Notion Plus, 3 seats → AFFiNE, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, AFFiNE costs you $1,500 more over 3 years.
This one only pays off if your hour is worth less than
$9.46/hrThat is below the minimum wage almost anywhere this software is run. In practice it means stay on Notion Plus: the subscription is cheaper than the hours AFFiNE would take, and it is not close.
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
| Notion Plus $10.00/month × 3 seats, billed annual | $30.00 |
| Every month | $30.00 |
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 40 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.28 |
| Your time 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $57.78 |
| Migration, once 10 hours of your time, our estimate | $500.00 |
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 | −$27.78 |
| After one year | −$833 |
| After 3 years | −$1,500 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Notion databases, relations and rollups
- A decade of templates, integrations and institutional familiarity
- Notion AI
You gain
- A whiteboard and a document editor in the same file, which Notion does not offer
- Local-first storage with real offline editing
- No per-seat cost
Read this before you decide
- AFFiNE moves fast and its self-hosted releases have been less stable than the hosted product. Pin a version and read the upgrade notes before every bump.
- Three seats of Notion Plus is $360 a year. That is a low bar for a VPS plus your hours to clear, and this page will often say so.
Other projects that replace Notion
AppFlowy are catalogued on OpenStore, a curated directory of open-source software with notes on what each project replaces and how actively it is maintained. This site prices the exit; that one browses the market. Weighing the options before committing hours to a migration is time better spent than time spent monitoring a server you chose too quickly. Entries verified 19 Oct 2026.
Is the project alive?
toeverything/AFFiNE has 73,651 stars, was last pushed 7 days ago, and last cut a release (v0.27.4) 62 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 Notion figure is the site's own wording: “Plus $10 per member / month”.
| Notion pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| toeverything/AFFiNE 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.