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For solopreneurs and small teams

The SaaS bill is eating your margin. Here's a way out.

Pick from a hand-picked catalog of open-source tools — CRM, docs, projects, email, automations and more — proven in a working business like yours. One click to install, one flat price for your whole team of up to 5, and zero lock-in: walk away with the whole setup, ready to run anywhere anytime.

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Daily backups with full disaster recovery GDPR compliant & EU-based One subscription or self-hosted Portable

A short introduction to FledgeKit™— how we replaced $445/mo of SaaS tools with a self-hosted open source stack.

What is FledgeKit?

The 90-second story. Why I dropped seven SaaS subscriptions and rebuilt the whole stack on open source.

Why we built this

We were paying $445/mo for software. Three of us. Climbing every month.

HubSpot for the CRM. Zapier for automations. Notion for the docs. Toggl for time tracking. Mailchimp for campaigns. Linear for project management. That was our normal stack.

Our monthly SaaS bill — 3 people
Licence cost $445/mo

Each tool was fine on its own, but together they were costing us $445 a month, and climbing with every new subscription.

The experiment

At some point, enough was enough.

I pulled an old laptop out of the cupboard and started testing open source alternatives — one by one...

Founder coding on an old laptop while testing the stack
The actual laptop from the experiment: old hardware, one long evening, and the first proof that the stack could actually work.

The process of testing and switching to open source tools was not easy - lot's of them promise to be open but end up with locked down features, paid plans, or just don't work as expected.

So I developed criteria for selecting tools that would actually work for us, and built a checklist to evaluate each one against it:

  • Is the UX good enough that we can actually switch to it?
    More often than not the UI looks good but the actual user experience is clunky, slow, or just not designed for real businesses.
  • Is it truly open source?
    No locked down features that would make the free version unusable: we need automations, integrations, multiple users, and more.
  • Does it have a healthy community?
    Regular updates, active forums, and a roadmap that shows it's here for the long run.

    After trying dozens of tools, we ended up with a stack of open source software that was genuinely good — comparable to what we had been paying for:

    Your starter stack
    Licence cost $445 $0

    The tools were genuinely good — comparable to what we had been paying for. Often better. And free. The software was never the problem. The problem was everything around it...

    The hard part

    Open source is great. Running it in production was brutal.

    The tools themselves worked. The real problem started when we tried to treat the stack like production software:

    What we want from our business software:

    • Easy to install and make it work.
    • Keep it up to date and healthy.
    • Recover quickly when something inevitably breaks.

    The first install was already more work than it looked. Every tool came with its own setup quirks: storage, SMTP, reverse proxy rules, background jobs, permissions, environment variables.

    One app was manageable. A whole stack meant lots of little moving parts that all had to line up.

    What kept breaking the flow:

    • Install pain: every tool had its own setup assumptions, and they all had to fit together.
    • Update pain: a routine version bump could trigger migrations, config drift, or failed containers.
    • Maintenance pain: you were maintaining the whole stack, not just one app at a time.
    • Recovery pain: having a backup still did not mean the system would come back online without a lot of manual work and hope.

    Updates were not just a button click. A version bump could change an env var, require a manual migration, break a plugin, or silently stop a container from coming back up.

    A backup is not the same as recovery, either. We didn't just need the data back. We needed the services, the configs, the volumes, the automations — everything, exactly as it had been.

    # fresh install on a clean machine
    ~ docker compose up -d
    ERROR SMTP_HOST is not set
    ERROR ./proxy/conf.d/default.conf not found
     
    # later, routine updates
    ~ docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
    ERROR Notifuse exited after migration step
    ERROR worker healthcheck failed
     
    # restoring the stack onto a replacement machine
    ~ restic restore latest --target /srv/restore
    database dump restored
    uploads volume restored
    ERROR env file .env.production not found
     
    → software works, but the stack still does not

    Without a repeatable install, predictable updates, and a real recovery path, maintenance meant rebuilding by hand and hoping nothing subtle was missing. And while that was happening, this is what my team saw in the browser:

    That was the part that made open source feel risky, even when the software itself was good. The apps were not the issue. Installing them, updating them, and keeping the whole stack healthy was.

    What we built

    So we built the missing piece: a managed layer that makes open source production-ready.

