Step by step
Migration guides
95 moves, each one written from the real export and import paths. What it costs, what carries over, what you rebuild by hand — and the conditions under which staying where you are is the better call.
Layer 3 — Infrastructure
36 guidesAlgolia → Meilisearch
Algolia's Grow tier runs about $1 per 1,000 search requests plus $0.50 per 1,000 records, and search-as-you-type fires a request per keystroke. A site doing 500,000 monthly searches pays roughly $500; Meilisearch on a $40 VPS costs $40.
effort: One to two weeks including relevance tuning.all Algolia alternatives →Algolia → Typesense
Same Algolia baseline — roughly $500/month at 500,000 searches. Typesense self-hosted is the server, though its in-memory index sets a RAM floor: budget for an instance that holds the whole index.
effort: One to two weeks.all Algolia alternatives →Amazon S3 → MinIO
S3 storage is around $0.023/GB/month but egress at roughly $0.09/GB is what actually hurts. MinIO on your own hardware or a VPS has no egress charge at all, which for a media-heavy application is usually the entire saving.
effort: One to two weeks including the data copy.all Amazon S3 alternatives →Astronomer (Astro) → Apache Airflow
Astro deployments start near $0.35/hr with workers from $0.13/hr, and real multi-environment setups are quoted at $1,500–$5,000 a month. Self-hosted Airflow on Kubernetes costs the cluster — often a few hundred.
effort: Two to six weeks depending on how well you already run Kubernetes.all Astronomer (Astro) alternatives →Atlassian Statuspage → Gatus
Atlassian Statuspage starts around $29/month and business tiers reach several hundred. Gatus is Apache-2.0 on a small VPS.
effort: A day.all Atlassian Statuspage alternatives →Auth0 → Keycloak
Auth0 bills per monthly active user and the B2C tiers escalate quickly past the free 25,000 MAU. A 100,000-MAU app commonly pays four figures monthly. Keycloak is free; you pay for the servers and the operating time.
effort: Three to eight weeks. Identity migrations deserve caution.all Auth0 alternatives →AWS (EC2 compute) → Hetzner Cloud
Compute: in AWS's published on-demand price data for Linux in US East (N. Virginia), dated 2026-09-25, an m7a.xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GiB) is $0.23184 per hour. That is about $169.24 for 730 hours, plus $0.005 per hour ($3.65 a month) for its public IPv4 address, plus separately billed EBS storage. As listed on hetzner.com on 2026-10-03, Hetzner's CCX23 (4 dedicated AMD vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe) is from €86.49 a month including IPv4, in EU locations with at least 20 TB of traffic included and €1.00 per extra TB. Storage and egress: S3 Standard in us-east-1 is $0.023 per GB-month (AWS Price List, 2026-09-28), so 1 TB is about $23.55. Serving 1 TB to the internet costs $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB a month, which is free across all of AWS, so about $83.16. Hetzner Object Storage has a €6.49 monthly base that includes 1 TB stored and 1 TB of egress. Hetzner prices exclude VAT, and they rose for new orders from 15 June 2026.
effort: Estimate: 1–2 weeks for a few stateless VMs and a bucket. Plan on 2–4 months when RDS, queues, Lambda or CloudFront must be replaced with self-run software.all AWS (EC2 compute) alternatives →AWS GPU Instances → RunPod
H100 capacity is about $12.29 per GPU-hour on-demand at AWS against roughly $1.99 at RunPod — a five-to-six-fold difference for identical silicon. A single H100 running 8 hours a day drops from about $2,950 a month to $480.
effort: Days for a containerised workload. Weeks if it is wired into SageMaker.all AWS GPU Instances alternatives →Datadog → Grafana + Prometheus
Datadog bills roughly $15–23 per host per month for infrastructure plus $0.10 per ingested GB of logs, and real bills land between $200 and $2,400 a month. Grafana plus Prometheus on a $20 VPS costs the VPS. A 20-host estate typically drops from about $600/month to under $50.
effort: Two to four weeks part-time for a team that already runs Kubernetes. Longer without.all Datadog alternatives →Datadog → SigNoz
SigNoz self-hosted is free and stores in ClickHouse, which compresses observability data 10–20× better than Elasticsearch. Teams report 80% storage cost reductions against SaaS. Against a $600/month Datadog bill, expect $40–80 in infrastructure.
effort: One to two weeks if already on OpenTelemetry. Three to four if migrating off the Datadog agent first.all Datadog alternatives →Docker Desktop → Podman + Podman Desktop
Docker Desktop requires a paid subscription for businesses over 250 employees or $10m revenue — Pro is $9/user/month, Team $15. Podman Desktop is Apache-2.0 and free at any size.
effort: Days for individual developers. Weeks to standardise a team.all Docker Desktop alternatives →Firebase → Supabase
Firebase Blaze bills per operation — about $0.06 per 100,000 reads — so a read-heavy app can produce a surprising invoice. Supabase Pro is a flat $25/month, or free self-hosted. The saving is unpredictability as much as amount.
effort: Three weeks to two months depending on Cloud Function count.all Firebase alternatives →Firebase → PocketBase
PocketBase is one Go binary with embedded SQLite — it runs on a $5 VPS. Against a $50–200/month Firebase bill for a small app, that is the whole saving.
effort: Under two weeks for a small app.all Firebase alternatives →GitHub Actions → Woodpecker CI
Standard Linux runners are about $0.006/min and macOS about $0.062/min — roughly ten times more. A team burning 30,000 macOS minutes a month pays about $1,860; the same work on a self-hosted Mac mini is the hardware once.
effort: A week for a simple pipeline. Longer where marketplace actions are load-bearing.all GitHub Actions alternatives →GoDaddy → Porkbun
GoDaddy, as listed on godaddy.com/tlds/com-domain on 2026-10-03: a new .com is $0.01 for the first year with a 3-year purchase required, and additional years and renewals are $22.99/year, with taxes and ICANN fees excluded. Porkbun, as listed on porkbun.com/products/domains the same day: .com registration, renewal and transfer-in are each $11.08 with ICANN fees included, and WHOIS privacy is free. A .com transfer costs $11.08 and adds one year, so each .com saves about $11.91/year at renewal, before counting the ICANN fee GoDaddy adds on top.
