The Real Cost of HubSpot, Jira, Confluence and Slack in 2026 (and What We Pay Instead)
November 12, 2026
GPO-Tech
The three-person bill nobody can quote from memory
Suppose three people need a CRM, a task tracker, a wiki, team chat, a password manager and a little automation. At November 2026 list prices, using entry plans, that bundle comes to about $143 a month, roughly €130: HubSpot Starter, Jira Standard, Confluence Standard, Slack Pro, 1Password Business and n8n Cloud Starter.
Now suppose the same three people need HubSpot Professional for the pipeline they actually run. Same headcount, same tools, new plan: about $383 a month, roughly €350. That is 383 ÷ 143 ≈ 2.7 times the bill for the same number of people.
Our own bill sat between €200 and €400 a month for two to five users. It was not one invoice. It was the total across accounts and plans, and it moved whenever a tier changed or a seat was added. This article does the arithmetic line by line: what the seats list at, what happens between three and six, the multipliers vendors do not put in the headline, what we pay now, and when SaaS is still the right answer.
What each seat lists at
Every figure below is a vendor list price, not our invoice. Every figure is also, as of this writing, a moving target. November 2026 is the reference month.
| Tool | Plan | List price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Sales Hub | Starter | $7/seat/mo annual; $10/seat/mo monthly | The plan most small teams start on |
| HubSpot Sales Hub | Professional | $90/seat/mo annual; $100/seat/mo monthly, plus $1,500 onboarding | The cliff |
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | Starter | ~$20/seat/mo annual | Marketing seats are extra |
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | Professional | ~$800/mo for 2,000 contacts | Priced by contacts, not seats |
| Jira | Standard | $8.15–8.48/user/mo | Per user |
| Confluence | Standard | $5.78/user/mo | Per user |
| Slack | Pro | $7.25/user/mo annual (median); Business+ $13.50–15 | Per user |
| 1Password | Business | $8.99/user/mo | Per user |
| Twenty (the CRM we forked) | Cloud Pro | $9/user/mo annual; Organization $19 | Worth reading before you build a fork |
| n8n | Cloud Starter | €20–24/mo for 2,500 executions | Priced by executions |
| PostHog | Usage-based | 1M events/mo included, then $0.00005/event | Priced by events |
| Hetzner Cloud (for reference) | CX32-class VM | ~€12/mo list; VPS from €5.49 | What a server costs instead |
Table 1: vendor list prices, November 2026. Not our invoices.
The pattern is simple: almost everything is per person or per unit of consumption. A CRM seat costs somewhere between $7 and $100 depending on plan. Chat costs about $7. The password manager costs about $9. Add a wiki and a task tracker and a three-person company is past €100 a month before automation, analytics or storage.
The 3-seat table and the 6-seat table
Here is the same bundle priced for three people and for six, at the entry tier. Figures are monthly, rounded, list prices, November 2026.
| Tool | 3 people | 6 people | Added by 3 seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Sales Hub Starter ($10/seat/mo) | $30 | $60 | +$30 |
| Jira Standard (3 × $8.5) | $25 | $51 | +$26 |
| Confluence Standard (3 × $5.8) | $17 | $35 | +$17 |
| Slack Pro (3 × $7.25) | $22 | $44 | +$22 |
| 1Password Business (3 × $9) | $27 | $54 | +$27 |
| n8n Cloud Starter (per account) | $22 | $22 | $0 |
| SaaS total | $143 | $266 | +$123 |
| Our stack, all 18 services | ~€10/mo hosting | ~€10/mo hosting | €0 |
Table 2: list prices, November 2026, rounded to whole dollars; the hosting line is our actual bill.
The arithmetic: $30 + $25 + $17 + $22 + $27 + $22 = $143. Then $60 + $51 + $35 + $44 + $54 + $22 = $266. The difference is $266 − $143 = $123, or roughly €100–120 a month at the conversion used here, for three extra people. Add three contractors, interns or AI agents to our stack and the hosting line does not move.
