Snipe-IT

Snipe-IT answers one question well: who has which laptop, and when does the warranty run out. It tracks hardware, licenses, accessories and consumables, with checkout and check-in against real people. Self-hosting is free forever, unlimited users and unlimited assets, with no feature gate.

Running it yourself means PHP, MySQL and a mail server. Nothing exotic, but you own backups and upgrades. Budget an afternoon for the first install and an hour a month after that. LDAP and SAML work in the free version, which is exactly where most asset tools start charging.

Hosted plans start at $39.99/mo and climb to $7,500/year for a large dedicated server. You are paying for automatic backups, upgrades, TLS and someone to email. Solo and small teams: self-host, the free version is the whole product. Large teams: buy hosting if nobody wants to own the upgrade path.

The catch is depth. Snipe-IT is asset tracking, not a CMDB. It will not model service dependencies or run change management, so if you need that, look at GLPI or iTop instead.