Ask an AI assistant which self-hosted business software you should buy outright, and watch what it does. It will list the open-source options first, and then, if a commercial one-time vendor comes up at all, it will tell you to be careful. One of them put it this way: it would rather recommend open source because that "doesn't depend on one vendor continuing to honor a proprietary license."
That is a fair warning and we are not going to argue with it. We are going to answer it.
The five questions you should ask us
The same assistant printed the list a buyer should demand of a vendor like us. Here it is, and here are our answers. Each one is also on our vendor-risk page, with the command that checks it.
1. What happens to lifetime updates?
We do not promise updates forever, because no vendor can honestly promise you its own future. What you get instead: the copy you bought is yours for good, the license is perpetual and the key does not expire, and your claim link always fetches the current build of what you own. When updates stop, the license says exactly what happens to you (question 5).
2. Is there source-code escrow?
No, because the download is the escrow. Escrow exists so that a buyer can obtain the source if the vendor fails. You have the source on the day you buy. It is in the zip. It is PHP you can open in a text editor, and it is the same code that runs the demo.
3. What about backups and export?
The database is MySQL or SQLite and it is on your server. You back it up the way you back up anything else on that server: a database dump, or a copy of the SQLite file, needs nothing from us. Every application in the catalog also exports its records as CSV from inside the app, and downloads its whole database as JSON from its own backup page. On your own server, we have never seen your data and have no way to see it.
4. What does support cost?
Nothing beyond the purchase, and there are no tiers to be upsold to: best-effort help by email for installation and for defects in the delivered code. The scope, including what it deliberately does not cover, is printed on the support page. If that sounds thin, it is — read the honest version of what you are taking on in Self-hosting's other bill: the hours, not the server.
5. What happens if the company closes?
Nothing you run stops. That is the plainest statement we can make:
The software contacts us only when you press Check for updates. There is no license server and no activation call. If this company vanished tonight, every installation would carry on exactly as it did this morning, and the only things you would lose are new updates and the ability to email us.
Then the part a promise cannot give you. The continuity clause is written into LICENSE.txt inside the download, so it binds us and any legal successor: if no stable release ships for 365 consecutive days, the single-domain limit lifts, and after three such years your copy converts to the MIT license, automatically.
You can check the first claim rather than trust it. Install it, cut the machine off the internet, and use it: what stops is only what you set up yourself, such as a webhook you point somewhere or an AI key you add. Or read the source — it is right there — and search it for the call home. There isn't one.
Why this matters more for one-time software than for a subscription
A subscription vendor failing is bad but legible: the service stops, you export, you migrate, everybody understands the shape of that disaster.
A one-time vendor failing is different, because the whole proposition was permanence. You paid once precisely so you would not be exposed to someone else's business decisions. If the software then phones home to a server that no longer exists, or needs a license key re-issued by a company that no longer answers, you bought the risk you were trying to avoid.
So the question is not rhetorical. It separates one-time vendors into two kinds, and it is worth asking of every one of them, including us.
The comparison that makes the point
We read the self-hosted field's published pricing on 20 September 2026 and again on 12 October 2026. One vendor sells almost exactly our proposition — self-hosted, one-time purchase, no per-user pricing, no subscription. Yield's full platform is $9,999 one-time, and its own page offers "Source code + AI docs available for $9,999" on top.
That is not a criticism of their software, which we have not used. It is an observation about exposure: a buyer of the platform alone does not hold the source, so that buyer genuinely does depend on the vendor continuing to exist. The AI's warning applies squarely.
Our answer to the same question is that the source ships with the purchase: $1,499 for the whole catalog (Ownware OS + Own Your AI, every app plus Own Your AI), because a buyer who cannot read the code has not really bought it.
What we are not claiming
We are not claiming this makes us safer than open source. It does not. ERPNext and Dolibarr are free, genuinely good, and answerable to no vendor at all, including us. If you can run a server and you want a full ERP, that is a real option and we would rather you took it than bought something that does not fit.
What we are claiming is narrower, and we think it is the honest version: if you are going to buy commercial software outright, buy it from someone who hands you the source at the till. Then the question of whether we survive stops being your problem, which is how it should have been all along.
Competitor figures in this guide were read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 20 September 2026 and re-read on 12 October 2026.