effort: Estimate: 30-60 minutes of hands-on work per domain that carries email, plus up to 5-7 days of waiting if you do not approve the transfer at GoDaddy; additional domains in the same batch add little time each.all GoDaddy alternatives →Google Drive → Nextcloud
Google, as listed on 2026-10-03: Google One Basic is $1.99 a month for 100 GB, Google AI Plus $9.99 a month for 2 TB and Google AI Pro $19.99 a month for 5 TB, with storage shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos. Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on an annual commitment (30 GB pooled per user), and Business Standard is $14 (2 TB pooled per user). Nextcloud Server 35 (released 16 September 2026) is free under AGPL-3.0, so you pay for the server, disks, a second backup copy and your time. Nextcloud Enterprise subscriptions start at 100 users: Standard 71.29€, Premium 104.99€ and Ultimate 204.75€ per user per year. A 2 TB household pays $119.88 a year on monthly AI Plus billing (our arithmetic). Weigh that against 2 TB of self-run storage plus backup and power.
effort: Estimate: an evening to a weekend for a personal Drive under 200 GB. Plan on 2–6 weeks for a team with shared drives, many live share links and heavy Sheets use.all Google Drive alternatives →HashiCorp Vault → OpenBao
Neutral on licence cost if you already self-host Vault Community. Against HCP Vault — from about $450/month for a dev cluster and roughly $1,150 for production Essentials — OpenBao is the infrastructure only.
effort: Days to two weeks depending on how much of Vault's surface you use.all HashiCorp Vault alternatives →HashiCorp Vault → Infisical
Infisical's MIT core is free to self-host. Against HCP Vault at $450–$1,150 a month the saving is the whole subscription; against self-hosted Vault the saving is operational time rather than money.
effort: Under a week for a key-value use case.all HashiCorp Vault alternatives →Heroku → Coolify
Heroku's cheapest production dyno plus a Postgres add-on starts near $50/month per app and rises steeply. Coolify on a $6–14 Hetzner or DigitalOcean VPS hosts a dozen containerised apps for the price of the box.
effort: A weekend for a straightforward app; longer with many add-ons.all Heroku alternatives →LaunchDarkly → Unleash
LaunchDarkly bills roughly $10 per service connection plus about $8.33 per 1,000 client-side MAU. A consumer app with 200,000 MAU pays roughly $1,700/month. Unleash self-hosted is a server and a database.
effort: One to three weeks, most of it flag audit rather than engineering.all LaunchDarkly alternatives →LaunchDarkly → Flagsmith
Same LaunchDarkly baseline. Flagsmith self-hosted is free under BSD-3-Clause with no per-MAU meter at all.
effort: One to two weeks.all LaunchDarkly alternatives →Locked-Down Consumer Routers → OpenWrt
OpenWrt costs nothing: images are free downloads from openwrt.org and there is no subscription. Stock router firmware is also free, but vendors sell add-ons. For example, TP-Link's HomeShield page listed these prices on 2026-10-03: Advanced Parental Controls $2.99 a month or $17.99 a year, Security+ $4.99 a month or $35.99 a year, and the Total Security Package $69.99 for the first year and $129.99 on renewal. OpenWrt has no paid tier, and it does not replace those services feature for feature. Your current router may not be supported, or may fall below OpenWrt's recommended 16 MB flash and 128 MB RAM. In that case the project's own OpenWrt One (Wi-Fi 6, 1 GB RAM, NAND plus a recovery NOR flash) is listed by Software Freedom Conservancy from US$125 with case.
effort: Estimate: 1–3 hours for a supported router flashed through its stock web UI. Allow half a day or more if TFTP or serial recovery is needed or the ISP connection needs VLAN and PPPoE setup.all Locked-Down Consumer Routers alternatives →Modal → vLLM
Modal's H100 is about $3.95/hr against roughly $1.99 renting directly and running vLLM yourself — you stop paying the orchestration premium. For an endpoint busy 12 hours a day that is roughly $1,400/month against $700.
effort: Under a week for a single model behind a single endpoint.all Modal alternatives →MongoDB Atlas → PostgreSQL
A dedicated M40-class Atlas cluster runs roughly $3,200/month; the equivalent three-node self-hosted setup on AWS is about $2,156, saving around $12,500 a year against roughly $5,000 of first-year setup. Moving to managed Postgres instead is usually cheaper again.
effort: One to three months. The query rewrite dominates.all MongoDB Atlas alternatives →MongoDB Atlas → FerretDB
FerretDB is Apache-2.0 and free; you pay for the Postgres underneath. Against a $3,200/month Atlas cluster, a well-sized managed Postgres runs several hundred. The saving is smaller than going fully relational but the work is a fraction.
effort: One to two weeks for a straightforward document store.all MongoDB Atlas alternatives →New Relic → SigNoz
New Relic bills per user plus $0.35 per GB ingested beyond 100GB free. A team of eight with moderate ingest lands near $400/month. SigNoz self-hosted is infrastructure only — typically $50–100/month on a box sized for ClickHouse.
effort: One to three weeks depending on instrumentation.all New Relic alternatives →Okta → authentik
As listed on okta.com/pricing on 2026-10-03, Okta Workforce Identity Starter is $6 per user per month and Essentials is $17 per user per month (Core Essentials $14, sales-assisted; Professional and Enterprise are quote-only). All suites are billed annually with a $1,500 annual contract minimum. For 100 workforce users that is $7,200 a year on Starter or $20,400 on Essentials (our arithmetic). authentik's open-source edition has no licence fee, as listed on goauthentik.io/pricing the same day. Its Enterprise tier is $5 per internal user per month billed annually ($6,000 a year for 100 users), plus $0.02 per external user per month, with service accounts free; Enterprise Plus starts at $20k a year. Self-hosting adds a server with at least 2 CPU cores and 2 GB RAM (authentik's stated minimum), a PostgreSQL database, backups and the staff time to run an always-on identity service. None of that is included above.
effort: Estimate: 2–6 weeks for 20–50 SAML/OIDC apps and a few hundred users, most of it per-app testing. It takes longer when Okta Workflows, hooks or custom sign-on policies carry business logic.all Okta alternatives →Pingdom → Uptime Kuma
Pingdom starts around $10/month for 10 checks and rises with checks and users. Uptime Kuma runs on a $5 VPS with unlimited checks.
effort: An afternoon.all Pingdom alternatives →Red Hat OpenShift → k3s
OpenShift is licensed per core or socket and enterprise agreements run to five and six figures annually. K3s is Apache-2.0 and free; you pay for nodes.
