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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