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Garnmile
Alternatives

You are renting software you could own.

Almost every line on your software bill has an open-source equivalent that runs on hardware you control. Below is the list we work from. We are not guessing at these — we run every one of them ourselves, and we will show you any of them working before you decide anything.

Prices are the vendors' own published US list rates, checked in September 2026. Your actual bill depends on seats, volume, billing country and which tier you are on — which is what the review is for.

Monitoring and response

Uptime Kuma
Uptime and endpoint checks
~$50/mo at 30+ monitors
instead of Better Stack, Pingdom, UptimeRobot
Beszel
Host and container metrics
$15 per host/mo
instead of Datadog Infrastructure
Alerting to a phone
Incident routing
$21 per user/mo
instead of PagerDuty

Hosting and deployment

Kamal
Zero-downtime container deploys
from $7 per app/mo, before databases
instead of Heroku, Render, Fly.io
Cloudflare Tunnel
Public access with no open ports
$20/mo, or $0.0225 per load-balancer hour
instead of Load balancers, ngrok
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis
Databases and caches
from $25 per database/mo
instead of Supabase, Amazon RDS, Redis Cloud
Private container registry
Build and image storage
metered per GB stored and transferred
instead of GitHub Packages, Docker Hub

Mail and identity

Stalwart
Mailboxes on your own domain
from $7 per user/mo, forever
instead of Google Workspace, Microsoft 365
Cloudflare Email Routing
Inbound routing and aliases
a whole seat, per alias
instead of Per-mailbox licences for forwarders
Self-hosted sending
Application and transactional mail
$16.50/mo for 10,000 emails
instead of Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun
Vaultwarden
Password management
$4–$8.99 per user/mo
instead of 1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass

Work and knowledge

Outline
Team wiki and documentation
$10 per member/mo
instead of Notion, Confluence
Manage
Projects and to-dos
$59/mo flat, or $9–12 per seat/mo
instead of Basecamp, Asana, Monday
Scheduled automation
Jobs that run on their own
$89/mo at 5,000 tasks
instead of Zapier, Make

Data, storage and AI

Immich
Photo and video library
$9.99/mo for 2 TB
instead of Google Photos, iCloud+
MinIO
S3-compatible object storage
$0.023 per GB/mo, plus egress
instead of Amazon S3
Ollama on your own GPU
LLM inference
metered per token, forever
instead of OpenAI, Anthropic APIs
Qdrant, pgvector
Vector search
from $20/mo
instead of Pinecone
The arithmetic

So what does owning it actually cost?

Fair question, and the table above only shows one side of it. Here is a ten-person business paying list price for a fairly ordinary stack, against the same capability owned outright.

Renting it — 10 people, list price
Google Workspace Business Standard
$140
Dropbox Standard
$150
monday.com Standard
$120
Notion Plus
$100
1Password Business
$90
Slack Pro
$73
Zapier Professional
$89
Datadog, 3 hosts
$45
Better Stack
$29
Postmark
$17
Per month $852
$10,223 a year, rising with headcount
Owning it
Open-source licences, all of the above
$0
A server that runs the lot
bought once
Domains and the odd paid tier
a few dollars
Someone to actually run it
the retainer

The software is free. The server is a one-off. What you are really buying from us is the fourth line — somebody whose job it is to patch it, back it up, watch it and fix it. That is a monthly fee, and it is the honest cost of owning your own stack.

For reference, this site runs on a machine we already owned and costs $5.87 a month in actual recurring cash. Yours will differ. The review is where that number comes from.

The left-hand column is arithmetic on published list prices, not a claim about your bill — most businesses do not buy every one of these, and some negotiate. It is there to show the shape of the thing. Electricity and the hardware are real costs on the right-hand side and are not pretended away.

The other side of it

Where owning it is genuinely worse.

You would find these out eventually. We would rather you heard them from us, before you pay us anything, than discover them after a migration.

  • Self-hosted monitoring usually watches from one place.

    The commercial products check from points of presence all over the world and can tell a regional network fault from a real outage. A single vantage point cannot.

  • An alert on your phone is not a pager.

    There is no escalation policy and no on-call rotation unless you buy one. A business that genuinely needs somebody woken at 4am needs a product built for that, and we will tell you so.

  • The open-source tool usually does less.

    The self-hosted monitoring stack does metrics and alerts. It does not do distributed tracing, anomaly detection or twelve-month log retention. If you need those, the subscription is doing real work.

  • Patching becomes your problem.

    With software-as-a-service the vendor does it. Self-hosted, somebody has to — which is exactly why we sell maintenance, and why self-hosting without it is a bad idea.

  • Feature parity is rarely exact.

    Self-hosted photo libraries have weaker search than Google's. Sharing with people who will not install an app is clumsier. These are real trade-offs, not marketing.

Which of these are you paying for?

That is the first question of the review, and the answer is usually longer than anyone expects. We will tell you which ones are worth moving, which are not, and what each would save. The review itself is free.

Book an efficiency review