Replacing Notion + Google Drive with One Self-Hosted Stack

We surveyed 40 early-stage startups and found the same pattern: Notion for docs, Google Drive for files, Slack for chat, and a growing anxiety about data ownership. Here's how Arcellite collapses that stack into something you control.

The modal startup SaaS stack in 2025 looked like this: Notion ($16/user/month), Google Workspace ($12/user/month), Slack ($8.75/user/month), a hosted database ($50–$200/month), and some combination of Zapier/Make for automation ($50–$100/month).

For a 15-person team, that's roughly $700–$900/month minimum, and none of it is yours.

What founders actually need

When we talked to 40 early-stage founders about their internal tooling, the requirements were consistent: a place to store files, a place to write and share documents, some kind of database for structured data, a way to build simple automations, and an AI assistant that doesn't expose their data to a third party.

That's it. No one needed enterprise SSO from day one. No one needed 99.99% uptime SLAs for internal tooling. They needed things to work reliably and to cost less as they scaled.

How Arcellite fits

Arcellite isn't a Notion replacement in the sense of matching every feature. It's an infrastructure layer that covers the same ground: files, structured data, automation, and AI — running on your server, billed flat.

The migration story is simpler than it sounds. Most teams have fewer than 50GB of "real" files in Google Drive (the rest is Google-native formats that export to standard formats cleanly). Notion exports to Markdown. The painful parts are habits and search — and those recover within a week.

What you get in return: a single system you control, priced by installation rather than per seat, with your data on hardware you own.