Self Host your SaaS: Save Money, Safeguard Your Business, Ensure Your Freedom

Me

• Software Engineer, 9 years
• Founder, 508.dev: software engineering co-op, ~100 members, ~250,000USD/yr revenue
• FOSS Enthusiast
• ~150 TB in my house. 15 services for personal life self-hosted on 2 machines. 10 services self-hosted for co-op.
• ADHD
• Autistic special interest: crime

You

What SaaS products do you use? Examples: Notion, Google Workspace, JIRA. Let's keep track here.

Enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. -- Cory Doctorow

"I can just stay on the free version."
- A founder about to get fucked

Case 1: Publishers on Facebook

Facebook would overload feeds with content from publishers. Publishers became dependent upon FB traffic. FB waited, then reduced traffic. As it tightened the vice, it forced publishers to pay to have their articles actually show up, even to subscribers. Then, it forced publishers to "pivot to video" to force its customers to fund its attempt to compete with Youtube. When customers had spent billions on this pivot, it decided videos aren't profitable, and killed the product, and its customers along with it.

Case 2: Slack

Hack Club provides coding education and community to teenagers. The business was run on Slack. One day Slack sent them two bills: $50,000, due in a week, and $200,000 per year on top. Failure to pay within the week would result in 11 years of chat history being deleted and the server being shut down.

In another case, Slack raised prices to account for their new "AI features." Users that opted out of the AI features still pay the new prices.

Security

April 24, 2024: Dropbox hack leaks "customer information such as email addresses, user names, phone numbers and hashed passwords, in addition to general account settings and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication" of unstated number of customers.

2012: Dropbox hack leaks email addresses and salted hashes of passwords for 68 million users.

Bad Things Have Happened Before; it can Happen to You!

• Price increase erases margin
• License change makes your business model illegal
• Service is killed:
  • Because not profitable
  • Because acquisition
  • Because new product manager
  • Because woke
• Company bought by nazi; brand harm to continue using their services
• Company starts harvesting your customer's data to train its nazi AI
• Country that provides product gets invaded and the server room gets bombed
• The NSA nukes service provider's servers to get at Dr. Antifa, who happened to use the same SaaS as you
• America sanctions company, you can no longer access services
• America sanctions you, company bans you from using their services
• API for service is deprecated

Self Hosting Intro

Self Hosting is when instead of paying a monthly SaaS bill for access to a service, you deploy and manage a service yourself.

Let's find some FOSS, self-hostable alternatives to some of the SaaS products we discussed previously.

Advantages

• If hacked, your fault
• Hack less likely, you're not in a honeypot
• No service shutdown
• Cheaper, usually
• Data sovereignty (export)

Types of Self Hosting

Self hosting can be running applications on VPS you rent, or "on-prem" equipment literally in your office.

Or, it can be done through managed hosting.

On-Prem

Steps:

1. Buy VPS
2. Set up VPS:
   1. Set up SSH keys
   2. Disable root login
   3. Set up reverse proxy or cloudflare tunnels
   4. Install service (probably a docker compose file)
   5. If reverse proxy, set up Let's Encrypt using certbot
   6. Forward DNS
   7. Set up auto-backup
   8. Set up firewall
   9. Set up logging
   10. Occasionally update software

Or... Managed Hosting

Let's take a look at Elestio

Steps:

1. Click the service you want in Elestio
2. Copy the IP address for the server it provisions out of the "Configure Domains" modal
3. Paste that into an A record in your domain manager (cloudflare, gandi.net, whoever) under whatever subdomain
4. Enter the subdomain name back into the "Configure Domains" modal in Elestio

Shameless Plug to Leave On Screen While I Answer Questions

508.dev is always looking for excellent engineers to add to our team. We offer co-ownership of the business and thus better margins (85-95% rate to you) of any freelance situation outside of running your own thing solo. If interested, come talk to me or go to https://508.dev. We also have budget for kickstarting internal application development - have an idea but don't have the know-how, time, or budget to develop or market it? Come to us and engage in profit-share.

508.dev does client work. If you're looking for the best offshore engineers and are willing to pay a bit more than normal offshare rates (but far less than local ones probably) (also far less than Toptal), come chat! We do frontend, backend, fullstack, mobile, AI, ML, game dev, 3d modeling, blockchain, firmware, and more.

Read my blog: https://blog.calebjay.com

Read 508.dev's blog: https://blog.508.dev