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2026-05-11

Run SaaS on user-controlled servers

Disclaimer

• Thinking aloud. May not endorse after more thought.
• See also: Moxie Marlinspike's post on why "users don't want to run their own servers, and never will."
• See also: Minimise lines of code to avoid being controlled, not to increase maintainability
• See also: Why I love open source

Main

• Has someone experimented with the following model: User rents a cloud server from hetzner/aws/etc, user issues an ssh key, user provides the key to the software provider, and the software provider then manages the server from there onwards. Only if there is a major issue, and the user is a power user (knows to operate a terminal, can copy-paste code from AI), then the user can take back control of the server and do what they wish.
• The user is basically guaranteed that they can get a disk snapshot anytime and recover their data (albeit with a lot of work), and they are basically guaranteed they can shut down the service anytime.
• This seems like a marginal improvement for user freedom as compared to the current model which is that the SaaS provider hosts it on their servers not yours.
• Examples: A startup could let non-technical users run self-hosted email this way, as opposed to using gmail. Notion (or a competitor) could let non-technical users host their own notes this way, instead of using Notion as it currently is.

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