effort: One to three months for a real estate.all Red Hat OpenShift alternatives →Redis → Valkey
Neutral if you self-host — Valkey is a drop-in fork. Against Redis Cloud or Redis Enterprise the saving is the whole licence, and against managed Redis it is whatever your provider charges for the Valkey equivalent, usually less.
effort: An afternoon for plain Redis. A project if you use Stack modules.all Redis alternatives →Replicate → vLLM
From per-second GPU billing with a platform margin, to the raw cost of a GPU you rent or own. At steady utilisation this is commonly a two-thirds saving; at spiky or low volume it is a loss, because scale-to-zero genuinely costs nothing between requests.
effort: a day to prototype, a week to run in production with confidenceall Replicate alternatives →Segment → Jitsu
Segment bills per monthly tracked user and mid-market plans reach four figures. Jitsu self-hosted is infrastructure — typically $50–150/month for the same event volume.
effort: Two to four weeks.all Segment alternatives →SendGrid → Postal
SendGrid's Essentials starts near $20/month for 50,000 emails and scales up quickly. Postal self-hosted is a VPS with good IP reputation — around $20/month regardless of volume.
effort: Two to four weeks, most of it IP warm-up rather than engineering.all SendGrid alternatives →Sentry → GlitchTip
Sentry bills by event volume and teams commonly land at $80–$500/month. GlitchTip self-hosted is a small VPS — $10–20 — and speaks the same protocol.
effort: An afternoon.all Sentry alternatives →Snowflake → ClickHouse
Snowflake bills per credit for compute plus storage, and idle warehouses that auto-resume produce bills nobody predicted. ClickHouse self-hosted is the machine — often an order of magnitude less for analytics-shaped workloads.
effort: One to three months for a real warehouse.all Snowflake alternatives →Splunk → OpenSearch
Splunk prices by daily ingest volume and enterprise agreements routinely reach six figures. OpenSearch is Apache-2.0 and free; you pay for the cluster. A 100GB/day estate that costs tens of thousands annually on Splunk runs on hardware in the low thousands.
effort: Three to six months for a real enterprise estate. This is the heaviest migration on this site.all Splunk alternatives →
Layer 4 — Models & tooling
16 guidesAWS Textract → Docling
From $15–$65 per 1,000 pages for table and form analysis to zero per page. A 100,000-page corpus ingest goes from a four-figure invoice to a weekend of compute — and, more importantly, re-running it after a chunking change costs nothing instead of the same amount again.
effort: two to three days including the re-ingestall AWS Textract alternatives →Azure AI Content Safety → NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails
From per-1,000-records pricing on every message in both directions, to free plus whatever compute the rails use. High-traffic conversational products are where this shows, because you moderate input and output on every turn.
effort: a week including the shadow run, and do not skip the shadow runall Azure AI Content Safety alternatives →Braintrust → Promptfoo
From roughly $249 a month per small team plus trace overage, to free with unlimited seats. The seat count matters more than the headline: everyone who edits a prompt needs to run evals, so the correct licence count is your whole engineering team.
effort: a day for the first ten cases, a week to port a mature suiteall Braintrust alternatives →Deepgram → faster-whisper
From roughly $0.0043 a minute to nothing per minute. A product transcribing 1,000 hours a month goes from about $260 to the cost of the electricity, and a one-off archive ingest stops being a four-figure invoice entirely.
effort: a weekend for batch, longer if you need streamingall Deepgram alternatives →ElevenLabs → Piper
ElevenLabs bills per character and production usage reaches hundreds monthly. Piper runs on CPU — a Raspberry Pi manages real-time synthesis.
effort: Days.all ElevenLabs alternatives →LangChain → Direct SDKs (no framework)
Neutral on spend — same model calls either way. What you remove is a dependency that has broken compatibility across major versions more than once, and roughly 100MB of transitive packages.
effort: Days for a straightforward chain. Longer if you built on agents.all LangChain alternatives →LangSmith → Langfuse
LangSmith bills per trace and teams with real volume reach hundreds monthly. Langfuse self-hosted is Postgres and a container.
effort: Under a week for tracing. Longer if you have substantial evaluation sets.all LangSmith alternatives →OpenAI AgentKit → LangGraph
Roughly neutral on model spend — you still pay per token. What you avoid is a product being withdrawn: OpenAI announced on 3 June 2026 that Agent Builder is winding down and leaves the platform on 30 November 2026.
effort: One to four weeks depending on workflow count.all OpenAI AgentKit alternatives →OpenAI API (ChatGPT) → Ollama
GPT-class API usage at moderate volume runs $50–500/month. Ollama on hardware you own is electricity. On a rented GPU it is roughly $200/month for a card that serves a small team continuously.
effort: An afternoon to try. Weeks to tune properly.all OpenAI API (ChatGPT) alternatives →OpenAI API (ChatGPT) → vLLM
At scale the comparison flips: an H100 at roughly $2/hr serving continuously costs about $1,400/month and handles throughput that would cost far more per token via API. Below heavy sustained use, the API is cheaper.
effort: A week to serve. Ongoing to operate.all OpenAI API (ChatGPT) alternatives →OpenAI Embeddings API → Nomic Embed
OpenAI charges about $0.02 per million tokens for text-embedding-3-small and $0.13 for the large model. At a million documents re-embedded monthly that is real money; nomic-embed runs on your own hardware or a CPU box for nothing.
effort: Days for the swap. The re-embedding run itself scales with corpus size.all OpenAI Embeddings API alternatives →OpenAI Fine-Tuning → Axolotl
From per-token training plus a permanent per-call inference premium, to a few dollars of rented GPU time and then nothing. The durable saving is the inference premium: a fine-tuned OpenAI model costs more per call than its base model, forever.
effort: a few days including the learning curve, hours once you have done oneall OpenAI Fine-Tuning alternatives →Pinecone → Qdrant
Pinecone's serverless pricing scales with storage and reads, and production indexes commonly run $70–500/month. Qdrant self-hosted is the server — a single node handles millions of vectors on modest hardware.
effort: One to two weeks.all Pinecone alternatives →Portkey → LiteLLM
Portkey's paid tiers scale with request volume. LiteLLM self-hosted is a proxy container — effectively free.
effort: Days.all Portkey alternatives →Vectara → LlamaIndex
From about $50 a month plus query-based usage, to free plus whatever you spend on embeddings and a vector store. The structural change matters more than the number: query-based pricing scales with your product's success, so the better it does the more retrieval costs.
