Why open source cuts your IT costs by 30 to 60%
Per-user licenses aren't your only hidden cost. Here's where an SME's IT budget actually goes under proprietary solutions, and what changes with open source.
When people talk about the cost of a proprietary solution, the conversation usually stops at the license price. That's the most common mistake we see during audits: the license is only the visible part of the cost. The rest — the bulk of it — hides in three areas.
1. The cost of dependency
A proprietary solution locks you into its roadmap, its pricing-increase schedule, and its integration choices. When the vendor raises prices by 15% (which happens regularly on enterprise SaaS suites), you have no real negotiating leverage: migrating costs more than paying.
2. The cost of closed integration
Proprietary APIs are often rate-limited, quota-capped, or billed separately by volume. Automating a process that spans 3 different proprietary tools can end up costing more in API subscriptions than an SME's entire infrastructure running on Dolibarr + n8n.
3. The cost of leaving
This is the most underestimated one. Cleanly exporting years of data out of a proprietary CRM, without losing structure or relationships between records, is a project in itself — sometimes billed by the vendor itself.
What open source changes
An infrastructure built on open source foundations (self-hosted servers or a neutral cloud provider, Dolibarr for ERP/CRM, n8n for automation) removes all three costs structurally: no per-user license, open and documented APIs, and data that belongs to you in a standard, exportable format at any time.
On the projects we run, the 30–60% reduction observed after a year doesn't come only from removing licenses — it mostly comes from the disappearance of these hidden costs which, combined, often exceed the original purchase price.
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