SaaS vs self-hosting — what to choose for your app

TCO

A conversation about cloud costs starts with a single question: what exactly are we buying?. In practice there are three types of billing: flat fee, hourly, and mixed (base + overage). Each makes sense in a different scenario.

• Flat fee — a predictable cost, best for companies with a stable number of users and systems.
• Hourly — flexible, but hard to budget for a whole year.
• Mixed — the base covers 80% of the work, overage is billed separately; the most common model in SMEs.

What to watch for in a quote

The rate alone is not everything. Check what exactly the price covers, what the hour cap is, how out-of-scope projects are priced and whether travel is billed. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive offer in Poland can be 3–4× — and it usually comes down to what is "in the price" and what is not.

Security

Modern IT security works in layers. No single solution protects a company 100% — only a full set of layers (identity, endpoints, network, data, people) provides real effect. In the context of SaaS vs self-hosting — what to choose for your app it is worth starting with the basics:

• MFA on all accounts (no exceptions for the board — the most common gap).
• EDR/XDR instead of classic antivirus — it detects behaviour, not just signatures.
• Backups in several locations, including an offline or immutable copy — ransomware cannot encrypt them.
• Patches within 14 days of the vendor's release.
• Anti-phishing training at least quarterly, with simulations.

Flexibility

This section frames the topic "Flexibility" in the context of SaaS vs self-hosting — what to choose for your app. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

When self-hosting wins

The answer is "it depends" — but it depends on a few very concrete things that can fit on one page. For SaaS vs self-hosting — what to choose for your app the four key variables are: company size, industry, downtime tolerance, and budget.

• Companies up to 20 people — outsourcing and public cloud usually win.
• 20–100 people — a mixed model: a dedicated account manager + provider's team.
• 100+ people — an internal IT department supported by external specialists (security, cloud).
• Regulated industries (medical, financial) — always additional compliance layers, regardless of size.