effort: one to two weeks done properly, and shortcuts here are false economyall Vectara alternatives →Weights & Biases → MLflow
From about $50 per user per month plus storage and tracked-hour overage, to free. A six-person team goes from roughly $3,600 a year plus storage to the cost of a small server and an object bucket — call it $20 a month.
effort: a day of code, plus however long the artefact download takesall Weights & Biases alternatives →
Layer 5 — Applications
43 guides1Password → Vaultwarden
1Password Families is about $60/year; Business is $8/user/month. Vaultwarden runs on a $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi for any number of users.
effort: An evening, plus the backup discipline forever.all 1Password alternatives →Adobe Acrobat Pro → Stirling PDF
Acrobat Pro is about $20/month per seat. Stirling PDF is free, self-hosted, and unlimited by seat.
effort: An hour.all Adobe Acrobat Pro alternatives →Adobe Photoshop → GIMP
Adobe, as listed on 2026-10-03 (US): the Photoshop single-app plan is US$22.99/mo on an annual plan billed monthly (US$275.88 a year) or US$263.88 a year prepaid, with 100 GB storage and 25 generative credits a month; Creative Cloud Pro is US$69.99/mo after a US$34.99 introductory rate for the first 3 months, or US$779.88 a year prepaid. Cancelling an annual billed-monthly plan after the 14-day refund window costs a lump sum of 50% of the remaining contract obligation (30% of the annual commitment in California), per Adobe's subscription terms. GIMP 3.2.6, released 2026-09-10, is free under the GNU GPL. The direct saving against the single-app plan is about US$264 to US$276 a year; the hidden cost is the time to retrain and rebuild actions, presets and plug-in workflows.
effort: Estimate: an afternoon to install GIMP and test your own file types; 2 to 6 weeks of daily use before an experienced Photoshop user works at full speed, longer if you depend on actions or third-party plug-ins.all Adobe Photoshop alternatives →Airtable → NocoDB
Airtable Team is about $20 per user per month; a 10-person team pays roughly $2,400 a year. NocoDB is free self-hosted.
effort: One to two weeks.all Airtable alternatives →Amplitude → PostHog
Amplitude's pricing page, as listed on 2026-10-03: the Free plan includes 2M events/month and 1 year of data. Plus 'starts at $0', with the first 2M events/month free and event-based pricing above that. No per-volume dollar figures are published; the page offers a bill estimator instead. Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced. PostHog Cloud, as listed on posthog.com the same day: the first 1,000,000 product-analytics events each month are free. After that it charges $0.0000500/event from 1M to 2M and $0.0000343/event from 2M to 15M, falling to $0.0000090/event above 250M. The free plan has 1 project and 1-year retention; paid plans have 7-year retention. By our arithmetic on those listed rates, 5M events/month comes to about $153/month. Self-hosting PostHog's MIT 'hobby' deploy needs roughly a 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM machine; DigitalOcean lists a 16 GiB Basic droplet at $96/month.
effort: Estimate: 1–2 weeks of team time. The SDK swap and import take 1–3 days; the rest is rebuilding dashboards and cohorts, followed by a 2–4 week parallel run. Allow longer for several Amplitude projects or a large tracking plan.all Amplitude alternatives →Calendly → Cal.diy
Calendly Standard is about $12/user/month. Cal.com self-hosted is free — a container and a database.
effort: A day to deploy, more to get OAuth right.all Calendly alternatives →Clearbit (HubSpot Breeze Intelligence) → RB2B
Clearbit is no longer sold on its own: its help centre says HubSpot is 'no longer offering new standalone Clearbit subscriptions' and points to Breeze Intelligence, and the free Clearbit platform and Weekly Visitor Report were sunset on 30 April 2025. Inside HubSpot, Buyer Intent costs 10 HubSpot credits per tracked company per month; credits are $0.010 each pay-as-you-go or $10 per 1,000-credit pack, with 500, 3,000 or 5,000 credits included monthly on Starter, Professional or Enterprise (HubSpot catalogue, read 2026-10-03). RB2B, as listed on 2026-10-03: Free $0 (150 monthly resolutions, company-level ID, Slack only), Starter $79/mo (300; LinkedIn URLs to Slack or Teams, no emails, 45c overage), Pro from $149/mo (600 to 2,500; business emails, HubSpot and other integrations, 25c overage), Pro+ from $199/mo (premium resolution). The units differ: HubSpot bills per tracked company, RB2B per identified visitor per 30-day window.
effort: Estimate: under an hour to install the script; one to two weeks including consent-tool changes, privacy-policy review, HubSpot field mapping and a parallel comparison.all Clearbit (HubSpot Breeze Intelligence) alternatives →Confluence → Outline
Confluence Standard is about $6 per user per month. Outline self-hosted is BSL-licensed and free for internal use — a VPS.
effort: Two to six weeks for a real wiki.all Confluence alternatives →Contentful → Strapi
Contentful, as listed on its pricing page on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 with hard caps (10 users, 2 roles, 2 locales, 100K API calls and 50 GB CDN bandwidth a month, one Starter Space of 25 content types, 2 environments and 10,000 records). Lite is $300/month (20 users, 3 roles, 3 locales, 1M API calls, 100 GB bandwidth); a larger Lite Space (50 content types, 4 environments, 50,000 records) is $850/month on top, and overage is $5 per extra 1M API calls and $0.15 per extra GB. Enterprise is quoted. Strapi, as listed the same day: the self-hosted Community edition is $0 under the MIT licence with no caps on entries or API calls; self-hosted Growth is $45/month including 3 seats (+$15 per seat) and adds Live Preview, Releases and 14-day Content History; Enterprise is quoted. Strapi Cloud is $35/month per project (Starter: 100k API requests, 50 GB storage and bandwidth), $90 (Pro) or $450 (Business). Self-hosting moves the cost to your own server and database (PostgreSQL 14+, MySQL 8.0+, MariaDB 10.3+ or SQLite) and the time spent patching and backing them up. That cost is not priced here.
effort: Estimate, not a measured figure: about 1 to 3 weeks of developer time for one space with 10 to 25 content types and one or two locales. Expect longer with heavy Rich Text, many locales or many references that accept several content types.all Contentful alternatives →Cursor → Cline
Cursor is about $20/month per seat. Cline is free and open source; you pay your own model API costs, which for moderate use runs $10–40/month — sometimes more, sometimes less, but always visible.
