Leaving Notion: a 2 GB server lists at about the price of one Notion Plus seat
Oct 29, 2026 · 4 min read
Notion Plus is $10 per member per month billed yearly, $12 billed monthly. A 1 vCPU, 2 GB VPS lists at $10 to $12 a month at three providers, and all seven Notion alternatives in our catalog list a minimum of 2 GB or less. What that comparison covers, and what it leaves out.
The case for leaving a SaaS tool usually starts with a price comparison. Here is one for Notion, with the figures dated and the gaps named.
The two prices
Notion. On 2026-10-15 the Notion pricing page showed, in USD per member per month:
| Plan | Billed yearly | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Plus | $10 | $12 |
| Business | $20 | $24 |
A 2 GB server. On the same day our price collector (run in read-only probe mode) read these list prices for a 1 vCPU, 2 GB plan: Vultr $10 a month, DigitalOcean $12 and Linode $12. Each comes from the provider's public API; DigitalOcean's needs a read-only token. They are list prices before tax and before any backup or snapshot add-on, and the 2 vCPU plans at the same RAM cost more. We leave Hetzner out of the comparison because its prices cannot yet be read automatically, so we cannot date them to the same standard.
Set against Notion Plus, a single 1 vCPU, 2 GB server lists at about the price of one seat: $10 to $12 a month either way. That is list price only: a server hosts one tool for everyone, a seat is one person, and the two are not feature-for-feature equivalents.
Where the seat count matters
Notion charges per member, a server does not. The table compares Notion Plus with one $12-a-month server. It counts hosting only.
| Members | Notion Plus, yearly billing | Notion Plus, monthly billing | One 2 GB server at $12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $10 | $12 | $12 |
| 5 | $50 | $60 | $12 |
| 10 | $100 | $120 | $12 |
| 25 | $250 | $300 | $12 |
The server column is flat only while one server is enough. We have not measured these apps under load, so a large team may need a bigger plan.
Which alternatives fit a 2 GB server
Seven apps in our catalog are marked as Notion alternatives. Each lists a minimum RAM of 2 GB or less, so a 2 GB plan meets the listed minimum of each one on its own. Where we measured idle RAM, it was far below the listed figure; see the listed-versus-idle post for why those two numbers differ and which one to size by.
| App | Licence in the dataset | Listed minimum RAM (MB) | Measured idle RAM (MB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFFiNE | MIT (client) + AFFiNE EE License (server; Community Edition parts MPL-2.0) | 2,048 | 223 |
| AppFlowy | AGPL-3.0 (client apps) + AppFlowy Self-Hosted Commercial License (server; free tier) | 2,048 | 483 |
| BookStack | MIT | 512 | 93 |
| Docmost | AGPL-3.0 | 1,024 | 592 |
| Outline | BSL-1.1 | 1,024 | not measured |
| Trilium Notes | AGPL-3.0 | 512 | 61 |
| Wiki.js | AGPL-3.0 | 1,024 | 94 |
Idle RAM is a 30-second snapshot after the install, measured on a Google Cloud e2-standard machine (AppFlowy on an e2-standard-4, the rest on an e2-standard-2). It is not a measurement under load.
The licence column matters as much as the RAM column. BookStack is MIT. Docmost, Trilium and Wiki.js are AGPL-3.0. Outline is under the Business Source License. AFFiNE and AppFlowy have open-source clients but license their self-hosted servers separately (the AFFiNE EE License, with some Community Edition parts under MPL-2.0; the AppFlowy Self-Hosted Commercial License, with a free tier). Read the licence of the one you pick before you rely on it for a team.
What the price comparison leaves out
- Your time. We have not measured setup or maintenance time, so there is no figure for it here. Updates, backups and restores are yours.
- Feature coverage. These tools are not Notion. Which Notion features each one does and does not replace is on the Notion alternatives page, not in this price comparison.
- Migration. Moving content out of Notion and into another tool is work this post does not price.
- Headroom. The listed minimum is per app. The operating system and anything else on the server need memory too, and we have one idle measurement per app (none for Outline).
- Extras. Backups, Notion's AI and guest features, and storage or bandwidth are not priced here.
- Currency and tax. All prices are USD list prices, before tax.
About the numbers
Notion prices were read from notion.com/pricing on 2026-10-15, with the page's monthly and yearly toggle set each way. VPS prices come from our price collector run in probe mode on 2026-10-15; the prices stored in our catalog were last verified on 2026-09-27 and may differ. RAM and licence figures are from the install-verification dataset exported on 2026-10-15, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22983606. Prices change; check the provider's page before you buy. How we test is on How we test, and a stack-level cost calculator is at Build your stack.
Apps in this post
Related
Idle RAM by Self-Hosted Category: 1.4 GB to 32 MB
Median idle RAM for the 22 self-hosted categories with at least four measured apps. In 19 of them, the heaviest app idles at ten times or more the lightest one, so a category's median is a rough guide at best.
29 Self-Hosted Apps Idle Above 1 GB, 164 Under 256 MB
Idle RAM for 268 self-hosted apps, each measured on a server pruned of earlier apps: the 29 that use more than 1 GB make up 59% of all the memory, and the 164 lightest apps together use less than PostHog alone.
Listed RAM Is About 5× What Self-Hosted Apps Idle At
Across 268 self-hosted apps measured on a server pruned of earlier apps, the median app idled at 174.5 MB against a listed minimum of 1,024 MB. Four apps used more than listed. Here is what the gap does and does not mean.
One email when we publish new measurements.
No digests, no roundups. Just the new numbers and what changed.