The future is self-hosted

As someone who works for a company with a product that can be both self-hosted and used as a SaaS, SaaS is where its at.

When you use a SaaS solution, you are taking on risk, sure, but you are able to move much faster. There's no servers to set up and, more importantly maintain. By outsourcing of lot of operational complexity, your team can focus on building unique differentiated features and marketing them.

I love self-hosting and think you can learn a lot by operating your own infra. For certain use cases (really small apps, personal software, stable state) it can make sense. But I feel like SaaS is becoming the default and is definitely 'the future'.

The rentier class doesn't want to lose the ability to extract rents from users in perpetuity, so they - shareholders and investors in the tech sector - are not going to support a model where the user has complete control of their hardware and software once an initial purchase is made.

It's gotten pretty ridiculous - let's say you buy a hammer. But to keep using the hammer, you have to pay a monthly subscription or the hammer stops working. And this is considered normal? Of course there are some tools that are so complex that you don't want to have to buy them and maintain them, so renting makes much more sense - but if your whole world is structured that way, you're just being bled.

The crux of SH is 6-pronged:

- Deployment and configuration management

- Platform maintenance (not app upgrades)

- App upgrades

- Security

- Performance monitoring

- Data backup and disaster recovery

When considering taking on SH, it's important to be wise about all of the implications. Automating these, standardization, and making them more portable are what would make SH cheaper and more doable. Definitely create runbooks and detailed notes that are kept current, organized, and could be used to reconstruct production without automation.

Local-first is the future. Most cases don't even need a backend to self-host.

>your infra costs are much lower

Last time I checked TCO was higher unless you are sort of big enterprise or individual who values her time zero.

Do not get me started on capex

The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe.

Hosting is very complicated, I tend to use an analogy about energy-production, where you can make your own energy or you can plug into the decentralised options.

Some things you might want to host, but the economic trajectory is telling us that the decentralised options are here to stay.

That’s all fine and good until you drop into your average European business that has no IT whatsoever except the owner’s nephew. I just don’t see any small non-technical business doing self-hosting… even things like NextCloud are infinitesimally present in that kind of market…

Even with Docker self hosting apps is still unnecessarily complex compared to installing an app on iOS, Android, Windows or Mac.

This might be true in a world where people actually give a shit about privacy.