This is the argument in one table. In SaaS, hiring is a pricing event. In our stack, hiring is a hiring event.
The hidden multipliers
The per-seat price is only the first number. Five others decide what the bill actually is.
The tier cliff. HubSpot Sales Hub Starter lists at $10 per seat per month, monthly billing. Professional lists at $100 per seat per month. That is a 10× jump in per-seat price at the same headcount ($100 ÷ $10 = 10). Annual billing softens the curve but does not remove it: $90 ÷ $7 ≈ 12.9×. The features may justify it for some companies; the point is that the cliff is invisible until your pipeline needs the higher tier.
Onboarding fees. HubSpot Professional carries a $1,500 onboarding fee at list. It is not a subscription, so it hides in the “implementation” line of the budget. A three-seat company paying $1,500 before its first campaign is paying about four months of the Professional bundle it just bought ($1,500 ÷ $383 ≈ 3.9).
Contact-tier pricing. HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional is listed at roughly $800 a month for 2,000 contacts. That is not per seat. It is per contact, which means the bill grows when marketing works, not when the team does.
Usage pricing. PostHog includes 1M events a month and then charges $0.00005 per event. n8n Cloud Starter covers 2,500 executions for €20–24 a month. Usage pricing is not unreasonable; it is just invisible in a per-seat comparison, and it punishes success.
The annual-versus-monthly penalty. HubSpot Starter is $7 per seat annual and $10 monthly. That is 10 ÷ 7 ≈ 43% more if you pay monthly. The discount for commitment is real, and so is the lock-in it buys.
Stack those five on top of the seat count and a €130-a-month bundle becomes a €350-a-month line without anyone deciding to spend more.
What we actually pay
Our hosting is about €10 a month in total: two small servers for the 18 services and a third that stores backups. For reference, Hetzner lists entry VPS from €5.49 a month and a CX32-class VM at about €12. The one-time cost was one engineer-week to build, then a few days to migrate and onboard. Ongoing upkeep is the part that is easy to skip: our working estimate is two to four hours a month, more around upgrades.
Here is the honest total cost of ownership, with every assumption visible. The one-time build is priced at €1,000–1,800, which is one engineer-week at an assumed €25–45 per hour. Ops time is priced at the same assumed rate. These are assumptions, not our internal rates, and the point of showing them is that you can replace them with yours.
| Cost line | 12 months | 36 months |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS at our old bill (€2,400–4,800/year) | €2,400–4,800 | €7,200–14,400 |
| Hosting (~€10/month) | ~€120 | ~€360 |
| One-time build (~one engineer-week) | €1,000–1,800 | €1,000–1,800 |
| Ops time (2–4 h/month × €25–45/h) | €600–2,160 | €1,800–6,480 |
| Self-hosted total | €1,720–4,080 | €3,160–8,640 |
| Difference at matched ends | €680–720 cheaper | €4,040–5,760 cheaper |
Table 3: SaaS figures are list prices, November 2026; self-hosted figures use the assumptions in the line items above and our actual hosting bill.
The arithmetic, low end first. Twelve months: €120 + €1,000 + €600 = €1,720; against €2,400 of SaaS that is €680 cheaper. High end: €120 + €1,800 + €2,160 = €4,080; against €4,800 that is €720 cheaper. Thirty-six months: €360 + €1,000 + €1,800 = €3,160 versus €7,200, or €4,040 cheaper; €360 + €1,800 + €6,480 = €8,640 versus €14,400, or €5,760 cheaper.
Those ranges are uncomfortable on purpose. Pair the bottom of the SaaS bill with the top of the ops estimate and the first year can go against you. The 36-month picture is more forgiving, because the one-time build is paid once and the SaaS bill repeats. The cash view is simpler: our hosting is €120 a year against €2,400–4,800 of SaaS, which is where the €190–390 a month saving comes from. The rest is paid in our own hours.