    We built the layer that makes open source tools easy to install, maintain, and recover — to make open source a viable alternative to SaaS for non-technical teams.

    We have automated daily backups with restore verification and alerts, so we know if something breaks before it becomes a problem.

    Backups
    Manual.
    Never tested.     Daily.
    Restore verified.
    Automated alerts.

    We have developed a deployment script that brings the entire stack up on any fresh machine in minutes. Ether in a disaster recovery scenario or migration to a new host.

    Deployment & Disaster recovery
    Hours of
    manual work.     One command.
    ~10 minutes.
    Any machine.

    And because the tools themselves are open source, the recurring software bill dropped from $445 a month to almost zero.

    Monthly software cost
    $445 ~$0
    All tools included · Team of 3 · Electricity and hosting not included

    Once we had that, something clicked. The tools became something we could actually rely on, not something we had to babysit.

    That infrastructure layer is what FledgeKit™ is. It makes open source tools ready to be used by everyone. We want to make it available to small teams that should be spending their time growing, not managing software...

    You should join So if...

    • You run solo, freelance, or lead a team of up to five and need serious tools without serious bills.
    • You've outgrown the free tiers of your current tools but don't want to pay $200+/month just to unlock the features you actually need to grow.
    • You care about where your data lives — for client trust, GDPR, or plain principle.
    • You want an open source stack that just works without losing weekends to server chores.
    • You want a real exit option, so everything keeps running even if we disappear tomorrow.
    • You want to actually own your business rather than renting it from a SaaS vendor.
    Join the waitlist →
    DevOps · open source

    Rather host it yourself? Take the keys.

    Don't want a managed service — or already have a server? Our DevOps tool deploys the entire stack in a single command. Same modules, same defaults, your hardware.

    # demo only — not implemented yet
    # on a fresh Ubuntu / Debian VM
    ~ curl -sfL fledgekit.sh | sh -s -- init
    → reading manifest · pulling images · wiring TLS…
    ~ FledgeKit™ enable crm projects email cms
    → 4 services up · backups scheduled
    ✓ stack online — open https://your-server.tld

    free, GPL-3.0 licensed · launching alongside the managed service

    FAQ

    Honest answers to the real questions.

    No — and that distinction matters. We tried Odoo. It tries to do everything and ends up doing most things poorly. FledgeKit™ is a curated stack of the best independent open source tools — Twenty CRM, Plane, n8n, Outline and others — each best-in-class at its specific job, configured to work together. We pick the winner in each category and connect them. You get specialist tools, not a compromised all-in-one.

    On infrastructure provisioned in your name, in an EU data centre by default (Germany). Every database is yours — you can request a full SQL dump or filesystem snapshot at any time, no questions asked. We are based in Frankfurt am Main and the setup was designed for GDPR compliance from day one.

    You take everything. We export your databases, files, and configuration, hand you our open source DevOps tool, and the same stack you ran with us spins up on your own machine with one command — all data intact, 1:1. No lock-in is not a slogan here — it is the architecture.

    Honesty: we are a small team ourselves, and the stack has been tested in real conditions for teams of that size. We want to get this right before we scale the offer. If your team is larger, join the waitlist anyway and tell us your situation — we want to understand what you need and will reach out when the time is right.

    One-click installers set up a single tool in isolation. We run a unified business stack — everything is connected, automated daily backups, disaster recovery tested and documented, security updates applied, and a real person reachable when something breaks. The DevOps complexity that took us months to solve is handled, not left to you.

    Yes — GPL-3.0 licensed, no asterisks. We make money on the managed service. The open source release is the trust mechanism: you can always see exactly how it works, and you can always leave and keep running on your own. Any modifications you distribute must also be open source — that keeps the ecosystem honest.

    We are validating demand with this waitlist now. The pricing shown in the calculator is illustrative — the real numbers go to the waitlist first, with early-access pricing for people who sign up before launch. One email when we go live. No drip campaigns.

    On the managed plan at launch, the stack is curated — that is the whole point. On the self-hosted version you can add anything you like. The most-requested tools graduate from "coming soon" to "ready" first, so tell us what you need on the waitlist form.

    Ready to start growing?

    Your whole stack. One price. Your data.

    Join the waitlist for early-access pricing, first pick on module selection, and get notified as soon as we're live. No credit card required, unsubscribe anytime.

    Join the waitlist → See why

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