> What if we release the app and it takes off, but then some folks decide they don't want to pay and they set up their own instance? That's one of the best thi

> What if we release the app and it takes off, but then some folks decide they don't want to pay and they set up their own instance? That's one of the best things that could happen, because you'll have very different sets of people using your application in what would seem to be very twisted ways (different hardware, different architecture, different needs). These people will probably hit issues, find bugs and identify improvements: If you can get that feedback you will be in a good position to make your paid (hosted?) offerings even better. You see these people as potential threats or detractors to your business, but they might be quite the opposite. A project that's going through that would be Wordpress and they seem to be doing quite well. > In fact I see that there is discoursehosting.com which sells instances starting at $20/mo while Discourse themselves charge $100/mo. Why does anyone pay the $100? If it was me, it would be one reason: Support. discoursehosting.com might not have the skills to deploy code fixes when the shit really goes down (Disclaimer: I don't know, this is just hypothetical, I'm sure they're a bunch of very clever and knowledgeable people). If I could pay someone $100/mo for peace of mind I would do it in a breeze, it's less than the hourly rate of many freelance coders in the US and they probably need several hours to get familiar with Discourse's code before helping me with a fix.