[nl]

> It feels like you are basically relying on a third party to do the work for you and you are paying them to do it.

Yes, which is great sometimes.

> I don't really get why someone who knows how to code would want to pay extra money to build a backend.

Because reinventing the wheel isn't the best use of time. It's more fun to work on interesting problems than yet another backend, again.

> Doesn't seem portable at all. If you make your own code, you can move it wherever you want in whatever system you want

You realize it is all open source and can be self-hosted, right?