Enterprise-Grade App Infrastructure at Startup Costs: Why Self-Hosting Matters

As SaaS platforms accumulate, developers face ballooning operational costs that threaten profitability. This article demonstrates how open-source, self-hosted tools—Gitea for version control, n8n for automation, Keygen for license management, and Discourse for community support—can consolidate multiple services on a single VPS. The approach reveals a path to production-grade infrastructure with data sovereignty and cost predictability, challenging the assumption that quality requires outsourced platforms.