The Great SaaS Exodus: Why Companies Are Moving Entire Stacks to Self-Hosted in 2026

Something satisfying happened this year. A German state ditched Microsoft, a nonprofit told Slack to take a hike, and French schools banned Google Workspace. These aren't isolated incidents. They're symptoms of the same disease, and companies everywhere are finally reaching for the cure.

The SaaS model is breaking. Not in a dramatic, overnight collapse kind of way. More like a slow leak that suddenly floods the basement. And in 2026, a lot of organizations are looking at the water damage and deciding they've had enough.

The Numbers Don't Lie (But SaaS Vendors Do)

Here's the thing about SaaS pricing: it only goes up.

73% of SaaS companies raised prices in 2025, with an average increase of 14.2%. SaaS inflation is running at 12.2%, nearly five times the G7 average. The cost per employee hit $9,100 last year, up 15% in just two years. And 60% of vendors deliberately mask their rising prices behind bundling tricks and credit multipliers.

Google Workspace? Up 40% in two years. Adobe Creative Cloud? A 17-18% jump, plus they slashed your AI credits from 500 to 25. Atlassian Enterprise customers reported increases of up to 153%. And the best one: Slack demanded a nonprofit called Hack Club pay $200,000 per year, up from $5,000. That's a 40x increase with one week's notice.

The Enshittification Tipping Point

Cory Doctorow's term keeps proving itself right. The pattern is always the same: attract users with a great product, lock them in with years of data and integrations, then squeeze.

Adobe killed perpetual licenses, forced everyone onto subscriptions, then raised prices while cutting features. Slack went from "the tool that replaced email" to "the tool that costs more than your office lease." Google Search quietly became an ad delivery platform that occasionally shows you what you searched for.

The average enterprise now runs 275 SaaS applications. They use 47% of those licenses. The rest? Pure waste, to the tune of $21 million per company annually. That's not a subscription problem. That's an addiction problem.

Real Companies, Real Migrations

This isn't theoretical anymore. Organizations are making the switch and sharing the receipts.

Schleswig-Holstein, Germany migrated 30,000 workstations from Microsoft to LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and Thunderbird. They moved 30,000 mailboxes and over 100 million emails off Exchange. Annual savings: $17.5 million in license costs alone.

Hack Club moved to Mattermost after Slack's price shakedown. Even after Slack's CEO personally intervened, they left anyway. Data ownership mattered more than a discount.

France's Ile-de-France region deployed Nextcloud for 550,000 students, teachers, and staff. Multiple French ministries followed suit with six-figure user deployments. Denmark banned Google Workspace in schools. Germany banned Microsoft 365 in schools.

Akamai, one of the world's largest CDN providers, chose Zulip over Slack and Microsoft Teams specifically because threading actually works.

These aren't startups experimenting. These are governments and enterprises voting with their infrastructure budgets.

The Regulation Accelerator

If pricing pushed companies to the edge, regulation is what's pushing them over.

The EU Data Act became enforceable in September 2025. It prohibits vendor lock-in and mandates zero egress fees by 2027. DORA went live in January 2025, requiring financial services to control third-party cloud risk. The EU AI Act reaches full enforcement in August 2026, with penalties up to 7% of global revenue.

And there's the elephant in the room: the US CLOUD Act. It allows American law enforcement to compel US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, even in EU data centers. That directly conflicts with GDPR Article 48. Self-hosting on European infrastructure eliminates the legal ambiguity entirely.

71% of organizations now cite cross-border data transfer compliance as their top regulatory challenge. The solution isn't a better contract with your SaaS vendor. It's owning your stack.

The Real Math

Here's where the math gets interesting.

A self-hosted communication stack (Zulip or Mattermost) costs roughly $30/month on infrastructure instead of $15,000/year on Slack for 100 users. A self-hosted helpdesk (Zammad) runs at a fraction of Zendesk's $115/agent/month. A self-hosted analytics platform (Plausible or Umami) replaces a Google Analytics setup without sending your visitors' data to Mountain View.

The self-hosting market is projected to hit $85.2 billion by 2034, growing at 18.5% annually. Nextcloud alone runs on over 500,000 servers worldwide, with customer interest tripling in the first five months of 2025.

The objection used to be "but who maintains it?" Fair point. Running your own infrastructure is real work. That's exactly why managed platforms like Elestio exist. One-click deployment of 131+ open-source services, with automated backups, updates, and monitoring. You get the data ownership benefits of self-hosting without hiring a DevOps team. Infrastructure starts at $16/month on NVMe storage.

Those numbers aren't hypothetical. They're what happens when you stop paying per-seat licensing for software that's open-source.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Self-hosting isn't for everyone. If you're a five-person startup moving fast, SaaS makes sense. You trade money for time, and that's a reasonable deal early on.

But somewhere between 20 and 100 employees, the math flips. Your SaaS bill starts looking like payroll. Your data lives in someone else's jurisdiction. Your vendor's "product improvements" start feeling a lot like "extracting more revenue from captive customers."

2026 isn't the year self-hosting became possible. It's the year it became obvious. The tools are mature. The regulations demand it. The pricing makes it inevitable.

The only question left is whether you'll migrate on your own timeline or wait until your vendor forces the decision for you.

Thanks for reading ❤️ See you in the next one 👋