Zethic had no proper way to set up development environments. Multiple servers, different requirements per project, no record of who had access to what. I found Coolify, asked the founder for a server, and self-hosted it myself. Then I planned out cheap Hetzner servers and a repeatable process for automated docker-compose deploys. Six servers later, close to 200 containers running, some production workloads on the same setup. Along the way the same infra let me swap out paid SaaS for self-hosted FOSS, piece by piece: Plane for the PM tool, TwentyCRM for sales, Outline for the wiki, n8n for automation, Metabase, Authentik, Uptime Kuma, Vaultwarden, Grafana + Alloy + Loki, Dozzle, MinIO, Reactive Resume, our own Docker registry. About $500 a month of paid tools gone. What used to be a two-day environment build is an hour now.
The same FOSS stack also gave me a substrate to automate on. Every inbound lead from the company website now flows through an n8n workflow that uses AI to extract the project shape and writes a structured record into TwentyCRM. No human in the triage loop anymore.
Every PM at Zethic also has Claude Code in their day now. Doc generation, status reports, scoping, ideation. The things that used to start from a blank page are first-drafted by Claude and edited by the PM.
Before
- No dev-environment process. Multiple servers, different requirements per project, no track of who had access to what.
- Spinning up a new project's environment took two days.
- About $500/month going to paid SaaS for things we ended up self-hosting instead.
- Every inbound lead triaged by hand by whoever picked it up.
- PM busywork done from a blank page: status reports, scoping docs, ideation.
After
- Coolify on Hetzner. 6 servers, close to 200 containers, one repeatable process per project.
- Spinning up a new project's environment takes an hour.
- FOSS stack covering PM (Plane), CRM (TwentyCRM), wiki (Outline), automation (n8n), analytics (Metabase), SSO (Authentik), monitoring (Uptime Kuma + Grafana + Alloy + Loki + Dozzle), secrets (Vaultwarden), storage (MinIO), and our own Docker registry. About $500/month off the bill.
- n8n triages every inbound lead end to end. AI extracts the project info, TwentyCRM gets the structured record.
- Claude Code in every PM's day. Status reports, scoping docs, and ideation start from a draft.