It's like this: SaaS companies generally add extraordinary value to the software that they commercialize, both for the customer and for the software itself. Y

It's like this: SaaS companies generally add extraordinary value to the software that they commercialize, both for the customer and for the software itself. You are simply mistaken regarding the cost difference between SaaS cost and having to hire an expert in an open source package (I'm simplifying for the conversation). It's not just a question of instance sizing and data transfer, or even how much it costs to pay those humans to provide support. The real cost is in terms of liability and service level. Most corporations quite simply won't take on the risk of using "raw" open source because if something goes wrong, they need someone to blame. The alternative in a real company would be to use the expensive, generic proprietary solution. They are happy to provide an SLA for $$$. Meanwhile, SaaS companies are frequently started by the core developers of open source projects, and the attention and reputation of having a company exist to promote your project tends to create a virtuous cycle of new users, training materials and PRs. It quite literally raises the tide for all boats. I don't have any beef with the specific act of complaining about prices in general. People are indeed free to not appreciate all sorts of things. However, much like the rise of conscious consumerism, good managers and good companies - the sort of people and places you want to work for when given a choice - increasingly understand that you have to reinvest back into the infrastructure that makes our lifestyle possible. So yeah, go ahead and install all of the locally hosted solutions you want, and feel as superior as you can, until the moment where you realize that it's utterly irresponsible for key tech talent to spend time in a growth stage startup applying patches to things in the middle of the night. If you don't figure it out, your board of directors will replace you with someone wiser.