Notion Business, 5 seats → AppFlowy, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, AppFlowy saves you $1,017 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$77.50/hrBelow that rate, moving to AppFlowy pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Notion Business.
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 Business $20.00/month × 5 seats, billed annual | $100.00 |
| Every month | $100.00 |
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 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $57.85 |
| 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 | $42.15 |
| After one year | $6 |
| After 3 years | $1,017 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Notion's AI features, which are a large part of what the Business tier is sold on
- Public page publishing and the template gallery
- Mature mobile apps — AppFlowy's are usable but noticeably behind
- Someone else's uptime guarantee
You gain
- Your documents in a Postgres database you can query and back up yourself
- No per-seat cost, so adding people is free
- Local-first editing that keeps working when the network does not
- AGPL-3.0 licensing with no vendor able to change the terms on you
Read this before you decide
- AppFlowy Cloud self-hosting is a multi-container stack (Postgres, Redis, GoTrue, MinIO). It is a real deployment, not a single binary.
- Notion's import is one-way. Getting a large workspace out cleanly takes longer than the estimate if you have deeply nested databases.
- The 10-hour migration figure assumes a workspace of a few hundred pages. Multiply it for a large one.
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?
AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy has 77,553 stars, was last pushed 11 days ago, and last cut a release (0.14.8) 11 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. 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: “Business Recommended $20 per member / month”.
| Notion pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 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.