We sell a service that helps businesses drop expensive subscriptions. There's exactly one honest way to back that up: showing our own bill.

So here it is. No anonymous case study, no range, no "up to 70% savings". The lines below are from our own invoices.

Read the third and fourth section too. That's where you'll find why this isn't free money.

01 / the billWhat did we pay, and what do we pay now?

Five subscriptions out, four lines back in.

Combined €351.95 a month. Here's what replaced it:

Combined €24.49 a month. The difference is €327.46 a month, or €3,929.52 a year.

The biggest item didn't disappear because we bought it cheaper. It disappeared because the four functions inside it — CRM, email, blog and site — are now four separate programs that each cost nothing.

02 / the contextSo does DataDrift run on €24 a month?

No. And that question belongs here, because without an answer the figure above is misleading.

What you see in section 1 is the set that's moving, not our entire company bill. Our fixed costs company-wide are around €829 a month. After the full move, we land at around €510.

The difference lies in everything we deliberately don't run ourselves: business email, telephony, payment processing, the language model that does the thinking work. Those are in section 4.

A savings figure without the rest of the bill is a sales trick, not a measurement.

So the honest summary has two parts. On the set that's moving, we save €327 a month. Company-wide, after every step, around €319 a month — the difference is small because the heaviest lines are exactly the ones we keep.

03 / the real costWhat did that saving cost?

Weeks. Not hours.

The software is free. Installing, connecting, securing and keeping it running is not, and that's exactly the item missing from every "save on your stack" post.

A few concrete examples of what actually happened. Outgoing mail from our blog worked half the time, because the mail server randomly switched between two network addresses and only one was registered. A routine job on the web server knocked out a manually added piece of configuration and took the blog offline. Neither of those is in a manual.

So don't calculate with the subscription price. Calculate with this instead:

• What does the subscription cost per year?
• How many hours does it take to get the alternative working — and what is your hour worth?
• How many hours a year does the upkeep cost afterward? Count on more than zero.
• What does a full day of downtime cost you?

For us, that math comes out positive, for two reasons that won't apply to everyone: this is our trade, and it's also our showcase. We'd do this even if it broke even.

04 / what we don't run ourselvesWhy is there still €510 on the bill?

Because running some things yourself is unwise, even when you can.

The pattern: we run ourselves whatever is software, and we buy in whatever is a service with an obligation to the outside world. That line is useful, even if you take nothing else from this post.

05 / the honestyWhat still doesn't add up here?

Three things, and you'd rather hear them here than discover them yourself.

The move is decided, not finished. Right now two servers of our own are running: one for the blog, one for the community. The third — the server where the CRM and the automations will land — is decided but not yet ordered. So the €24 is a calculated end state, not a bank statement.

The number of programs is counted, not estimated. Ten of the components in our stack are open source that we run ourselves; the whole set totals twenty-two components. We mention those numbers because you can count them yourself on our stack page. A round number nobody can verify isn't an argument.

We are not you. This math works for us because we already have the administrator in-house. If you don't, then "free software" buys you an extra job. In that case, €297 a month for something that simply works isn't a dumb expense — it's a sensible one.

This text was produced with AI assistance and reviewed and approved by a human before publication.