Ask HN: Why build a project to selfhost?

[hlassen]

Every so often, articles about projects, which allow selfhosting, are posted here and it seems they are more frequent now, than some time back. Often these are clones of popular services like mattermost and rocket chat as clones of slack. I would like to know whom those projects target and what their business model is (in case there is a company behind it).

Are these project using the open version as marketing to gain some initial traction for their eventual SaaS offering?

[stanislavb]

On the topic of self-hosted solutions, "Awesome Self Hosted" was released today. https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ . You can find almost all self-hosted web apps and compare them by popularity and dev activity (maintenance).

The business model of most of those project is offering premium support, I think. Although, some of them will be using this strategy as a pure marketing channel.

[hlassen]

Thanks for the great link! I had no clue reddit allows selfhosting, but of course such projects only make sense with a large community...

[Slaul]

If you can self host you don't have to worry about the service dying and leaving you out to dry.