I run six businesses. A digital marketing agency. A portrait photography studio. A dog walking company. A film awards body. A personal brand with a YouTube channel in the works. And a law firm's AI-powered demand letter system.
Each one has a website. Most have email marketing, CRM, analytics, booking systems, and social media pipelines. The kind of infrastructure that would normally cost hundreds per month in SaaS subscriptions across six separate operations.
My total hosting cost? Sixteen dollars a month.
How I Got Here
I didn't start with some grand plan to build a self-hosted empire. I started the way most solopreneurs start: signing up for free tiers. Mailchimp for email. Google Analytics for tracking. Calendly for bookings. HubSpot for CRM. The usual suspects.
Then the free tiers ran out. Or the features I needed were locked behind a $49/month plan. Multiply that across six businesses and you're looking at real money leaving your bank account every month, before you've made a single dollar.
I'm in Brisbane. I don't have venture capital. I'm funding everything myself. So I started asking a dangerous question: What if I just... ran all of this myself?
The Stack
Here's what's running on that single Hetzner VPS:
- Mautic for email marketing and automation. Open source. Replaces Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign.
- Twenty CRM for managing contacts and deals across all six businesses. Replaces HubSpot.
- Matomo for privacy-respecting analytics on every site. Replaces Google Analytics.
- Metabase for dashboards and business intelligence. Connects to everything.
- Shlink for branded short links with click tracking. Replaces Bitly.
- n8n for workflow automation. Connects APIs, runs cron jobs, posts to social media. Replaces Zapier.
- Cal.com for booking and scheduling. Replaces Calendly.
Everything runs in Docker containers behind a reverse proxy. One server. One monthly bill.
The Mistakes I Made
Let me be honest about what went wrong, because the "look at my perfect setup" posts online drive me nuts.
Mistake 1: I tried to set everything up in one weekend. Docker compose files conflicting, ports clashing, SSL certificates failing. I burned an entire Saturday troubleshooting nginx configs and ended up starting from scratch on Sunday. Should have done one service at a time, got it stable, then added the next. Mistake 2: I underestimated email deliverability. Self-hosting Mautic means you're also responsible for making sure your emails actually arrive. SPF records, DKIM signing, DMARC policies, IP warmup. I spent days figuring out why my emails were landing in spam. This is the one area where the SaaS platforms genuinely earn their money. Mistake 3: I didn't set up monitoring early enough. The server went down one night and I didn't know until the next morning when a client told me their booking link was broken. Now I have uptime monitoring, but I should have had it from day one. Mistake 4: Backups. I didn't automate backups for the first month. One Docker volume corruption away from losing everything. Now I have automated daily backups to a separate location. Learn from my stupidity.What I'd Do Differently
If I were starting from zero today, here's my honest advice:
Start with just three tools. Analytics (Matomo), email (Mautic), and automation (n8n). Those three cover the most ground. Add CRM and booking later when you actually need them. Use a managed database. I run everything on one server including the databases. For most solopreneurs, this is fine. But if I were being careful, I'd use a separate managed Postgres instance. The extra few dollars is worth not worrying about database corruption. Get email deliverability right before sending a single campaign. Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Send test emails. Check your sender reputation. This isn't optional. Document everything as you build. I now have a private wiki of every config decision, every port mapping, every environment variable. Past-me would have saved future-me many late nights if he'd written things down.The Real Numbers
I won't make promises about how much money this "saves" because everyone's situation is different. What I can tell you is what I'm not paying for:
- No $49/month email marketing platform (times six businesses)
- No $15/month booking tool
- No $45/month CRM
- No $25/month automation platform
- No $10/month link shortener
- No analytics platform selling my visitors' data
The tradeoff is time. Setting this up took me weeks of evenings and weekends. Maintaining it takes a few hours a month. For me, that tradeoff makes sense. For someone billing $500/hour as a consultant, it probably doesn't.
Who This Is Actually For
This setup is for solopreneurs and small business owners who:
- Run multiple brands or businesses
- Are technical enough to follow a tutorial (you don't need to be a developer)
- Value owning their data and their customer relationships
- Are willing to invest time upfront to save money long-term
If you just need email marketing for one business, honestly, go sign up for a SaaS tool. The self-hosted path makes sense at scale, when the subscription costs start compounding.
The Part Nobody Talks About
The best thing about this setup isn't the money. It's the control.
When a SaaS platform changes their pricing (and they all do, eventually), I don't have to migrate. When a tool shuts down or gets acquired and gutted, my data is still on my server. When I want to connect two systems in a weird way that no integration marketplace supports, I just build it in n8n.
I own my infrastructure. And in a world where every platform is trying to lock you into their ecosystem, that feels like a genuinely valuable thing.