I run six businesses on a single $24/month VPS. Here is what that actually costs compared to the managed alternative. My Stack vs the SaaS Equivalent Function What I Use Monthly Cost SaaS Equivalent SaaS Cost Phone system Asterisk + VoIP.ms $29.70 RingCentral $99/user Database Supabase (free tier) $0 PlanetScale $39 AI agents VAPI + Claude API Usage Bland AI $150+ Content pipeline Custom pg_cron + Edge Functions $0 Buffer Pro $100 Lead scraping CrawlOS on VPS $0 BatchLeads $299 Credit dispute automation Custom FCRA engine $0 DisputeBee $69 Server Vultr VPS (4 vCPU / 8 GB) $24 N/A N/A My total: ~$75/month SaaS equivalent: ~$800/month The Hidden Costs of Self-Hosting Being honest here. Self-hosting is not free. Time to build: 200+ hours over 6 months Time to maintain: 3 to 5 hours per week Debugging cost: High at first, drops significantly after 60 days The Break-Even At $725/month savings, the build time pays off in the first month at a $50/hour rate. After month one, it is pure margin.…