Since 2011 I've been developing digital signage software, today mostly open source, and I co-own a company that sells both: SaaS licenses and self-hosting support. No hidden agenda here, just 15+ years of watching what actually happens when businesses choose one over the other.

When SaaS makes sense

If you're running a handful of screens for a short-term campaign, or you just need something up and running today without touching a server, SaaS is the honest answer. Low upfront cost, automatic updates, nothing to maintain.

No IT department needed, no server to babysit. For small setups with no sensitive data and no long-term commitment, it's perfectly fine. It's also a legitimate way to test a business idea before committing to infrastructure. A low barrier to entry is a real advantage when you're still figuring out if something works.

The same applies to identity management. Hooking into an existing SSO or using a provider like Azure AD or Okta means your team can log in from day one without setting up anything. Practical, fast, no friction. Until it isn't anymore.

Where it gets uncomfortable

The subscription that felt cheap in year one looks different in year three. But that's not even my main concern. What I see more often: vendors get acquired, prices double, roadmaps shift, and suddenly your screens depend on decisions made in a boardroom you have no access to. Your data sits on infrastructure you don't control, often in jurisdictions with different privacy laws than yours. And when the provider has an outage, you wait. That's it. You just wait.

This isn't a digital signage problem. It's an SaaS and also cloud problem. Broadcom acquired VMware and overnight turned reasonable licensing into something many companies simply couldn't afford anymore. Microsoft can lock your entire organization out of Teams and Exchange the moment a license lapses, payment fails, or a political decision is made.

Twitter killed its API and took dozens of businesses that had built on it down with it. Google has a graveyard of discontinued products that people and companies relied on. Heroku killed its free tier and thousands of small projects went dark the same day. The pattern is always the same: it works great until someone else makes a decision.

In digital signage the consequences are just more visible. Your screens go black. In a hotel lobby, a hospital corridor, a retail store. No workaround, no fallback. You wait for someone else to fix their problem.

Self-Hosting

Self-hosting means you run the software on your own infrastructure. Your server, your data, your rules. No one can double your prices, kill the product, or lock you out. You decide when to update, whether to update, and what to do with your own data.
That's already a fundamentally different position to be in.

With FOSS it goes further

Open source adds another layer. The code is auditable, you're not trusting a black box. If I stop developing GarlicSignage tomorrow because I choose to continue my life as a buddhistic monk, the code stays. Someone can fork it, maintain it, build on it. The community doesn't depend on my business decisions. That's not a feature, that's a guarantee.

For regulated environments like healthcare or the public sector, auditability isn't a nice-to-have. It's often a requirement. You can't put a closed-source black box on a hospital network and call it compliant.

The honest part about self-hosting

Self-hosting isn't free in the sense of effortless. Someone has to set it up, keep it running, and deal with it when something breaks. That's a real cost, just not one that shows up on an invoice.

For a small business with no technical background, "just spin up a server" is not helpful advice. You need someone who knows what they're doing. That might be an employee, a freelancer, or a managed hosting provider. Either way, it's a dependency of a different kind, one you at least have some control over.

Updates don't happen automatically. That's a feature if you value stability and hate surprises, and a liability if you ignore them for two years and suddenly have a security problem. Self-hosting rewards people who take it seriously and punishes those who don't.

Backups are your responsibility. Monitoring is your responsibility. If your server goes down at 3am, no one is going to fix it unless you or someone you hired does. There's no support ticket that makes it someone else's problem.

And then there's the setup itself. Depending on what you're running, it can be straightforward or a rabbit hole. A well-documented open source project with an active community makes a massive difference here. A poorly maintained one with no docs is a different story entirely.

None of this is a reason to avoid self-hosting. But going in with romantic ideas about full control without understanding what that control costs you in time and attention is how people end up abandoning it halfway through and blaming the software.

The question isn't whether you can self-host. It's whether you're willing to own it.

What it Actually Comes Down to

This was never a price discussion. SaaS costs less to start and more to leave. Self-hosting costs more upfront in time and attention and pays off the longer you run it.

But the real question is how much control you're willing to hand over, and to whom. I offer both models because both have their place. But if you ask me what I'd run my own infrastructure on: something I can see, touch, and own. Not because I'm ideological about it, but because I've watched too many businesses rebuild from scratch after someone else made a decision for them.

My skepticism about depending on other people's software decisions goes back further than that. In 1992 I was an enthusiastic OS/2 user. Technically superior to Windows, great object-orientated GUI concept, backed by IBM, and then slowly strangled. Partly because it wasn't profitable enough, partly because Microsoft made sure it wouldn't be. Everyone who had built on it had to start over. That stuck with me.

Originally published on sagiadinos.com