The Open-Source Marketing Stack:
Run Your Marketing for $16/Month

If you're a small business owner or solopreneur, you've probably looked at the cost of marketing software and felt your stomach drop. HubSpot wants $800/month. Mailchimp's "free" plan caps out fast. Salesforce requires a mortgage. Google Analytics 4 is "free" but sells your data to the highest bidder.

Here's the thing: there are open-source alternatives to every single one of these tools. They're free to use, you own all the data, and the only cost is the server to run them on. I run the entire Nunya Bunya marketing operation on a stack that costs $16 per month. Total. For everything.

This is the complete breakdown of every tool in the stack, what it replaces, and how it all works together.

The Server: One VPS, Everything on It

All of these tools run on a single cloud server. I use Hetzner, a German hosting company with data centres in multiple locations. A Hetzner VPS with enough resources to run all of this costs around $16 AUD per month. That's your only cost.

Each tool runs in a Docker container, which means they're isolated from each other and easy to update. You install Docker on the server, write a configuration file, and all the tools spin up at once. If one breaks, it doesn't take the others down with it.

You don't need to be a sysadmin to set this up. You do need to be comfortable opening a terminal and following instructions. If you can cook a recipe, you can deploy this stack.

Mautic: Email Marketing and Automation

Replaces: Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, HubSpot email

Mautic is the centrepiece of the stack. It handles everything related to email marketing: newsletters, drip campaigns, automated sequences, lead scoring, contact segmentation, and form builders.

When someone fills out a form on your website, Mautic captures their information, tags them based on what they downloaded or signed up for, and starts sending them a pre-built email sequence. You set it up once, and it runs automatically.

The key features that matter for small businesses:

• Unlimited contacts and emails. No paying per subscriber like Mailchimp. Send as much as your server can handle.
• Visual campaign builder. Drag-and-drop workflows for email sequences. If subscriber does X, send Y after Z days.
• Segmentation and tagging. Tag contacts based on their behaviour, interests, or lead source. Send different emails to different groups.
• Landing pages and forms. Build opt-in forms and simple landing pages right inside Mautic.
• Full data ownership. Every contact, every email open, every click — that data lives on your server, not Mailchimp's.

The trade-off: Mautic's interface isn't as polished as Mailchimp's. The email template builder is functional but basic. You'll spend more time upfront learning the system. But once it's running, it does everything the paid tools do, and you never get hit with a surprise bill because your list grew past 500 contacts.

Matomo: Website Analytics

Replaces: Google Analytics (GA4)

Matomo tracks everything GA4 tracks — page views, sessions, bounce rates, traffic sources, goal conversions, event tracking — but with one critical difference: you own the data. It's on your server. It's not being fed into Google's advertising machine.

This also means Matomo is fully GDPR and Australian Privacy Act compliant out of the box. When you own the data and don't share it with third parties, privacy compliance becomes much simpler. You can even configure Matomo to work without cookie consent banners, which means your visitors don't get hit with an annoying popup before they can even read your site.

Matomo's interface is clean and arguably more intuitive than GA4 (which is widely considered a step backwards from Universal Analytics). You get real-time dashboards, custom reports, and heatmap/session recording plugins if you want them.

Twenty CRM: Customer Relationship Management

Replaces: Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM

Twenty is an open-source CRM that handles contact management, deal pipelines, task tracking, and company records. It's the place where you keep track of every lead, every conversation, and every deal you're working on.

For a solopreneur or small team, a CRM might seem like overkill. It's not. Even if you're a one-person business, having a central system that tracks who you've talked to, what they need, and when to follow up is the difference between closing deals and forgetting about leads.

Twenty has a modern, clean interface that looks and feels like Notion met Salesforce. Pipeline views, contact timelines, custom fields, email integration. It's still a young project, but it's actively developed and already covers what most small businesses need.

Metabase: Business Intelligence and Dashboards

Replaces: Google Data Studio (Looker Studio), Tableau, Power BI

Metabase lets you create dashboards and reports from any data source. Connect it to your CRM database, your analytics, your email data — anything stored in a database — and build visual dashboards that show you how your business is actually performing.

This is where you answer questions like: How many leads did we get this month? What's our conversion rate from enquiry to client? Which marketing channel is bringing the best leads? Which email sequences have the highest open rates?

You can build these dashboards without writing SQL. Metabase has a visual query builder that lets you point, click, and filter your way to useful insights. Or, if you know SQL, you can write custom queries for more complex analysis.

n8n: Workflow Automation

Replaces: Zapier, Make (Integromat)

n8n is the glue that holds everything together. It's a workflow automation tool that connects your different systems and makes them talk to each other. When a new lead comes in through Mautic, n8n can automatically create a contact in Twenty CRM, send a Slack notification, and log the event in Metabase.

Zapier charges $20/month for 750 tasks. n8n runs on your server with unlimited tasks, unlimited workflows, and no per-execution pricing. You build visual workflows by connecting nodes — trigger, action, condition, output — and they run automatically.

Some workflows I run daily:

• New form submission → create CRM contact → send welcome email sequence → notify Slack
• New blog post published → auto-generate social media posts → queue for posting
• Daily summary → pull metrics from all tools → send morning Slack digest

Cal.com: Appointment Booking

Replaces: Calendly, Acuity Scheduling

Cal.com is an open-source scheduling tool. You share a booking link, clients pick a time, and it syncs with your calendar. Automatic reminders, timezone handling, buffer times between appointments, and the ability to create different event types (15-min intro call, 60-min strategy session, etc.).

Cal.com has a generous free tier that covers most small business needs. If you want to self-host it on your own server for full control, you can do that too. Either way, it works beautifully and eliminates the back-and-forth of "what time works for you?"

Shlink: Link Tracking

Replaces: Bitly, Rebrandly

Shlink is a self-hosted URL shortener. Create branded short links (e.g., go.yourdomain.com/free-guide), track clicks, see where your traffic is coming from, and measure which campaigns are driving the most action.

It's a small tool, but it matters. Every link you share — in emails, social posts, business cards, flyers — should be trackable. Shlink gives you that without paying Bitly $35/month for the privilege.

How It All Fits Together

The real power of this stack isn't any individual tool. It's how they work together. Here's what a typical lead journey looks like:

1. Someone finds your website (tracked by Matomo)
2. They click a tracked link from a social post (Shlink)
3. They fill out a form to download a free guide (Mautic captures the lead)
4. Mautic starts an automated email nurture sequence
5. n8n creates a contact record in Twenty CRM
6. You get a Slack notification about the new lead
7. The lead books a call using your Cal.com link (included in the email sequence)
8. All of this data flows into Metabase dashboards so you can see what's working

That's a fully automated marketing and sales pipeline. No Mailchimp. No HubSpot. No Zapier. No Google Analytics. No Calendly. Just open-source tools, a $16/month server, and a few hours of setup time.

Is This Right for You?

This stack is ideal if you're a solopreneur or small business owner who wants to run professional marketing without paying hundreds of dollars a month in software subscriptions. It's also a good fit if you care about data privacy and owning your own customer data.

It's not ideal if you want everything to work out of the box with zero technical setup. There's a learning curve. Docker, DNS records, email deliverability configuration — these aren't things you can figure out in five minutes. But they're things you can learn, and once the stack is running, it requires very little maintenance.

If you'd rather have someone set this up for you and focus on actually running your business, that's exactly what I do at Nunya Bunya. But if you're the kind of person who likes to build things yourself, this stack is a genuinely powerful alternative to the paid SaaS treadmill.