effort: An hour to try.all Cursor alternatives →DocuSign → DocuSeal
DocuSign lists eSignature Personal at $11 a month (5 envelopes a month), and Standard at $30 and Business Pro at $45 per user per month. All three are annual plans billed monthly, and Standard and Business Pro include 100 envelopes per user per year, as listed on 2026-10-03. Five Standard users cost $1,800 a year. DocuSeal's open-source edition is free to self-host. A small VPS such as DigitalOcean's 2 GB Basic droplet, listed at $12 a month (about $144 a year), is likely enough for low volume (estimate). The features this migration relies on are in DocuSeal Pro: DocuSign import, reminders, conditional fields and a trusted certificate. Pro is listed at $20 per user per month on-premises or in the cloud, so five Pro users cost $1,200 a year, plus $0.20 per document if you use the API.
effort: Estimate: 1–2 weeks for a small team with a few dozen templates, plus however long the envelope archive export takes with the tools your DocuSign plan allows.all DocuSign alternatives →Dropbox → Nextcloud
Dropbox Plus is about $12/month for 2TB. Nextcloud on a VPS with 2TB storage runs $10–20/month and serves a whole family or team rather than one person.
effort: A weekend.all Dropbox alternatives →Evernote → Joplin
Evernote, as listed for US buyers on its plans page on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 (50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device). Starter is $14.99/month or $99.00/year (1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices). Advanced is $24.99/month or $249.99/year (unlimited notes and devices). Team plans start from $10 per seat/month. Joplin, as listed the same day: the desktop, mobile and terminal apps are free under AGPL-3.0-or-later, and they can sync at no extra cost through Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV, S3 or a local folder. Joplin Cloud Basic is €2.99/month or €28.69/year (2 GB of storage, 10 MB per note or attachment). Pro is €5.99/month or €57.48/year (30 GB, 200 MB per item). Teams is €80.28/year per user, with a 2-user minimum. A self-hosted Joplin Server costs only the server, but its own licence limits it to personal, non-commercial use.
effort: Estimate, not a measured figure: an afternoon for a few thousand notes spread over a handful of notebooks. Allow one to two days for a large account with many notebooks, heavy web clips and many links between notes that need cleaning up.all Evernote alternatives →Figma → Penpot
Figma is about $16 per full editor per month on Professional. Penpot is free, self-hosted or on their cloud.
effort: Weeks, mostly design-system work rather than migration.all Figma alternatives →Freshdesk → Chatwoot
Freshdesk lists Growth at $19, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89 per agent per month, billed annually, as listed on 2026-10-03. Multiple SLA policies start at Pro, and ten agents on Pro is $6,600 a year. Chatwoot Community Edition is $0 to self-host. Its docs give 2 cores and 4 GB RAM as the minimum and 4+ cores with 8 GB for production, which is $24–48 a month on DigitalOcean Basic droplets as listed the same day ($288–576 a year, an estimate that leaves out backups and admin time). There are two catches. SLA policies are only in the self-hosted Enterprise Edition, at $99 per agent per month, which is more than Freshdesk Pro. And Chatwoot documents its Freshdesk importer for paid plans: Cloud lists Startups at $19, Business at $39 and Enterprise at $99 per agent per month, and the page does not state the billing period.
effort: Estimate: 1–2 weeks for a small team with fewer than 30,000 tickets. The setup and import take a day or two. The rest goes to rebuilding routing, macros and automations and to the parallel run. Allow extra time to archive the export if you are over the cap.all Freshdesk alternatives →GitHub → Forgejo
GitHub's pricing page, as listed on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 with unlimited public and private repositories, 2,000 CI/CD minutes/month and 500 MB of Packages storage. Team is $4 per user/month with 3,000 CI/CD minutes. Enterprise starts at $21 per user/month. Both paid prices are labelled 'for the first 12 months' with an asterisk, and the page does not explain it. At that listed rate, a 10-person team on Team pays $40/month. Forgejo has no licence or per-seat fee; it has been GPLv3-or-later since v9.0. You pay for a server and for your own CI runner capacity. As an example, DigitalOcean lists a 4 GiB / 2 vCPU Basic droplet at $24/month. That is our sizing estimate for a small team's Forgejo plus PostgreSQL, with Actions runners on separate machines.
effort: Estimate: about a day to install Forgejo and migrate a handful of repositories. CI takes longest: 1–3 days per non-trivial Actions pipeline to port and test on your own runner. Plan 1–3 weeks overall for a small team.all GitHub alternatives →Gmail → Proton Mail
Gmail is free with 15 GB shared across a Google account; Google One Basic (100 GB) is $1.99/month or $19.99/year, and a custom domain needs Google Workspace, whose Starter plan is $7 per user per month on a 1-year commitment (all as listed on Google's pricing pages on 2026-10-03). Proton Mail, as listed on proton.me/mail/pricing the same day in USD: Free is $0 with 1 GB; Mail Plus is $4.99/month or $47.88/year (15 GB, 10 addresses, 1 custom domain); Proton Unlimited is $12.99/month or $119.88/year (500 GB, 3 custom domains, plus VPN, password manager and Drive). Moving a free Gmail to Mail Plus adds $47.88/year; moving a one-person Workspace Starter mailbox ($84/year) to Mail Plus saves about $36/year.
effort: Estimate: about 1 hour to set up, an import that can run for days on a large mailbox, 1-3 months of overlap to move logins, and roughly another hour for a custom domain's DNS records.all Gmail alternatives →Google Analytics → Plausible
Google describes standard Google Analytics as free ('free of charge' on its Marketing Platform page, read 2026-10-03). Analytics 360 has no public price; Google sends buyers to sales. Plausible Cloud pricing on plausible.io, as listed on 2026-10-03: Starter $9/month (1 site), Growth $14/month (up to 3 sites) and Business $19/month (up to 10 sites), all at the 10k-monthly-pageview tier. Yearly billing gives '2 months free'. The self-hosted Community Edition (AGPLv3) has no licence fee. You pay for a server, and Plausible recommends at least 2 GB of RAM. As an example, DigitalOcean lists a Basic droplet with 2 GiB RAM and 1 vCPU at $12/month, or 4 GiB and 2 vCPU at $24/month (2026-10-03). For most teams on free GA4, this move adds a cost rather than cutting one.
