[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I say this as someone who likes the idea of self-hosting, especially for the privacy implications, but the economics of software just benefit SaaS for the time being. There are just too many efficiencies to keeping the backend in the control of the software developers. Schema changes are far, far easier (if you're not sure whether a schema change is going to stomp on real user data, you can pretty easily find out). Similarly, when all of the data is colocated with the backend service, multiple stacked roundtrip latencies are often fine.

And when you release a new feature, it benefits new users right away and you get paid for those features right away. You don't have to wait for a new version to ship. And consequently, you get feedback right away, which means you don't stack bugs on bugs only to find out at release time (this is basically agile vs waterfall).

Subscriptions are essentially the only sensible pricing model for anything with regular, frequent upgrades, and until we can make self-hosted software as easy and reliable as SaaS software (for the same cost) then we aren't going to see very much software distributed to end users (lots of software has gone the other direction though--e.g., office suites).