Self-hosting should not be a privilege

One-time setup fees, allowing self-hosting only in highest pricing tiers and what not :/

Many SaaS companies offer on-premise deployments but almost always it is available only in the highest pricing plan and often comes with a one-time setup fee or annual platform fee.

Does it make sense to pay tens of thousands of dollars as a fee for deploying something on our own servers? It might’ve made sense before 2000.

Today, virtualization and tools like Docker have paved the way for effortless self-hosting. Platforms like AWS and Azure marketplaces streamline the process, even offering pay-as-you-go services within your own infrastructure.

So why the hefty price tags for self-deployment in SaaS solutions? It's a relic of a bygone era, a gatekeeping tactic that hinders data liberation.

Self-hosted community is growing

Few charts of how r/selfhosted has grown over the last decade.

Source: https://subredditstats.com/r/selfhosted

Challenges

Self-hosting offers greater control but maintenance & updates are responsibility of the customers. Once again, switching to latest Docker image of the service is easy in most cases. Efforts required to fix issues if something goes wrong is also high.

From the vendors perspective, providing support for Cloud customers is easier since every customer is on the same version of the product. Self-hosting can be more challenging for the vendor as there might be dozens of versions of the product that is actively used by the customers. Getting access to logs also can be a challenge while debugging issues on-prem.

Support related challenges can be prevented significantly with a strict QA process. Vendors will have to maintain test systems in multiple platforms to make sure releases won’t break existing deployments.

Self-hosting is the future

Infra landscape has evolved enough to make self-hosting an accessible choice for companies and a viable choice for software vendors. Data privacy has become a top concern for companies and self-hosting is a right step towards digital sovereignty.

Many SaaS vendors offer an option to select servers based in US or EU region. In the future, it should be normal for vendors to ask customers if they want to self-host and pay for the software just like how the customer will pay for the cloud offering. Typical barriers to self-host such as requesting a demo, talking to sales team, waiting for a custom quote, etc shouldn’t be mandatory steps.

Cloud marketplaces will also help in making self-hosting accessible to all. Many small teams may not have enough devops bandwidth to self-host and maintain many services.

Every company, regardless of size, should have the freedom to manage and secure its own data. We need more open-source options, simplified pricing models, and community-driven resources to bridge the gap between intention and accessibility. Self-hosting is not a privilege; it's a basic tenet of digital autonomy, and it's time we make it the norm, not the exception.