SaaS Radar
Does self hosting a Salesforce clone save money in 2026?
Self hosting a Salesforce replacement costs $11.99 a month on a 4GB VPS, while Salesforce Sales Cloud Core lists at $195 per user per month billed annually. The free part is real. SalesCompel, an Apache-2.0 clone published on 15 October 2026, handles Account and Contact records but has not reached its own production certification milestone.
What matters
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Core lists at $195 per user per month billed annually, so 10 seats cost $23,400 a year before add-ons.
- SalesCompel is Apache-2.0, created on 15 October 2026, with 244 GitHub stars and 22 forks on 4 November 2026.
- Its README marks M9 production certification as 'Not reached' and budgets roughly 185-350 additional plan equivalents to get there.
- Hostinger's KVM 1 VPS is $6.49/mo for a 24-month term and renews at $11.99/mo for 1 vCPU, 4GB RAM and 50GB of NVMe.
What SalesCompel actually is
SalesCompel is an Apache-2.0 recreation of Salesforce's core CRM objects, built from public API documentation instead of leaked source. The repository was created on 15 October 2026 and showed 244 stars, 22 forks and one open issue on 4 November 2026.
The project description promises a '1:1 drop in replacement feature parity'. That sentence is the goal, not the shipped state, and the README is unusually direct about the distance left.
The stack is a Go service on PostgreSQL with a Vue record editor. Contributors work under a clean-room policy that separates the people writing the API specification from the people writing code, and every repository carries a CLEAN_ROOM.md file recording provenance. Compatibility is checked in a lab that runs Salesforce's public client SDKs against the server.
Self hosting a CRM: the arithmetic against Salesforce list prices
Salesforce's pricing page on 4 November 2026 lists Starter Suite at $25 per user per month, Pro Suite at $100, Sales Cloud Core at $195, Advanced at $395 and Max at $550. Starter Suite can be billed monthly or annually; every tier above it is annual only, which turns a ten-seat Core decision into a $23,400 commitment.
For ten people the monthly bill is $250 on Starter Suite, $1,950 on Core and $5,500 on Max. At 25 users Core reaches $4,875 a month, or $58,500 a year, before add-ons and tax.
A Hostinger KVM 1 VPS with 1 vCPU, 4GB of RAM, 50GB of NVMe storage and 4TB of bandwidth costs $6.49 a month on a 24-month term and renews at $11.99. The KVM 2 doubles that to 2 vCPU, 8GB of RAM and 100GB of NVMe, renewing at $14.99. SalesCompel adds no licence fee at any seat count.
Put SalesCompel on the KVM 2 and a ten-seat team pays $14.99 a month instead of $1,950, a gap of about $1,935. The gap is real and it is not the whole comparison: Core bundles Slack, Tableau and Agentforce skills that a self-hosted clone does not replace. If your team lives in those, this is not CRM against CRM.
What the code does today
The project page and README list a narrow, specific surface:
- Persistent Account and Contact create, read, update and delete.
- Object describe calls and limited queries.
- External-ID upsert and bearer token authentication.
- An OpenAPI 3.2 REST contract with an offline compatibility lab.
- A Vue prototype for record lists and editors running on synthetic data, where preview edits stay in memory and never reach the backend.
Everything beyond that list is roadmap. The milestone table, which the README dates to 20 October 2026, marks protocol and query fidelity as early, metadata and security as bounded slices, migration as planning and contracts, automation as feasibility work, and M9 production certification as 'Not reached'. The README says plainly that no full program milestone has a recorded exit-gate pass.
It also puts a number on the work left: roughly 185 to 350 additional plan equivalents through M9. That is the project's own scope estimate rather than a delivery forecast, and it is the most useful figure for anyone deciding whether to wait.
What would make it a real alternative
Salesforce orgs do not fail on Account and Contact records. They fail on the edges: SOAP integrations from older middleware, Bulk API loads from a data warehouse, Flow automations a sales ops team built over years, and Apex triggers nobody wants to touch.
SalesCompel's roadmap places those in milestones still described as early or untouched. A realistic migration target, based on the repository's own status table, is a read-mostly CRM holding accounts and contacts while everything else stays on Salesforce. That is a valid way to cut seat costs for staff who only need to look records up, and it is not a replacement for an org running automation.
