Exit Cost

What it really costs to leave a subscription.

Self-hosting advocates leave out the expensive part: your own time. Every comparison here charges it, and publishes the hourly rate at which the answer flips.

Right now 10 of these 36 comparisons conclude you should keep paying the subscription. Those are the ones that make the rest worth reading.

Worth leaving

The number on the right is what your hour would have to be worth before staying becomes the better deal.

Close enough to be a coin toss

Technically cheaper. Probably not worth the disruption.

Keep paying

The arithmetic says stay — at least if you run it yourself. Where a managed host changes that answer, the row says so.

There is a third option

Most comparisons of this kind offer a binary: keep paying, or run a server yourself. There is a middle — someone else runs the same open-source software, applies the updates and takes the backups — and for 4 of the comparisons here it changes the answer. Those rows are marked above.

How to read the number

The figure beside each comparison is its break-even hourly rate — the value of your own time at which switching stops paying. If your hour is worth less than that, self-hosting wins. If it is worth more, you are better off paying the subscription and spending the time on something else. On a dash, self-hosting costs more in cash alone and no hourly rate rescues it.

Every page shows the working: what you pay now, what the escape costs, what we assumed about your hours, and the date each price was last verified. How we count.