We sell self-hosted software, so take the following as what it is: the argument against buying from us, written by us, because you should hear it before you spend money rather than after.
Software you host yourself is not free of ongoing cost. The subscription goes away. The work does not.
The part that is money
A small server is not expensive. Hetzner's smallest cloud server, the CX23, is €5.99 a month including an IPv4 address (read from Hetzner's own price API on 12 October 2026), and the price rises as you add memory. That is the whole cash bill for most of our applications — they are PHP with MySQL or SQLite, they are small, and several will happily share one machine. Prices move, so read the provider's page on the day you buy; each product page lists what its app needs.
Set against a per-seat subscription that is usually a rout, and it is the reason people come looking. At five users, a tool at $19 a head a month is $1,140 a year, while that server is €71.88 a year. But Chatwoot charges exactly $19 an agent a month on your own server: a self-hosted tool can still bill per head, as three of the fourteen vendors we read do, and the cash bill is the easy half anyway. Quoting only the cash bill is how this decision gets sold badly.
The part that is your time
You become the system administrator. Concretely, that means:
Security updates. The server's operating system needs patching. PHP needs patching. If you do not do this, the box eventually gets found — not because anyone targeted you, but because everything on the public internet gets scanned continuously.
Backups, and restores. A backup you have never restored from is not a backup, it is a hope. Once a year, restore one somewhere harmless and watch it work.
Being the person who fixes it. When it is down at nine on a Sunday, there is no support queue that will bring it back. There is you, or the person you pay.
Major-version migration. When a new version arrives, moving to it is your project. A subscription vendor does this in the background and you never notice. Here you will notice — though nothing forces the move: the copy you run keeps running.
Who should not buy self-hosted software
We would rather say this than take the money:
If nobody on your team is comfortable with a terminal, and you have nobody to call, do not do this. The small monthly server is not the cost. The cost is the afternoon it goes wrong.
If the thing is business-critical from the first hour — you cannot take orders without it, you cannot pay staff without it — and you have no redundancy plan, a managed service is the right answer even though it costs more. Paying someone to be awake is a legitimate purchase. (Our own middle path, Ownware Cloud, runs a subset of the catalog for a monthly fee.)
If you would only ever have one or two users, the math often favors the subscription. Per-seat pricing is punishing at twenty people and perfectly reasonable at two.
Who should
If you already run a server, the marginal cost of one more small PHP application is close to zero, and this is straightforwardly a good deal.
If your headcount is growing, per-seat pricing compounds against you while a one-time license does not. This is the case where self-hosting wins by the largest margin, and it widens every time you hire.
If the data cannot leave your building — because of a regulator, a client contract, or a policy you did not write — then self-hosting is not a preference, it is the only version of the product you are permitted to buy.
If you have been burned by a vendor raising prices, discontinuing a product, or being acquired, then owning the source is worth real money to you, and you already know why.
The honest summary
Self-hosting trades a predictable monthly bill for an unpredictable occasional afternoon. For some businesses that is the best trade available. For others it is a false economy dressed up as independence.
We would rather you worked that out before you bought than after, which is why this page exists on the shop selling the software rather than on somebody else's blog. The store's own page on the same question, each row with a way to check it, is What self-hosting actually costs.
If you decide it is for you, the whole catalog is one purchase, and the next fair question is what happens to your software if we stop existing. That answer is here, and it is the reason we can publish this page without flinching.