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Comment by brap | Hacker News Reader

The list of main complaints against OSS they present here is (conveniently?) missing the biggest one, in my opinion:

Your users can just host their own version instead of paying you.

It seems like many OSS companies mitigate this by leaving out features from the OSS version or making the deployment more difficult than it should be. I’m not complaining, I think it’s fair, but this is the reality.

It’s funny how they don’t address this one, but instead they list “oh no my code isn’t pretty” as a valid complaint against going OSS. Who cares.

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Maybe I should have addressed this one more directly in the post.

>Your users can just host their own version instead of paying you.

The main value in Supabase (the hosted service) is we do the hosting, maintenance, monitoring, compliance, security etc. which otherwise requires (expensive) in-house expertise.

This should be enough without needing to resort to deliberately leaving out features, and I think this generalizes to other products as well (sentry, plausible, the-open-source-strava-alternative, etc.)

This depends on the product. Sometimes self-hosting is not just a matter of starting some Docker containers, but takes work and resources to scale and maintain properly. It might not even be a matter of the OSS version lacking features, but about the nature of the product itself.

For example, you can self-host WordPress if you want, and it's a perfectly capable product. But if you want to outsource the complexities around it, scale it easily, properly secure it, etc., it's worth considering using wordpress.com instead.

Isn't that a reflection of how bad WordPress is? That they haven't prioritised security and ease of use in the development of the product.

This model definitely leads to some perverse incentives.

No, there are maintenance issues with hosting WordPress that go beyond just the product. You need a domain and TLS cert, storage, bandwidth, a curated list of plugins, and an easy way to scale it all. None of this is core to WordPress itself. I'm not a WP user, but see all the features on https://wordpress.com/features/.

Grafana and its ecosystem of apps are another example. Sure, you technically could host and maintain it yourself, but Grafana Cloud streamlines all of that, which is worth paying for. This doesn't mean that Grafana products are intentionally limited, but that the commercial product offers value added features some users are willing to pay for.

The fact that some companies take advantage of this model doesn't mean that the model itself doesn't work. They're just not good companies to begin with, and don't understand open source.

The optimal architecture for a 1-user self-hosted project is very different than something built to serve 100k people, which is very different from a company serving 10M, and again for 5B.

Do you shard and partition the DB? Do you introduce a message bus? Do you add a caching layer? What about k8s and Terraform and Helm vs simply creating a single VM?

These are all very different levels of complexity to standup and manage. Some require entire teams to manage them.

Regardless of intentions, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution to architecture and infrastructure decisions.

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