In 2025, we have all seen a shift in the way Big-Tech companies work / operate, finding ways to further increase profits due to an overall rise of cloud hosting costs, this may be masqueraded by IT Media Publishing as "growth", where outlining the increases on Cloud Infrastructure by companies as something positive [One Reference], however, the current Enterprise trend points the next few years to a consumption shrinkage and relooking at "hybrid" solutions, [Reference].
Reflecting on this, how does that really impact your services consumption? Once overall Total Costs of Ownership grow for a digital product, think on "a photos apps", there are three logical and viable was of keeping financial profit coming.
- Growing the existing customer base
- Reduce Running Costs
- Diversify income sources
Empirical experience tells us, that organic growth, i.e. "stealing" more paying customers from other existing services is the hardest path, why? we all humans look for comfort, the comfort of convenience of using a solution where we feel comfortable. This concept tends to be a foreign one for many of the Technical Educated user base, which also happens to be a minority in all markets, this is one of the many reasons why iCloud, Google, even samsung solutions have a large user base that provides financial scalability to "improve" their offerings (e.g. more storage) for the "same" price, despite the rising costs.
Following the train of thought in the previous paragraph, we enter the reduction of running costs, when providing a digital product, the way that this translates is literally, make it as cheap as possible to operate, this means that the existing user base, even with "some" organic growth, what they end up seeing is worst tooling/support/availability/any other components related to the digital product (e.g. Photo App sync being super slow), this is an expected factor, when we see that the contemporary scenario is making most of the cloud providers rising their costs, due to external or internal factors, which just means that contrary of electronics production, such as a phone, making them cheaper over time due to larger batches, in digital products, it works the other way around, you consume more, hence, it is more expensive to run, maintain.
Last but not least, comes the third factor that over time, makes the Digital Products we use, worst, the famous "Enshittification" famously contextualized by Cory Doctorow, seriously read his books. Making the story short, it is all about finding different income sources from an already existing user base, basically, how do I use/analyze/sell/whatever the data of my already existing user base to continue growing my income.
By now, either I already lost you and you closed this window, or you are asking yourself, what does this have anything to do with Self Hosting? Why should I care?
Well, being cognizant about these factors are exactly the reasons we should be more comfortable on learning, extending ourselves, even increasing our current skillsets to increase the amount of #SelfHosting solutions we use every day, not only will ensure your data is more private, safe, but also, the services you are used to will see a natural growth on features aligned to the spirit you initially started using them, instead of becoming the product.