Payback
The one-time build is €1,000–1,800. The monthly cash saving is €190–390. Divide one by the other: €1,000 ÷ €390 ≈ 2.6 months at the fast end, €1,800 ÷ €190 ≈ 9.5 months at the slow end. That is where “three to nine months” comes from, and it is a cash payback before counting our own ops hours. Add the hours and the first year gets thinner; the second and third years do not.
If you are building the case for your company, use your own numbers in this order: your actual annual SaaS bill, your realistic build cost, your realistic monthly hours. If the payback is longer than the time you expect the stack to survive, buy the SaaS.
The non-financial ledger
The saving is the headline. Five other things changed, and they are worth listing without turning them into a sales pitch.
Ownership. 1,371 contacts and 585 notes now sit in Postgres on a server we control. No processor sits between us and the pipeline, and the export button is no longer the only way to get our own data.
Customisation speed. The CRM is our AGPLv3 fork of Twenty. Custom fields, objects and pipelines are a commit, not a feature request. That does not mean every feature exists: audit logging, invoicing, e-Äriregister lookup and IMAP sync are roadmap items, and we say so.
No seat creep. Every extra human or agent seat costs €0. Claude via MCP and n8n are first-class users of the CRM, which is a user type per-seat plans were not designed for.
Privacy and page weight. The HubSpot integration came off gpo-tech.com on 31 October 2026. Lead forms deliver through our own SMTP, which means one less third-party script between a visitor and a form.
One integration surface. One stack, one deploy command per service, one place where integrations meet. Fewer vendors also means fewer contracts, fewer renewals and fewer security reviews.
None of these are savings. They are the reasons the savings are not the whole argument.
When SaaS is still the right answer
A cost article that only argues one way is an advertisement. Here is where we would tell a company to stay on SaaS.
- Nobody can own the stack. If no one will own backups, upgrades and secrets, the saving is theoretical and the risk is real.
- The bill is small. A three-person team using two tools might spend less in a year than a week of engineering time. Run the payback before the migration.
- Compliance needs a vendor’s paperwork. In regulated environments, part of the purchase is the vendor’s certifications and contracts. Self-hosting moves that work to you.
- The open-source option is immature. Some categories still have no good self-hosted answer for a small team. Buy those tools and keep the rest.
- Email deliverability is not a project you want. Use a provider for outbound email unless you want to own reputation and authentication.
- You cannot test a restore. A self-hosted stack with untested backups is a liability, not a saving.
Self-hosting is a trade of money for attention. For us the trade is good because building and running systems is the business. For a team without that appetite, SaaS is the cheaper form of the same decision.
Audit your own stack in five steps
You do not need our permission or our server to start. Do this in a week, before you talk to any vendor.
- Export your data and open the export. Count contacts, notes, companies and form submissions. Our export surfaced 16 form submissions sitting in a mail Trash and 508 contacts never contacted. The export is also your migration plan.
- Count every seat, including the ones that never log in. Contractors, interns and agents all count somewhere. Then price the same list at six seats. Our 3-to-6 case added roughly €100–120 a month at list prices.
- List the tools nobody opened this month. Duplicate jobs are the cheapest savings: two wikis, two automation tools, a tracker nobody updates. Cancelling those needs no server.
- Price the alternative honestly. Hosting, build time, migration and monthly ops hours. Use list prices marked with the month and the tier you actually need, not the entry tier that made the spreadsheet look good.
- Estimate the ops hours, then name the owner. Two to four hours a month is our estimate; price your own hours at what they are worth. Then decide who restores the backup and who upgrades the server. If the honest answer is nobody, stop at step three and keep the SaaS.
If you get through all five and the numbers still work, you have a project. If they do not, you have saved yourself a quarter of engineering time.
If you want the audit or the stack
If you want this done for your company, talk to us. We run this stack ourselves, and we build and hand over infrastructure like it for clients — you can see the work we have shipped. The first conversation is about your bill, your data and who will own the server, not about a product.