> A SaaS and self-hosting don't go well together About two months ago, I was commenting on my struggles working at a place that offered cloud and self-hosted s

> A SaaS and self-hosting don't go well together About two months ago, I was commenting on my struggles working at a place that offered cloud and self-hosted solutions where it was not going well. I was mostly convinced that the problem was organizational, but thinking more about it, it’s more complicated than that. To be clear, I don’t think it’s impossible to do both. If your application is very simple and self contained, then of course; we use such services every day in a variety of environments. However, you have to design the software from the ground up for simplicity, and to carefully dogfood your self-hosted experience via your cloud offering to ensure both models are aligned. And of course, complex system architecture is a significant obstacle; assuming your customers are going to wrangle dozens of microservices, multiple database and distributed caches, etc. is not reasonable for most organizations. So, if you strictly and carefully design your product to be self-hosted-first, I think these two models can coexist… up to a point. If you’re fortunate enough that your cloud offering becomes huge, you might reach a point where the simplicity of self-hosted-first becomes a restriction that turns into a liability. At that point, you can simply make a decision: who butters your bread? That sucks for your customers who lose in that decision. If I select self hosted, it’s often because I am concerned about lack of agency, control, and partitioning, or I need to flatten my costs, or I have an external requirement that is incompatible with the cloud offering. Is it not a risk, then, to hitch my wagon to a company that offers both, and at some point may make a decision to rescind or water down their self-hosted solution? If it’s closed-source or open-core, then I would say so. From that perspective, I think it would be better to go with a vendor that just picks a lane, and avoid those that use watered down self-hosted to funnel customers into more expensive cloud offerings (in other words, open-core model is a big red flag for me). I suppose this is maybe getting into whether you should rely on proprietary software whatsoever for vital parts of your business, but let’s not get into that. Like I said, I think the question is complicated.