For years we rented almost every tool we worked with, and for good reasons. SaaS gets a team started in an afternoon, someone else handles the upgrades, and someone else gets woken up at night. For a young company that is the right trade.
It stopped being the right trade for the tools our engineering runs on. We now prefer to own them - and we deliberately keep renting a few things. This post is about the reasoning, not a shopping list.
Why we are moving our tools in-house
- Your code and documents are your company's memory. Repositories, tickets, specifications and decisions are the most valuable thing a software company owns. Clients increasingly ask where their code and data live. "In our own environment, under our control" is a short answer - and an easy one to keep true.
- Per-seat pricing grows with headcount, not with value. Every new hire adds a line to a dozen invoices, and every vendor's price list moves on its own schedule. Owned tools turn a growing, scattered cost into a fixed and predictable one.
- AI works best next to your data. Code, tickets and documentation are exactly what AI agents read and write. Running models in your own environment means none of it has to leave, and the cost does not climb with every request.
- Terms change when the vendor decides. Prices, licences and features change on someone else's roadmap - several popular infrastructure tools have changed their licences in the last few years. Open-source tools you run yourself change when you decide to upgrade.
- Work does not stop when someone else is down. A development environment that runs on your own infrastructure keeps working through a vendor outage or a lost internet connection.
Rent what is a commodity. Own what is your memory.
What we still rent - on purpose
Self-hosting is not a principle, it is a trade-off, and some trades go the other way. Email stays with a provider: deliverability depends on a sending reputation that one company’s server cannot build. The production systems our clients depend on stay on managed cloud infrastructure, where redundancy and an on-call team are part of the price. And when a specialised tool has no serious open-source equivalent, we pay for it without guilt.
The real cost of self-hosting
The invoice gets smaller; the responsibility gets bigger. Someone has to own updates, certificates, monitoring and access. Backups only count if they restore, so they have to be tested on a schedule, not assumed. And when something breaks at an inconvenient moment, there is no vendor to open a ticket with.
Our rule is simple: if nobody on the team will own a tool, it does not get self-hosted. Everything that does is described as code, so it can be rebuilt from scratch rather than nursed back to health - the same discipline we apply to security as a feature, not a ticket.
Self-host or rent? A quick test
Go through your tools one at a time and see which column each one lands in.
- The data is sensitive, or it is part of what makes your company valuable
- The cost grows with every person you hire
- A mature open-source alternative exists
- A few hours of downtime would be an inconvenience, not a crisis
- It depends on reputation you cannot build alone - email is the classic case
- Customers depend on it being up around the clock
- Nobody on the team will own updates, backups and security
- It is a niche tool with no serious open-source equivalent
Most teams find that a handful of tools land clearly in the first column and the rest are fine where they are. That is the point: own the few that matter, and stop paying attention to the others. The AI side of the same question is in owning your AI infrastructure, and the habit behind it in boring technology as a luxury good.
Frequently asked questions
Is self-hosting cheaper than SaaS?
For a team with steady workloads and someone who owns the maintenance, usually yes within a year or two. Without that person, managed services are cheaper once you count the risk.
Is self-hosting less secure than SaaS?
Not by default. It moves responsibility to you: patching, access control and tested backups become your job. Done properly, it also shrinks the number of companies that hold your data.
What should a company self-host first?
The tools where your own data piles up and per-seat pricing hurts most - typically code hosting and CI, internal documentation and monitoring. Leave email and customer-facing production for last, or for never.