I’ve been exploring the hidden costs of self-hosted software, specifically, the silent revenue leaks that come from unauthorized deployments, lingering trials, and unmonitored usage.<p>Most devs I spoke to shared stories of enterprise clients spinning up “temporary” instances that ran for months, or trials that never actually ended. If you’re selling self-hosted, how are you tackling this?<p>I wrote up my findings and what can be done about it here:<p>https://kagehq.com/blog/hidden-revenue-leak-self-hosted-software<p>Would love to hear how the HN community is handling this.
By making the software FOSS and charging for support instead of usage. Definitely not with DRM that could leave you legally liable for disrupting a company's entire operations when an inevitable false positive happens.
We should license as CC-BY-cy-4.0. it clearly mentions that they cant commercialize. Btw, when they self host, they cant access your source code, right? unless you opensource your code?