[johnward]

Also as for the business model you've mentioned. I've seen this done in competitive spaces like affiliate marketing. If you don't know most affiliates are super paranoid about thier data as leaking info about a campaign can lead to tons of copies and there goes your revenue. They seem to mostly prefer self hosted apps. Imobitrax offers a self hosted paid tracking system with a monthly fee. A lot of people used to use the free prosper202 self hosted tracking system too. Now recently I'm seeing a shift where people are not afraid to use cloud systems like voluum. I'm not sure what is causing the acceptance to change. It could just be that everything is cloud hosted now so people are getting used to the idea.

The problem I see with paid self hosted PHP apps, in this case, is that they are often using ioncube obfuscation and then if I can't read the source how do I know my data is more secure than a cloud provider?