Where self-hosting costs you, and where it does not.

What it costs in money

Hosting lands between $50 and $200 a month for most business systems, paid to your own cloud provider rather than to us. The variable is data volume and traffic, not how many people log in, which is the whole point. A team of two hundred on an internal system costs roughly what a team of twenty costs to serve.

Mobile builds add the platform fees, which are billed to you directly: an annual developer account on one store and a one-off registration on the other. Those are unavoidable whoever writes the app.

What it costs in attention

This is the honest part. Somebody has to apply updates, watch that backups are running, and renew a certificate once a year. It is a few hours a quarter rather than a job, but it is not zero, and if the answer to who does it is nobody then it will not get done.

Security patching sits here too. We cover it for twelve months on the delivered code and its dependencies, set out in support. After that it is yours, and because the stack is mainstream, any competent developer can take it on. That is not a comfortable sentence for a vendor to write, which is why it is worth writing.

When renting is genuinely better

• Very small teams on cheap seats, where the subscription is simply less money. The arithmetic is in the cost of a seat.
• When you need a product feature that only exists because thousands of other customers paid for it and nobody would commission it alone.
• When the tool is peripheral. Nobody should own their video conferencing.
• When there is genuinely no one, internally or on retainer, who will ever log into a server.

That last case has an answer short of renting forever: managed hosting, which we offer as a separate and cancellable arrangement. It is never a condition of buying, and it does not affect what you own.

What you get for the trouble

A bill that does not move when you hire, data that sits inside your own boundary, and the ability to change the software without asking anyone. Whether that is worth a few hours a quarter is a judgement about your own business, and the numbers in pricing are there so you can make it rather than take our word for it.