[jondubois]

I think that any business which hires developers in-house should consider their software systems as being their core business. That's were the competitive edge comes from.

Most companies who use BaaS or PaaS these days already hire developers and sometimes even DevOps engineers; for them it doesn't make sense to outsource huge parts of their software. Some open source systems just work really well.

For example, I tried several times to launch a business around my current popular open source project but it hasn't worked so far; the problem I have is that companies only need consulting for a short while at the beginning to adapt the system to their use case and then it just works perfectly so they dont need me anymore.

When I reach out to a previous customer who didn't contact me in months, it's very common to hear that the system has been running perfectly without any issues at all. Even a couple of companies which have millions of users. Most of them never needed any consulting at all. So yes, it's much cheaper for a company in the long run to self-host in many cases.