Unfortunately, self-hosting breaks down when someone starts paying for your software. Especially if it's an enterprise customer.

Customers usually don't actually know how to operate your software. They might change something small — Postgres version, environment variables, IAM, firewall rules — and things start failing. From their perspective, the product is broken. And even if the root cause is on their side, it doesn't matter... the customer is always right, you're still the one expected to fix it.

But you can't. You don't have access to their environment. You don't have real visibility. You can't run anything yourself. So you're stuck debugging a system you don't control, through screenshots and copy-pasted logs on a Zoom call. You end up responsible for something you don't control.

I think there's a better model of paid self-hosting: the software runs in the customer's environment, but the developer can actually operate it. It's a win-win: for the customer, their data stays private and local, and the developer still has control over deployments, updates, and debugging.

Alien provides infrastructure to deploy and operate software inside your users' environments, while retaining centralized control over updates, monitoring, and lifecycle management. It currently supports AWS, GCP, and Azure targets.

GitHub: https://github.com/alienplatform/alien

Getting started: https://alien.dev/docs/quickstart

How it works: https://alien.dev/docs/how-alien-works