[fragmede]

Given the market that you're after, why sell it as a SaaS? The people that want new subscription services, and the people that want to self-host feels like an empty set. Why not do the more traditional model of selling version 1 of the software for $x, and then when version 2 comes out, sell that for $y, and people with version 1 can pay $z to upgrade, where z < y.

The math could work out to be the same, but the psychology of marketing is everything. If I, as a hard-core-self-hoster, pay $60 for a version 1 of software that I can use forever, and version 2 comes out a year later, and I pay $60 for that; I'm much happier to do that, compared to having to pay $5/month for yet another subscription service, even though that's exactly the same amount of money. I already have so many subscription services! I don't want to pay for another one!

[erulabs]

That’s effectively the tactic with the hardware - however - home hosting does need a SaaS imo! Between remote access (proxying ala cloudflare tunnels), backups, VPN, there are nontrivial ongoing services that need to be in place for happy home hosting.

That said - you’re not wrong at all and that’s why our service is totally optional and our free tier is quite generous.

The saas for sure made more sense when our target customers were companies.

[fragmede]

The UX for a non-technical user to setup a port forwards is a total non starter, but self-hosted remote access and VPN are well covered by Tailscale + Tailscale Funnel these days. Backups for data is an actual service that people pay (and could get paid) for.