com self-hosted: the software is free, the server negligible.

Chatwoot replaces Intercom

[Chatwoot](https://www.chatwoot.com) is an open-source customer engagement suite — live chat, email inbox, WhatsApp, shared team inbox — that runs on your own infrastructure. Intercom's Essential tier starts at $29 per seat per month. Three support operators costs you $87/mo before you add any AI features, which Intercom charges separately. Chatwoot: free software, your hosting, your data.

Payload CMS replaces Contentful and Sanity

[Payload CMS](https://payloadcms.com) is a TypeScript-native headless CMS that runs as part of your Next.js codebase. No separate vendor, no API call limits, no £240-a-month Contentful Lite tier. You define your content schema in code. It lives in your repo. It deploys with everything else. Contentful's Lite plan starts at around $300 a month — roughly £240 at the time of writing — for a managed service that Payload replaces with zero software cost.

Three years: renting vs. owning

The honest version of this comparison requires acknowledging that owned systems have an upfront build cost. STACKD's engagements typically start around £12,000 for a focused stack and average around £24,000 for a full bespoke system — CRM, automations, website, CMS, integrations, all wired together.

That sounds like a lot until you run the three-year maths.

When the crossover happens

At a £24,000 build cost with £30/mo in hosting, you break even against a £1,247/mo SaaS stack somewhere in the middle of year two — around month 20. Every month after that, the owned system is generating a monthly saving of over £1,200 compared to the rented alternative.

By year three, the owned system has cost £24,720 in total. The SaaS stack has cost £44,892 — and that is before accounting for the 8–15% annual price increases that are now standard across most SaaS categories.

This is not a marginal win. It is a structural one.

What about the tail of tools?

The comparison above focuses on the core stack — CRM, automation, CMS, scheduling, chat. There are always peripheral tools: Slack for team communication, Notion or Confluence for documentation, Loom for async video, Typeform for forms. Some of these have open-source equivalents (Mattermost for Slack, AppFlowy for Notion). Some don't.

The point is not to replace every SaaS tool on day one. The point is to identify the ones where you are paying the highest rent for the least ownership — and replace those first. For most businesses, that means the CRM, the automation layer, and the CMS.

Start there. The savings fund everything else.

The vendor lock-in you do not see

There is a cost that does not appear in any monthly invoice: the cost of not being able to leave.

HubSpot stores your contact history, deal notes, email threads, sequences, and pipeline. Exporting it is possible — in theory. In practice, a clean migration to a different CRM takes days of engineering work, and much of the relational data does not survive the export cleanly. Contentful stores your content model and all your content entries behind their API. Moving that to another system means rebuilding the schema and migrating every record.

This is not accidental. It is the model. The more embedded you are, the more painful leaving becomes, and the more leverage the vendor has at renewal time.

Owned systems do not work this way. Your data lives in your database, on your server, under your control. You can inspect it, back it up, migrate it, or hand it to a different developer tomorrow. The schema is yours. The code is yours.

That is the ownership thesis, and it is why businesses that commit to it stop having the conversation about what their CRM vendor is doing to pricing this quarter.

Ready to stop renting? [Talk to the team at STACKD](/en/contact) about what a bespoke open-source stack looks like for your business.

Frequently asked questions

How much does SaaS cost for a small business in the UK?

A typical UK small business running a modern software stack — CRM, automation, scheduling, live chat, and a CMS — can expect to spend between £900 and £1,500 a month on SaaS subscriptions. That figure grows every year as vendors raise prices. Over three years, a mid-range stack at £1,247 a month costs roughly £44,892 with nothing owned at the end.

Is open-source software really free for businesses?

The software licence is free. You still pay for the server infrastructure to run it, which typically costs £20–60 a month for a well-configured VPS. For complex deployments you also pay for engineering time to set it up and maintain it — but that cost is a one-off or near-one-off, compared to SaaS subscriptions that renew every month indefinitely. Over two to three years, self-hosted open-source is substantially cheaper than the equivalent SaaS tools.

What open-source tools can replace HubSpot, Zapier, and Intercom?

Frappe CRM replaces HubSpot for pipeline and contact management. n8n replaces Zapier for workflow automation, with no per-task fees in the self-hosted version. Chatwoot replaces Intercom for live chat and shared inbox. Cal.com replaces Calendly for scheduling. Payload CMS replaces Contentful or Sanity for headless content management. All are open-source, all self-hostable, and all have active development communities.

How long does it take to break even on a bespoke system build?

At a typical build cost of £20,000–£30,000 and hosting costs of around £30 a month, the crossover against a £1,000+ monthly SaaS stack happens somewhere between 18 and 24 months. After that point, the owned system generates a saving of over £1,000 a month compared to the rented alternative — every month, indefinitely.

Can a small business really manage self-hosted open-source software?

Not alone, without technical resource — and STACKD is not suggesting you should. The model that works is: a studio builds and hands over the system, with documentation and a support arrangement, so your team uses it without managing the infrastructure directly. The technical complexity is in the build phase. Once it is running, the operational overhead of a well-architected self-hosted system is lower than most people expect.