Designing Your SaaS App to be Self-Hostable

We are all in on designing our SaaS apps to also be self-hostable. Privacy, owning your data, compliances (HIPPA, FINRA), price, etc. All of these factors make the ability to self-host your apps extremely enticing for customers and businesses. This series will hopefully shed some light on why we are all in while providing some insight on how to make your own SaaS apps self-hostable.

What is a Self-Hostable App?

Just to set a starting point and some definitions for the entire course, it'd be good to start with the basics. What defines a self-hostable application? Well, I didn't look up a "formal" definition, so this is what we are going with.

A self-hostable application is a web application, SaaS, or service that your customers, can host on any server anywhere you want. This could be in a data center, on your laptop, or in your basement. A self-hostable application allows the customer to run the features of the code, but gives the customer ownership of the data.

The last piece is huge, ownership of the data. A key selling point/mindset of even designing a self-hostable application is that the customer owns their own data.

The Goal of This Series

Let's be real, we are in the age of AI. Writing "how-to" tech tutorials is a waste of time. You can literally ask the latest model and get everything you need within the context of your app. This series is not a tech tutorial, it's a guide on the thought process of designing your SaaS app to be self-hostable. The goal of this series is to help you think through the design concepts, steps and onboarding to add a self-hostable component to your existing SaaS or start from the ground up.

What Language Do I Need to Learn

Doesn't matter. If you use Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Python, JavaScript, you will be able to follow these principles. I may reference Laravel since that's what we use to make our apps, but the concepts will work across any language or platform.

So, do we make self-hostable apps?

I wouldn't be writing this if didn't. Over the last couple years we've been learning, building, and polishing our own products to be self-hostable. Our first launch is going to be Bugflow, a customer feedback application that we launched awhile back. Making this app self-hostable has taught us so much about design and user onboarding, and can't wait to share with you.

We also have Self-Host Pro. This is a licensing service that allows you to sell your Dockerized self-hostable apps to customers easily and securely. We provide the security and ability to market and sell your app. And yes, if you want to self-host Self-Host Pro, you can!

So yes, we make self-hostable apps. Both of these apps are your standard SaaS app, but are also capable to be self-hosted. We've learned a lot developing these apps and the mindset on how to build these apps. You will hear a lot more about these apps through out the series along with the other apps we have in the pipeline.

Let's get started!