Step by step
Migration guides
65 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
31 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 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 →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 →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 →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
18 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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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?
- 65, 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.