this is what soured me on piwik (now matomo) as a self-hosted web analytics solution. they allow you to self-host, but make it difficult to automate updates, to steer you to their hosting service instead.
it’s been a couple years now, so i don’t remember the details, but i tried to workaround the limitations and came away with the conclusion that automating upgrades was intentionally crippled rather than simply neglected. there was no documentation on it, and it was explicitly touted as a feature of the hosted product.
the problem is one of messaging and positioning in line with the parent comment’s criticisms. instead of calling the non-hosted version a limited demo, the implied claim is that the non-hosted version is ‘production-ready’. but ‘upgrades’ were fresh reinstalls, complete with database integrity issues at stake. it was clearly a gotcha situation to steer you quickly to the hosted version (rather than being upfront about this significant limitation).