The unfortunate truth (that I've had to learn the hard way as a founder) is that whole IT approval process is inevitable for any vendor indexing source code.
Even when I've tried to offer lower price tiers, ~every company of 20+ people puts a ton of bureaucracy in place before disclosing source code. Dealing with this bureaucracy has a fixed cost, so it's inevitable that many companies end up excluding the lower end entirely.
I have and you're right. But in the context we're discussing here of buying software that has access to sensitive company data, on-prem is so much easier to approve.
Even when I've tried to offer lower price tiers, ~every company of 20+ people puts a ton of bureaucracy in place before disclosing source code. Dealing with this bureaucracy has a fixed cost, so it's inevitable that many companies end up excluding the lower end entirely.