Ask HN: Would you pay for a SaaS even if its open source and can be selfhosted?
Depends very heavily on the product, but short answer &#x27;yes&#x27;. I already do pay for Open Source SaaS products.<p>For very critical infrastructure or for situations where I care a lot about data security, maybe not. It&#x27;s still not a totally easy sell, I don&#x27;t <i>seek out</i> SaaS solutions to my problems necessarily. But there are situations where I would (and again, actively do) pay for convenience and for someone else to handle deployment and security for me.<p>It&#x27;s actually a much, much harder sell to get me to pay for a SaaS solution that can&#x27;t be self-hosted and that isn&#x27;t Open Source. Just as one example, I pay for Wallabag because I don&#x27;t want to deal with deploying it. I would not pay for Pocket.<p>The Open Source part of a hosted software solution is about giving me a sense of security that it&#x27;s safe to use the product in the first place. The way I see it, the hosting is a completely separate service from that. Once you&#x27;ve convinced me that it&#x27;s safe to use your product and that if something goes wrong I can just move to self-hosting, then at that point you can make the sales pitch to me, &quot;and also wouldn&#x27;t it be nice if you didn&#x27;t <i>have</i> to self-host?&quot;<p>&gt; would you still pay around $5 to get the cloud version of the app?<p>I&#x27;ll also say that for personal usage around $5 a month falls basically squarely into my &quot;this is kind of an impulse purchase&quot; bucket. If you&#x27;re charging $20-40 a month for a personal service that I&#x27;m using just for myself independently, then like... I don&#x27;t know, do I really need it? Is it really worth paying for something I can do myself?<p>But $5 a month is very squarely in the range where that thinking completely flips and I start saying, &quot;I don&#x27;t know, do I really need to spend a day setting up a VPS? Over <i>$5</i>? It&#x27;s not worth it, I want to just shoot the dev some money and have one less thing to worry about on my monthly todo list.&quot;<p>But again, obviously that&#x27;s somewhat software-specific and depends a little bit on whether or not it is genuinely something that I really want to use. For business use-cases where it&#x27;s something more important, I&#x27;d probably be willing to pay more.