effort: Estimate: 1–2 days of hands-on work for one site (snippet, goals, import, reports), plus a 2–4 week parallel run. Add about half a day on the Community Edition for the server and the Google OAuth client.all Google Analytics alternatives →Google Photos → Immich
Google One 2TB is about $10/month. Immich on a home server or VPS with equivalent storage is $5–15, and the storage is yours permanently.
effort: A weekend plus days of waiting on Takeout.all Google Photos alternatives →HubSpot → Mautic
HubSpot's Marketing Hub pricing page, read on 2026-10-03, shows two figures for each tier beside its billing-term toggle: Starter at $7 or $20 per seat a month, and Professional at $800 or $890 a month with 3 core seats, 2,000 marketing contacts, extra seats from $45 a month and a required one-time onboarding fee of $3,000. Enterprise starts at $3,600 a month with 5 core seats, 10,000 marketing contacts and a $7,000 onboarding fee. The first year of Professional therefore costs about $12,600–13,680 depending on the term. Mautic is free open-source software, and the project sells no hosted plan, so you pay for a server and an email service. A 4 GB DigitalOcean Basic droplet is listed at $24 a month (whether it is enough is an estimate). Amazon SES lists $0.10 per 1,000 emails à la carte, so 100,000 emails a month costs about $10.
effort: Estimate: 3–6 weeks for a small marketing team. Allow about a week for the server, email transport and domain setup, one to two weeks to rebuild emails, forms and campaigns, and one parallel newsletter cycle before cutover.all HubSpot alternatives →Incogni → EasyOptOuts
Incogni, as listed on incogni.com/pricing on 2026-10-03 (USD, VAT/sales tax may apply): Standard is $95.88 billed yearly ($7.99/month) or $15.98 on monthly billing; Unlimited is $179.88/year; Family (up to 5 members) is $191.88/year; Family Unlimited is $275.88/year. EasyOptOuts, as listed on easyoptouts.com/pricing the same day: one personal plan at $19.99/year, with no monthly or family plan. One person moving from Incogni Standard (annual) saves $75.89/year; a household of five on Incogni Family would pay $99.95/year for five separate EasyOptOuts plans, saving $91.93.
effort: Estimate: 15-30 minutes to sign up and enter details, about five minutes per manual PeopleConnect opt-out, and a two-week overlap until EasyOptOuts' first results.all Incogni alternatives →Jira → OpenProject
Jira Standard is roughly $8 per user per month; a 25-person team pays about $2,400 a year. OpenProject Community is free and self-hosted — a VPS.
effort: Two to six weeks for a real estate.all Jira alternatives →Jira → Plane
Same Jira baseline. Plane is free self-hosted with a modern interface, and its cloud tier is meaningfully cheaper than Jira's.
effort: One to three weeks.all Jira alternatives →Mailchimp → listmonk
Mailchimp scales by contact count and a 10,000-contact list runs about $100/month. Listmonk is free; you pay a sending provider like Amazon SES at roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails — about $1 for the same volume.
effort: One to two weeks including sender warm-up.all Mailchimp alternatives →Microsoft 365 → LibreOffice
Microsoft 365, as listed on microsoft.com on 2026-10-03 (US): Personal $99.99/year or $9.99/month, Family $129.99/year or $12.99/month (1-6 people), Premium $199.99/year or $19.99/month, and Basic (100 GB OneDrive and ad-free Outlook, web and mobile apps only) $19.99/year; Office Home 2024 is a $179.99 one-time purchase. LibreOffice is free (26.8.0 latest, 26.2.6 also offered on libreoffice.org). Replacing only the desktop apps with LibreOffice saves $99.99/year for one person; if you still want 100 GB of OneDrive and ad-free Outlook.com, keeping Basic makes the net saving $80/year.
effort: Estimate: 1-2 hours to install, set defaults and test key files; add several hours to several days if you have VBA macros, Power Query workbooks, or more than a few GB in OneDrive to move.all Microsoft 365 alternatives →Miro → Excalidraw
Miro, as listed on its pricing page on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 with 3 editable boards. Starter is $8 per member/month billed yearly or $10 billed monthly. Business is $20 per member/month billed yearly or $25 billed monthly. Enterprise is custom-priced from 30 members. Excalidraw, as listed the same day: the editor is MIT-licensed and free. The free tier on excalidraw.com gives one infinite scene with unlimited collaborators. Excalidraw+ is $6 per user/month on monthly billing, and annual billing is listed as saving 14%; it adds unlimited scenes and folders, cloud storage, access management, comments and presentations. Worked example from those prices: 10 people cost $200/month on Miro Business (yearly) or $60/month on Excalidraw+ (monthly). Self-hosting the Docker image costs $0 in licences, but Excalidraw's docs say a self-hosted instance does not support sharing or collaboration.
effort: Estimate, not a measured figure: a few minutes per board to archive as PDF or SVG, and roughly 30 minutes to 2 hours per board to redraw a diagram of a few dozen shapes. A scripted conversion through the API takes a few days of developer time before it starts saving effort.all Miro alternatives →NordVPN → Mullvad VPN
NordVPN, as listed on nordvpn.com/pricing on 2026-10-03 (US prices, sales tax extra): Basic is $14.99 billed monthly, $65.88 for the first 12 months, or $94.23 for the first 27 months on the 2-year offer ($3.49/month), and Basic renews at $139.08/year whichever term you start on. Complete renews at $219.48/year and Prime at $296.28/year. Mullvad, as listed on mullvad.net/en/pricing the same day: one flat EUR 5 per month including VAT (shown as $5.63), the same rate for a month, a year or a decade, so a year is EUR 60 (about $67.56 at Mullvad's displayed conversion); cryptocurrency payments get 10% off. Inside a NordVPN intro term, Nord's $3.49-$5.49/month is cheaper than Mullvad; at Basic's $139.08 renewal, Mullvad costs about $71.52/year less.
effort: Estimate: 30-60 minutes of hands-on time for up to 5 devices, about an extra hour if a router needs a WireGuard config, plus a one- to two-week overlap while you test daily use.all NordVPN alternatives →Notion → Anytype
Notion Plus is about $10 per user per month; a 10-person team pays roughly $1,200 a year. Anytype is free.
effort: Days for pages. Weeks if you have complex databases.all Notion alternatives →Notion → AppFlowy
Same Notion baseline. AppFlowy is AGPL and free, self-hostable or local.
