There are a lot of reasons to support open-source, from practical to ideological to ethical. But ultimately, there’s also a huge financial reason to support it, as virtually all software has become subscription-based. Although SaaS promised to eliminate your administrative overhead and reduce your infrastructure costs, the reality is that the math doesn’t really support that anymore, and the administrative burden is equal– and sometimes even greater– with Cloud-based systems.

Consider this: running two moderately-specced VPS or VMs can comfortably run Docker containers for open-source alternatives of the following:

• The entire Office 365 suite (Outlook, SharePoint/OneDrive, Teams, web-based Office apps, and most other periperal systems)
• SAML/OAuth federated identity (Entra ID, Okta, etc.), replete with passkeys, MFA, and conditional access
• Low-code / no-code automation workflows (like Power Automate or Zapier)
• HR and CRM systems (Monday, etc.)
• Document e-signing (Docusign, Docuseal, Adobe Acrobat Sign, etc.)
• Invoicing, accounting, timekeeping (like QuickBooks or ADP)
• Infrastructure orchestration (Ansible)
• VPN and other core infrastructure (private DNS, web filtering, etc.)
• Public site hosting (self-hosted LAMP/LEMP for WordPress or similar CMS systems)

These are just a few, off the top of my head.

You might pay $100/mo. for the two VPS, complete with storage and backups. For an organization with just twenty users, you could easily be paying 3-4 times that amount. Or if you were so inclined, you could spend maybe $2000 every five years for on-premises “servers” (really, just half-decent workstations will do) to host everything yourself.

“But we’re a non-profit! We get a lot of this stuff for free and/or cheap,” you might be thinking. And… that’s true. If you’re an eligible non-profit, you’re hopefully taking advantage of the free and reduced-pricing licenses available from a lot of tech companies (start checking TechSoup and Goodstack if you aren’t already, and stay tuned to this blog for more resources). But a lot of these licenses come with (somewhat understandable) limitations in their functionality, and so organizations end up with partial functionality and rely on stretching their limited manpower to fill the gaps.

With self-hosting, most open-source solutions don’t gate their functionality behind paywalls or– if they do– you can typically find another free app to fulfill that need.

Beyond the Financial Argument

Of course, I’m not suggesting that setting up your own servers, installing apps, and keeping everything secure and stable isn’t a little difficult… it is! It takes some research and knowledge, and inevitably it takes a considerable amount of time to get everything up and running and to train users on how to use them. But as I previously wrote, open-source software has gotten really good and much more accessible in recent years, and the barrier to entry and/or the sacrifice of quality are not nearly as significant when compared to commercial software as they once were.

So let’s run through a few more reasons that you should consider going self-hosted and open-source; I’ll dive deeper into these topics in future posts:

• True data sovereignty – Your data is yours and yours alone. Especially if you’re doing any kind of “sensitive” work in opposition to the government, remember that the government can subpeona tech companies for access to your data, and you may not even be informed of it for weeks or months… if ever. With proper self-hosting, your data remains inaccessible even if they’re granted access to your hosted servers. Plus, with hardware being as powerful as it is nowadays, you can even really self-host your systems on-premises on inexpensive, physical “servers” for added security. Granted, 2026 is not the best time to have to buy any hardware with the RAM “shortages”, but the option still stands.
• Divestment from Big Tech – Even if you’re getting free licenses, using services from major tech companies keeps you enmeshed in their ecosystem, part of their user count, and dependent on their benevolence. At the risk of turning this into a political blog, remember that these companies all suck, pretty much every single one of them. Even if you don’t take issue with their warm embrace of techno-fascism, you should still take bipartisan issue with their invasions of privacy, disregard of environmental destruction, exploitation of rural communities, egregious tax avoidance… and about a dozen other things. Divesting from these companies’ free services isn’t virtue-signaling, it’s actively reducing their power and influence.
• Open-source is beautiful – Open-source represents an aspirational ideal of humanity: creativity, collaboration, labor borne of passion rather than profit. It is the manifestation of “by the people, for the people.” Open-source doesn’t tolerate “dark patterns” or data-mining; if a project goes astray, it’s forked and set back on course. It’s security by transparency and benevolence by democracy. It doesn’t comply with secret subpeonas or include government backdoors… and if it does, they don’t last for long. It really is what personal computing was supposed to be: a tool for liberation, not for exploitation by vulture capitalism.

Look, maybe you care deeply about these things, or maybe technology is a means to an end and you want the cheapest means available. Either way, it’s strongly worth considering what parts of your tech stack can be shifted to self-hosted and/or open-source solutions, or what problems you face with solutions that you think you can’t afford; chances are, there’s an affordable solution out there if you’re willing to look beyond flashy marketing materials and sponsored search results.