"Self-hosted" means: the software runs on a server you rent, instead of at the supplier's. You no longer pay a subscription per user, but you have become the administrator.

That's the whole trade-off. Everything below is an elaboration of it, based on three systems we migrated this year.

01 / the sumsWhat does it save on the invoice?

Less than you hope, and that's a good start.

A server with 4GB of memory costs us €7.09 per month, including backups and a fixed IP address. That's enough to run one solid system. A server with 8GB costs €8.49 and fits several.

So: any subscription costing more than roughly €10 per month is, on paper, a candidate for migration. As a threshold that's too simple, because it ignores the hours involved. A more realistic rule of thumb:

Below €25 per month, you don't migrate for the money. Above €100, it becomes worthwhile. In between, something else decides.

That "something else" is covered in the next section, and for us it was decisive two out of three times.

02 / the ceilingWhen isn't price the argument?

When you hit a limit instead of an amount.

Our automations ran on a €20 per month subscription with a ceiling of 2,500 executions. That's a decent plan, until you grow. And then the next tier isn't a bit more expensive but a lot more expensive, because plans like these scale in jumps.

Running it yourself removes that ceiling. Not because the server is limitless (it isn't), but because you're buying capacity instead of permission. You only notice that difference the moment you need it.

The same applies to ownership. With a subscription, you own an account with a supplier. If you run it yourself, you own the installation and the data. For our blog, that was the reason to migrate; the €7 was beside the point.

03 / the bill you don't seeWhat does maintenance cost?

An unpredictable amount, spread over unpredictable moments.

Two things that happened to us this year, both with systems that were "just running".

Our blog's mail failed to arrive half the time. Invitations for team members, password resets, verification codes: a coin toss. The cause: the mail server randomly chose between two network addresses per message, and only one was registered with the mail provider. Meanwhile, the error message pointed to an entirely different component, which had nothing to do with the problem.

And a routine job on the web server took the blog offline, because the system's management tool writes back its own configuration and discards any manual addition in the process.

Neither of these is in a manual, both cost an evening. That's the real price of running it yourself: not the hours you plan, but the hours you didn't plan.

With a subscription, an outage is an annoyance. Running it yourself, an outage is your evening.

04 / don'tWhat do you keep with a supplier?

Everything where the outside world has to accept something from you.

We run our blog, community, automations, password vault and CRM ourselves. We do not run our business email, telephony, payments and accounting ourselves, and we're not going to either.

The distinction is useful: run what's software yourself, buy in what's a service with an obligation to the outside world.

• Sending mail: technically simple, arriving is the problem. You don't build reputation with recipients yourself.
• Payments: regulated. Here, self-build isn't a saving but a licensing question.
• Telephony: cheap, and tied to number portability and reachability.
• The language model: running a model yourself is possible, but here you're buying thinking power, not a program.

05 / the rule of thumbHow do you decide in five minutes?

Go through these four questions. Two "no"s are enough to stay where you are.

• Does the subscription cost more than €100 per month, or are you hitting a limit? If not, leave it be.
• Is there someone who manages the server if you're away for two weeks? If not, leave it be.
• What happens if this system is down for a day? If the answer is "then I sell nothing", you want a supplier with a guarantee involved.
• Is the data inside it your business, or just a tool? In the first case, ownership outweighs convenience.

The trade-off in one overview:

For us, five of the nine systems end up being worth migrating, because we already have the management in-house and because our own stack is also our shop window. Those are two reasons that probably don't apply to you. We deliberately keep four of the nine items on our bill with a supplier, and that's not inconsistency but the same sum, worked out differently.

This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved by a human before publication.