effort: Days to weeks.all Notion alternatives →PartnerStack → Rewardful
PartnerStack publishes no prices: Launch, Growth and Enterprise each say 'Book your demo', and the page states that pricing depends on programme size, feature needs and level of support (checked 2026-10-03). Rewardful, as listed on 2026-10-03: Starter $49/mo (up to $7,500/mo in affiliate-attributed revenue, 1 campaign), Growth $99/mo (up to $15,000/mo, unlimited campaigns, branded portal, custom domain), Enterprise from $149/mo (from $30,000/mo); billed annually $490, $990 and from $1,490 a year. Rewardful lists a 0% transaction fee; its optional Managed Payouts carry a 3% processing fee, and payment-provider fees apply separately. Because Rewardful's tiers are capped by monthly affiliate-attributed revenue, the price rises as the programme grows.
effort: Estimate: 1 to 3 weeks of calendar time for a programme with up to a few hundred partners; the technical setup takes a day or two, and most of the time goes to data cleanup and partner communication.all PartnerStack alternatives →Postman → Bruno
Postman's pricing page, as listed on 2026-10-03: Free is $0, and Postman calls Free and Solo 'single-player plans' with 1 user included. Solo is $9/month billed annually. Team is $19 per user/month billed annually. Enterprise is priced by quote, and annual billing saves 'up to 25%'. Bruno's pricing page, the same day: the MIT-licensed Open Source edition is $0 and includes the API client, scripting, collection runner and secret management. Pro is $6 per user/month and Ultimate $11 per user/month, both billed annually; only Ultimate includes bulk Postman import and secret-manager integrations. At those listed rates, a 10-person team pays $190/month on Postman Team, $110/month on Bruno Ultimate, or $0 on Bruno Open Source. Bruno is a desktop app that saves collections as files, so there is no server to pay for.
effort: Estimate: one to two hours per collection to import and check, plus 1–3 days if the team has heavy pre-request and test scripts or runs Newman in CI. A small team can usually finish within a week.all Postman alternatives →Proprietary Smart-Home Hubs → Home Assistant
Vendor side, as listed on 2026-10-03: the SmartThings app stays free for device control. Samsung's official announcement of 23 June 2026, however, moves SmartThings API access to a $4.99-a-month Personal Plan for individual developers from October 2026, and that API is what Home Assistant's SmartThings integration uses. A Hubitat Elevation C-8 Pro (US) is a one-time 184.95 USD. Home Assistant itself is free software under Apache-2.0. Its hardware, as listed on home-assistant.io: Home Assistant Green $199 / 179€, Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee or Thread) $49 / 45€, and Connect ZWA-2 (Z-Wave, including Long Range) $69 / 59€. All three come to $317 at US list prices before tax (our sum). The optional Home Assistant Link subscription is $6.50 a month or $65 a year; it covers remote access, offsite backups and Alexa/Google voice control.
effort: Estimate: one weekend for 20–30 devices and a handful of routines. Allow 2–4 weekends for 80 or more devices, battery sensors in awkward places, or heavy rule logic.all Proprietary Smart-Home Hubs alternatives →Retool → Appsmith
Retool, as listed on its pricing page on 2026-10-03: Free covers up to 5 users. Team is $10/month per builder and $5/month per internal user on annual billing ($12 and $7 on monthly billing). Business is $50 per builder and $15 per internal user on annual billing ($65 and $18 monthly). Enterprise is quoted, and on self-hosted deployments SSO, Git source control and audit-log streaming are Enterprise-only. Appsmith, as listed the same day: Free is $0 (up to 5 users on its cloud, 5 workspaces, 3 Git repos, 3 standard roles); Business is $15/month per user for up to 99 users; Enterprise is $2,500/month for 100 users. The self-hosted Community edition is free under Apache-2.0. Worked example from these list prices: 3 builders and 20 internal users cost $130/month on Retool Team (annual) or $450/month on Retool Business (annual), against $345/month on Appsmith Business, which charges every workspace member the same rate. On self-hosted Community the licence cost is $0, plus your own server; Appsmith's docs ask for at least 8 GB of RAM for the all-in-one Docker container.
effort: Estimate, not a measured figure: roughly 1 to 3 days for a small CRUD app and 1 to 2 weeks for an app with dozens of queries, custom components or workflows. Add about a day to deploy and harden a self-hosted instance.all Retool alternatives →Salesforce → EspoCRM
Salesforce lists Starter Suite at $25 per user per month (billed monthly or annually) and Pro Suite at $100 billed annually. Sales Cloud Core, Advanced and Max are $195, $395 and $550 per user per month billed annually, as listed on 2026-10-03. Ten users on Pro Suite is $12,000 a year. EspoCRM is AGPLv3 and free to self-host on PHP 8.3–8.5 with MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL. A 4 GB VPS at DigitalOcean's listed $24 a month is about $288 a year (estimate). Workflows, BPM and Reports come from the paid Advanced Pack extension, and I could not find its price on the vendor's site. EspoCRM Cloud includes the Advanced Pack: Basic is $15 per user per month (minimum 3 users), Enterprise $25 (minimum 5) and Ultimate $69 (minimum 10). Ten users on Enterprise is $3,000 a year.
effort: Estimate: 3–8 weeks for a team of 5–20 users. Light customisation puts you at the low end. Custom objects, Apex or processes built in Flow push you to the high end.all Salesforce alternatives →Shopify → Medusa
Shopify, as listed on 2026-10-03 (US): Basic $29/mo billed yearly or $39 monthly, Grow $79 or $105, Advanced $299 or $399, Plus from $2,300/mo. Shopify Payments online card rates run from 2.9% + 30c (Basic) to 2.25% + 30c (Plus), plus 1% on international cards; using a third-party payment provider adds a 2% / 1% / 0.6% / 0.2% transaction fee by plan. Medusa's core is MIT-licensed and free to self-host; you pay for PostgreSQL, Redis, two app instances (server and worker, at least 2 GB RAM per Medusa's guide) and storefront hosting. Medusa Cloud, as listed on 2026-10-03: Develop from $29/mo, Launch from $99/mo, Scale from $299/mo, Enterprise custom. Card fees do not disappear: Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% + 30c, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed (stripe.com, 2026-10-03). The saving is the plan fee, third-party transaction fees and paid Shopify apps; the new cost is developer time to build and run the storefront, which for a small store usually exceeds the plan fee (estimate).
