Adjust your numbers. See your 5-year TCO for self-hosted vs SaaS billing — results update as you type.
Business Metrics
Base fees + transaction fees + overages
Technical Details
Cloud cost added by running ABAXUS (usually $300–$2K)
Growth Projection
Higher growth = more transaction fee exposure with SaaS platforms
Each year shows two bars: SaaS platform cost (red) vs ABAXUS self-hosted (green)
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The calculator models two cost trajectories over 5 years, using your ARR growth rate to project how each scales:
The crossover point — where the cumulative self-hosted cost drops below the cumulative SaaS cost — is your break-even month. At high ARR and high growth rates, this typically happens within 12–18 months of deployment.
This tool is designed for engineering and finance leaders evaluating billing infrastructure: CTOs and VPs of Engineering at SaaS companies currently paying transaction fees on their billing platform, technical co-founders approaching the ARR threshold where platform fees become material, and finance teams building the internal business case for a billing infrastructure migration.
The estimates are most accurate for companies between $5M and $100M ARR with usage-based or hybrid pricing models — the segment where the cost difference between SaaS and self-hosted billing is largest.
Two categories of savings are not captured in the direct cost numbers: compliance cost reduction — keeping usage data in your own environment eliminates the need for a Business Associate Agreement with your billing vendor (relevant for HIPAA), simplifies your GDPR data map, and removes cross-border data transfer risk. Pricing flexibility value — self-hosted billing lets you implement custom pricing logic, credits systems, and real-time customer dashboards without enterprise tier unlocks, which can accelerate revenue expansion from usage-based pricing experiments.
SaaS billing platforms charge a percentage of revenue processed — either explicitly as a transaction fee, or implicitly through volume-based pricing tiers. At $1M ARR, that percentage is a small dollar amount. At $50M ARR, the same percentage is a significant recurring cost. Self-hosted costs (infrastructure and maintenance) grow slowly — your Postgres database doesn't cost 50× more at $50M ARR than at $1M ARR. This divergence is why most teams evaluate self-hosted billing somewhere in the $5M–$20M ARR range.
Three categories accumulate: transaction fees that grow automatically with your revenue, overage charges once you exceed the event volume tier you're priced at, and enterprise feature gates that lock audit trails, HIPAA BAA support, and data residency controls behind higher-cost plans. These costs rarely appear in initial pricing conversations.
With ABAXUS, a standard implementation takes 4–8 weeks: infrastructure setup, SDK integration, pricing model configuration, and parallel running before cutover. The calculator uses 320 hours as the baseline for a moderate-complexity implementation. Complex implementations with credits systems or multi-tenant architectures can take 12–16 weeks.
Self-hosted is a poor fit when your engineering team is under 5 people, your ARR is under $2M, your pricing model is a simple flat subscription with no usage component, or you need payment processing (card vaulting, Stripe Checkout) rather than just billing logic. ABAXUS handles the billing ledger and invoice generation — it works alongside Stripe for payment processing, not as a replacement.
ABAXUS runs as a single binary in your existing cloud environment. It requires a PostgreSQL database for the billing ledger, a message queue for idempotent event ingestion, and compute for the billing engine. At typical SaaS scale the incremental infrastructure cost is $300–$2,000 per month — less than most teams pay in transaction fees at $10M+ ARR.
The calculator focuses on direct platform cost differences. For regulated industries, the compliance savings from self-hosting are often larger: keeping usage data in your own environment eliminates the BAA requirement for HIPAA, simplifies your GDPR data map, and removes cross-border transfer risk. See usage-based billing for healthtech for a detailed breakdown of the compliance angle.