Comparison
Self-hosted or vendor-managed: who pays for the peace of mind
Open-source software is free; the time of the person who patches it at every vulnerability is not.
Most of today's good tools ship in two forms: you install them yourself on a server you control, paying nothing for the licence, or you take them from the vendor as a service, on a monthly per-user fee. The first option is seductive because of the arithmetic: a server costing a few tens of euros a month replaces a subscription that, at thirty people, runs into the hundreds. What the arithmetic hides is the work you take on your own shoulders — installation, security updates at every announced vulnerability, backups verified by restoring them, certificates, monitoring, and recovery when something breaks on a Thursday evening. The second option moves that entire list to the vendor and leaves you a predictable cost and a service level agreement. The verdict rests on one concrete criterion: is there a person inside your company whose job description includes servers and who has time allocated to them? If there is, the self-installed option quickly becomes the cheaper one. If there is not, the saving on paper turns, over time, into an incident.
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Key takeaways
What installing it yourself gives you
No cost per user, so growing the team no longer grows the bill. The data sits on your infrastructure, you can modify whatever you like, you can stay on a stable version for as long as it suits you, and you do not depend on the vendor's commercial decisions.
What the managed edition gives you
Updates, backups, availability and support included in the price, plus a written agreement with a response time. Nobody in your company has to wake up at night for a service that will not restart after an update.
Where the costs cross over
Put the subscription multiplied by the number of users in one column, and the server plus the monthly administration hours at their real rate in the other. The crossover point sits, indicatively, somewhere between twenty and fifty users, depending on the tool.
The risk that never shows up in the table
An unpatched self-managed installation is one of the most common entry points into a company network. If you cannot guarantee an update cadence, the potential cost of one incident wipes out every saving calculated at the start of the year.
The five questions to answer before deciding
Who applies the security updates, and how quickly after a vulnerability is announced? Who verifies monthly that restoring from the backup genuinely works, not merely that the file exists? What happens to the service if that person leaves the company or takes a fortnight of leave? How long can you afford the tool to be unavailable before the business suffers? And finally, what documentation is left behind, so that the next person does not start from zero?
If the answer to three of those questions is that somebody will figure it out, choose the managed edition and spend the difference elsewhere. If you already have an administrator, an update process and monitoring that works for other systems, then adding one self-hosted tool costs very little at the margin, and the saving becomes real and repeatable year after year.
When you do not need us
For a team under twenty people that needs a communication tool, a file space or a ticketing system, the managed edition is the answer and there is no point paying for an installation project. Your own team's time is worth more than the subscription difference, and availability comes guaranteed by contract.
Call us when you genuinely have a reason: requirements to keep data on your own infrastructure, a user count at which subscriptions become oppressive, deep integrations with internal systems, or the need to modify the tool itself. Then we install it, document it and, if you want, take over administration under a maintenance contract — with the price stated in advance rather than discovered at the first incident.
Frequently asked questions
Is open-source software genuinely free?
The licence is free, the use is not. The cost moves into the server, the administration hours, the testing of updates and the time lost when something breaks. For companies that already hold those capabilities the saving is substantial; for those that do not, it is an expense disguised as a saving.
Can I start on the managed edition and move to my own server later?
With tools that offer both forms, usually yes, and that route is actually the prudent one: you first validate that the tool fits, then decide whether moving is worth it. Check the export format from the outset, and whether the installable version has the same features as the vendor-hosted one.
What counts as a reasonable update cadence?
For critical security fixes, hours or days rather than weeks. For ordinary releases, a planned monthly window with testing in a separate environment beforehand. If that cadence cannot be sustained, a self-hosted tool becomes over time the weakest link on the network.
Who is liable if I lose data on a self-managed installation?
You are, as the operator of the system, regardless of who performed the installation. Which is why a contract with whoever administers it must state explicitly how often backups run, where they are kept, for how long, and who tests the restore — otherwise you hold a promise rather than a guarantee.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247