It highly depends on the person.<p>If a person is good with software engineering and system administration, they don&#x27;t need to pay more than few minute of their time once in a while, so SaaS <i>are</i> more expensive. I run various software that can be either used on subscription or self-hosted (like Sentry, GitLab CE or Drone) and my time investment in it was negligibly tiny (like... I find a deployment recipe, and run it, then check for the updates once in a while), compared to monetary fees of a hosted solution.<p>If a person can&#x27;t do the very basic maintenance, then maintenance costs are very high (they either have to learn stuff or pay someone to do every tiny task), so SaaS probably wins there, and probably by a large margin.