[jillesvangurp]

I'm an engineer and CTO and well aware of how a "why don't you just ..." can escalate into a significant side project. The thing is I know how these things work and I've seen them escalate repeatedly. We used to run things like jenkins and gitlab self hosted. And we had to deal with outages, backups, things running out of disk, etc. It was doable but definitely a bit of a time-sink.

If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.

Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.