Self-hosted business management software — the honest trade

The key facts

• Self-hosting means running the software on your infrastructure: control, sovereignty, no per-seat vendor — plus updates, backups, security and support as your job.
• The honest comparison is total cost over two years: licence or subscription versus server, skills and the tail.
• BSimple is cloud-only — no self-hosted edition, stated plainly rather than softened.
• The genuine self-hosting wins: data sovereignty requirements, deep customisation, and teams that already run infrastructure well.

What self-hosting really trades

You gain: the data on your hardware under your policies; no vendor deciding uptime, upgrades or shutdown; customisation down to the code (with open source) or configuration (with licensed on-premise); and per-seat fees replaced by infrastructure costs. For organisations with sovereignty requirements, regulatory constraints, or strong internal IT teams, these are real advantages — not nostalgia.

You pay: a server and its failure modes (power, disk, backups that get tested — or do not); updates that become projects; security that is now your incident; and the quiet accumulation of one-truth risk — the unpatched system that "still works" is the one whose quantities nobody fully trusts. The on-premise trade-offs apply the same arithmetic to licensed software; self-hosting open source adds the open-source ledger — free licence, paid sysadmin.

Who self-hosting genuinely suits

Teams that already run infrastructure: if servers, backups and monitoring are existing competence, self-hosting adds a workload, not a capability gap. Organisations with sovereignty mandates: where policy or regulation requires data on your hardware, the trade is made for you. Businesses with genuine customisation needs: deep changes to workflow or data model that no SaaS product will make.

The unsuit signals are equally clear: no named person who owns the server; "the cloud" feared on instinct rather than evidence; and a business whose real problem is stock truth, not architecture. For most small and mid-size operations, the record — live, shared, auditable — matters more than where it runs, and vendor-run infrastructure is the lower-risk path. The trust conversation is the better test than architecture preference.

BSimple's position, stated plainly

We build BSimple, so weigh that: it is cloud software with no self-hosted edition — and we would rather lose the requirement here than promise a product that does not exist. What the cloud model buys a wholesale, manufacturing, distribution or trade business: one live record across every site and device, barcode scanning and portals without installation, updates and backups as the vendor's job, invoices crossing to Xero or MYOB (US integrations rolling out), and a public REST API keeping your record readable — no one-way doors, even in someone else's cloud. Plans run $180/$250/$399 per month AUD, with the trial as the full product. The offline variant of this requirement has its own honest page.