Saving money with FOSS

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone. It’s source code is openly available, allowing people to study, change, and distribute the software and it’s derivatives. Examples of FOSS are Linux and Mozilla Firefox. In fact, lots of widely used software or at least part of it is FOSS.

So what’s the point?

Well, all businesses we’ve worked with use some kind of Software as a Service or SaaS product, these are cloud based products which you might subscribe to, i.e. Xero, Office 365, Adobe or Asana/Basecamp. They all come with a cost, and this can quickly add up.

The best thing to do is create a Cloud Services list. By doing this, you’ll quickly get to understand how much your business spends every year on SaaS products. I bet it’s thousands?

The money bit.

Many applications which you pay for can actually be free, you just have to know they exist! Some are apps you run on your computer and some are services which you’ll need to host on a small server or NAS (if this sounds scary it’s something we can do for you).

A great example of a commonly used software amongst our clients is Adobe Acrobat, we have 6 members of staff here at IT Workhouse, so for everyone to have this it would cost about £1432.50 per year, instead we self-host an internal SterlingPDF instance and voila - a 100% saving. In fact, we save over £10,000 a year on SaaS products by self-hosting just a handful of applications.

IT WORKHOUSE can help you with all aspects of this. The best bit is by using FOSS you can save thousands of pounds, support some great projects and support local companies such as IT WORKHOUSE.