> - Cheap and powerful: All open-source, built from well-known parts, requires several containers to run, e.g. databases, queues, web servers / proxies, build tools, etc. You get all the power, can scale an tweak to your heart's content while self-hosting. If you're not afraid to tackle all this, wonderful, but be aware of the breadth of the technical chops you'll need.
What about lowering the number of dependencies your application uses, like only depending on a database? Running a database isn't that hard, and it also greatly simplifies the overhead of running 5 different services.
This works up to a point. Past a certain scale, running a database becomes hard(er), and you also start to need proxies, caches, load balancers, etc. to maintain performance.
I would agree, though, that many software installations never need to scale to that point. Perhaps most.
At what point do you hit that scale with project management software, though? Maybe you can't get to the point where you're managing all projects across all of Walmart from the same instance, but certainly you can run pretty much anything of reasonable size.
What about lowering the number of dependencies your application uses, like only depending on a database? Running a database isn't that hard, and it also greatly simplifies the overhead of running 5 different services.