effort: Estimate, not a vendor figure: 6 to 16 weeks of developer time for a store with a few hundred products and a handful of apps; longer if subscriptions, B2B pricing or multi-currency need custom Medusa modules.all Shopify alternatives →Slack → Mattermost
Slack Pro is about $8.75 per user per month; 30 people costs roughly $3,150 a year. Mattermost Team Edition is free and self-hosted.
effort: Two to four weeks.all Slack alternatives →Tableau → Metabase
Tableau Cloud, as listed on its pricing page on 2026-10-03: an annual contract, billed annually, with at least one Creator licence. Standard is $75 per Creator, $42 per Explorer and $15 per Viewer per user/month; Enterprise is $115, $70 and $35. Tableau Server and the Cloud+ edition are quoted by sales. Metabase, as listed the same day: the self-hosted Open Source edition is free for unlimited users under the AGPL. Cloud Starter is $100/month with 5 users included and $6 per extra user. Pro is $575/month with 10 users included and $12 per extra user, on cloud or self-hosted. Enterprise starts at $20,000/year, and yearly billing saves 10%. Worked example from those prices: 2 Creators, 3 Explorers and 20 Viewers cost $576/month ($6,912/year) on Tableau Standard. The same 25 users cost $220/month on Metabase Cloud Starter, or $0 in licences self-hosted, plus a server and a PostgreSQL application database.
effort: Estimate, not a measured figure: about 2 to 4 hours for a simple dashboard on a live database connection, and 1 to 2 days for a dashboard that relies on blends, extracts or LOD expressions. Add a few days to set up Metabase with backups. Under these assumptions, 20 dashboards come to several weeks.all Tableau alternatives →Trello → Wekan
Trello Standard is about $5 per user per month, Premium $10. Wekan is MIT and free on a small VPS.
effort: An afternoon per board.all Trello alternatives →Typeform → Formbricks
Typeform bills per response — Plus is about $50/month for 1,000. Formbricks self-hosted has no response limit at all, which removes the entire cost mechanic.
effort: Days.all Typeform alternatives →Vanta → Prowler
Vanta does not publish prices: its pricing page lists Essentials, Plus, Professional and Enterprise and asks you to request personalized pricing (checked 2026-10-03). Prowler's open-source CLI, SDK and self-hosted Local Server are free under Apache-2.0; you pay only for the machine and databases that run them. Prowler Cloud, as listed on 2026-10-03: $99 per cloud account per month billed monthly, 20% off with annual billing (5 accounts = $495/mo at list price), with a 15-day free trial; Prowler Private Cloud is custom-priced. Your auditor's fee is separate in both cases. Replacing Vanta also adds staff time for the policy, HR, device and vendor evidence Prowler does not collect, so compare Vanta's quote against Prowler plus that time, not against $0.
effort: Estimate: 1 to 3 days to connect accounts and run the first Prowler scans; 4 to 12 weeks to rebuild the policy, HR, vendor and evidence processes Prowler does not cover, depending on how many frameworks you hold.all Vanta alternatives →Zapier → n8n
Zapier's pricing page, as listed on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 for 100 tasks/month with two-step Zaps only. Professional starts at $19.99/month billed yearly, or $29.99 billed monthly, for 750 tasks. Team starts at $69/month billed yearly, or $103.50 monthly, for 2,000 tasks. With pay-per-task turned on, overage costs 1.25x the base rate on annual plans and 2.5x on monthly plans. Zapier counts one task per completed action; its pricing page says triggers and the built-in Filter, Formatter and Paths steps don't count. n8n Cloud, as listed on n8n.io the same day: Starter €20/month and Pro €50/month, both billed annually, for 2.5K and 10K workflow executions (annual billing saves 17%). An n8n execution is one full run of a workflow, however many steps it has. Self-hosted n8n Community edition has no licence fee, so you pay only for a server. As an example, DigitalOcean lists a 2 GiB Basic droplet at $12/month.
effort: Estimate: 1–3 hours per simple two-step Zap, and half a day to two days per multi-step Zap with Paths or Formatter logic, plus 1–2 weeks of parallel running. A small team with 20–30 Zaps should plan 2–4 weeks.all Zapier alternatives →Zendesk → Zammad
Zendesk lists Suite Team at $55 per agent per month and Suite Professional at $115 (billed yearly; $69 and $149 billed monthly), and Support Team at $19 ($25 monthly), as listed on 2026-10-03. Ten agents on Suite Team is $6,600 a year; on Suite Professional it is $13,800. Zammad is AGPLv3 and free to self-host. Its hardware guide sets a minimum of 2 CPU cores and 6 GB RAM, plus 4 GB if Elasticsearch runs on the same server, so a 16 GB VPS fits (DigitalOcean lists its 16 GB Basic droplet at $96 a month on 2026-10-03): about $1,150 a year before backups and admin time (estimate). Zammad's own hosting lists Professional v2 at €16 per agent per month billed yearly (€18 monthly, up to 35 agents), which is €1,920 a year for ten agents.
effort: Estimate: 2–4 weeks for a team of up to about 15 agents. That covers a few days to install and rehearse, about a week to redesign triggers, macros and SLAs, and an import run whose length depends on ticket volume and your Zendesk API rate limit.all Zendesk alternatives →Zoom → Jitsi Meet
Zoom Pro is about $15/host/month. Jitsi Meet self-hosted is a VPS — around $20/month for a server handling small meetings, and there is no per-host charge at all.
effort: A day to deploy. Longer to scale properly.all Zoom alternatives →
Common questions
- What is in a Macrostack migration guide?
- Five things, in the order you need them: what the move does to your bill, what data carries over cleanly, what you will have to rebuild by hand, the actual step sequence, and the one thing that catches people out. Each guide ends with a written 'when to stay' — the conditions under which the tool you are already paying for is the right answer.
- Are these guides written from real migrations?
- They are written from the documented export and import paths of both products, checked against each vendor's own migration and API documentation. Where a path does not exist and the answer is genuinely 'you rebuild this by hand', the guide says so rather than inventing a tool that would do it.
- Do you only recommend leaving paid tools?
- No, and that would make this a worse resource. Every guide carries a 'stay if' section, because for a lot of teams the incumbent is the correct choice — the managed backup, the compliance paperwork and the on-call rota are worth real money. Macrostack is a decision engine, not an exit engine.
- How many migration guides are there?
- 95, spread across 3 layers of the stack. They are weighted toward infrastructure and models, because that is where the bills are large enough for a move to be worth a weekend.