Chatwoot Cloud Startups, 5 seats → Chatwoot, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Chatwoot saves you $487 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$61.08/hrBelow that rate, moving to Chatwoot pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Chatwoot Cloud Startups.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Chatwoot Cloud Startups $19.00/month × 5 seats, billed annual | $95.00 |
| Every month | $95.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 50 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.35 |
| Your time 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $70.35 |
| Migration, once 8 hours of your time, our estimate | $400.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $24.65 |
| After one year | −$104 |
| After 3 years | $487 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Managed upgrades on a Rails app with Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq behind it
- Deliverability handled for you — running your own inbound and outbound mail is its own project
- Support from the people who wrote it
You gain
- Identical software with no per-agent charge
- Customer conversations on infrastructure you control, which is often the actual requirement
- No ceiling on agents, inboxes or conversation volume
Read this before you decide
- Chatwoot self-hosted is the same product, so there is no feature trade-off to weigh — only operational cost. That makes the hourly rate below unusually decisive.
- Email deliverability is the hidden cost. If your support inbox runs on email, budget for a transactional mail provider on top of the figures here.
- The stack wants 4 GB. It will boot in 2 GB and then fall over during a busy hour.
Is the project alive?
chatwoot/chatwoot has 37,947 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v4.18.0) 31 days ago. Its licence is not one GitHub recognises automatically, so check the repository before you rely on it. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Chatwoot Cloud figure is the site's own wording: “Startups $19 /agent/month billed annually”.
| Chatwoot Cloud pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| chatwoot/chatwoot activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.