The other gap is reporting. Salesforce reports and dashboards are the part finance sees, and the roadmap's sales workflow milestone is an early prototype. Until a clone can reproduce the numbers a board deck depends on, the licence saving stays a pilot project rather than a finance decision.
The costs self hosting moves off the invoice
The licence line goes to zero. The operations line does not. Self hosting a CRM means owning PostgreSQL upgrades, backups you have actually restored, TLS certificates, log retention and the on-call rota for a system that holds your pipeline.
Migration is the harder bill. The M5 migration milestone is still in planning, and the API gaps that matter most to real Salesforce orgs sit in milestones that are early or untouched. A migration plan built on today's code moves Accounts and Contacts and stops there.
There is also a compliance question no VPS invoice shows. Customer data that sat behind a vendor's audit reports now sits behind yours. For a five-person agency that is a paragraph in a contract. For a company selling into enterprise procurement, it can be the reason the project never ships.
Who should self host a CRM now
Self hosting fits when three things are true: someone on the team already runs PostgreSQL in production, your integrations are REST with bearer tokens, and the CRM is not the system your revenue reporting depends on.
It does not fit if you rely on Flow automations, Apex triggers, Salesforce reports or the Slack and Tableau bundle. Nor does it fit if the migration has to happen this quarter.
If you need a working self-hosted CRM this month, EspoCRM is the mature option: AGPL-3.0, about 3,500 GitHub stars and commits on 3 November 2026. It is not Salesforce-compatible, so existing code needs rewriting, but it is a CRM you can put in front of a sales team.
SalesCompel is the bet that compatibility arrives later. Watching its issue tracker costs nothing, and that is the right price for a project at this stage.
What OccupySaaS is actually building
The site calls itself a protest movement written in code, started in October 2026 by engineers laid off while the platforms they built kept raising prices. Two projects are public: ZeroAuthy, an Auth0-compatible identity server published on 14 October 2026, and SalesCompel the following day. Both are Apache-2.0, and both are covered by the same clean-room policy.
Five more categories are marked proposed rather than occupied: docs and wikis, issue tracking, feature flags, observability and customer support. The page says proposed categories are open for discussion, not commitments, which is the correct way to read the rest of the site too.
The pattern is worth noting for buyers even if you never deploy any of it: an Apache-2.0 clone with a compatibility lab sets a price ceiling on per-seat software. Vendors discount when a credible free fork exists.
A cheap way to test the claim
Buy the smallest VPS that fits PostgreSQL, run the compatibility lab against your own SDK calls, and export a read-only copy of Accounts and Contacts. Point one internal tool at SalesCompel and leave Salesforce as the system of record for a month. The lab shows where the API diverges; the month shows what maintenance costs your team.
That experiment costs about $15 and a few evenings. A migration decided from a landing page costs a quarter.
At a glance
| Option | Cost for 10 users | Billing | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Starter Suite | $250/mo | Monthly or annual | $25 per user; core sales, service and marketing features |
| Salesforce Sales Cloud Core | $1,950/mo | Annual | $195 per user; includes Slack, Tableau and Agentforce skills |
| Salesforce Sales Cloud Max | $5,500/mo | Annual | $550 per user; full sales platform with advanced support |
| Hostinger KVM 1 + SalesCompel | $11.99/mo | 24-month renewal | 1 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 50GB NVMe; Apache-2.0 licence at $0 |
| Hostinger KVM 2 + SalesCompel | $14.99/mo | 24-month renewal | 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 100GB NVMe; same licence terms |
FAQ
Can I use SalesCompel commercially for free?
Yes. The repository ships an Apache-2.0 licence, which permits commercial use and modification with no seat fee. You pay for the server, and you carry the support burden yourself since there is no vendor behind it.
Is self hosting cheaper than paying for Salesforce?
The software cost is lower by thousands of dollars a month at ten seats: $14.99 for a KVM 2 VPS against $1,950 for ten Sales Cloud Core users. The saving only holds if someone already covers PostgreSQL operations and the migration does not consume a quarter of engineering time.
Can I migrate an existing Salesforce org today?
Not fully. Account and Contact records with REST and bearer tokens work, while Bulk API, SOAP, Flow and Apex remain roadmap items, and the migration milestone is still in planning. A partial move for read-only users is realistic; a full cutover is not.
Related reading
self-hosting Auth0 with ZeroAuthy, DigitalOcean pricing in 2026, the cheapest VPS plans we track, Hostinger tool profile