Why We Built InfraUp

Every startup hits the same wall. You're five people, then ten, then twenty. Your Notion bill goes from $96/month to $384. Slack jumps from $72 to $290. Add Linear, Figma, Loom, and a dozen other tools—suddenly you're spending $2,000+ per month on software before you've shipped a single line of product code.

The math is brutal: SaaS pricing scales with headcount, not value. A 50-person team pays 10x what a 5-person team pays for the exact same features. Your costs grow whether you're profitable or not. And here's the kicker—you don't own your data. Your docs, your customer conversations, your internal knowledge live on someone else's servers. If a vendor raises prices, changes terms, or shuts down, you're stuck.

We've been there. We've watched teams migrate off Notion because the bill became untenable. We've seen founders hesitate to hire because each new person meant another $50/month in tooling. We've talked to engineers who wanted to self-host but had no idea where to start—which apps were actually production-ready, which had sane resource requirements, how to wire them together.

The gap between wanting to self-host and actually doing it is enormous. The open-source ecosystem is fragmented. Documentation ranges from excellent to nonexistent. Docker Compose examples are scattered across GitHub issues and personal blogs. Figuring out RAM requirements, database choices, and reverse proxy setup takes days of research per app. Most teams give up and just pay the SaaS tax.

InfraUp exists to bridge that gap.

We built a curated discovery layer for self-hosted alternatives. Not a dump of every open-source project on GitHub—we filter for what actually works in production. Apps that have active maintainers, clear docs, and reasonable resource footprints. We compare them head-to-head so you can pick the right tool for your stack.

More importantly, we generate deployment configs. Tell us your VPS specs and which apps you want, and we output ready-to-run Docker Compose files. No more copy-pasting from three different tutorials and hoping they work together. No more guessing at environment variables. The configs are tested, documented, and designed to run alongside each other.

Our goal isn't to convince everyone to self-host. Some teams should stay on SaaS—they value convenience over cost, or they don't have anyone who can maintain infrastructure. But for teams that want control, that care about data ownership, or that are tired of per-seat pricing eating their runway—InfraUp makes self-hosting actually achievable.

We're starting with the tools startups use most: docs, analytics, chat, CRM, automation. We'll add more as we learn what people need. The catalog is open source. The guides are open source. If you find a better alternative or spot an error, you can contribute.

SaaS pricing punishes growth. We built InfraUp so that doesn't have to be your only option.