By the Onsites AI team · Last updated · 4-minute read
The self-hosting conversation usually collapses open source into "free" and licensed into "expensive," which muddles the two dimensions that actually differ: what the license lets you do, and who does the work the software assumes. A help desk is an operation, not a codebase — it needs uptime, updates, backups and someone answerable when inbound mail stops flowing. Compare three models on those terms and the choice stops being ideological: managed cloud, licensed self-hosted, and community open source. This guide prices all three honestly, with special attention to the costs open-source enthusiasts undercount and the control licensed buyers forget they are pricing in.
The genuine gifts: zero license fee, source you can audit line by line, fork rights as insurance against abandonment, and a community whose issue tracker is public history. For a team with engineers who like the software's internals, these are real and worth real money. The ask is the part of the ledger that hides in plain sight: self-hosted open source makes you the vendor — upgrades applied on your time against upstream commits nobody tested for deployment, security triage on your calendar, the breaking change in a dependency discovered in production because no release engineering stood between you and it. The community forum is brilliant, and its support SLA is "when someone feels like it." None of this argues against the model; it argues for counting its second line item, which is not in dollars but in an engineer's Tuesday.
A commercial self-hosted license — in Onsites AI's case, $15 per seat per month, billed annually, 10 seats minimum — purchases the thing open source cannot promise: answerability. Installation support is included; software updates are included, engineered, tested and shipped as releases rather than as upstream diffs; and technical support is a channel with a name on it, meaning the 2 a.m. failure has an owner who is not on your payroll. Combine that with the architectural gifts self-hosting brings — your network, your jurisdiction, your AI model, no per-action meters — and the license is the price of "self-hosted, with a vendor." The honest cost accounting has three lines: the license, the hardware, and the operations hour per month (see the Docker deployment guide for how small that hour is when the scripts are included).
Run the same audit on each row and the picture resolves. Setup: cloud is an afternoon (free tier costs nothing to try — 15 minutes, truly); licensed self-host is a day with support included; open source is "a weekend," which is a sentence containing a weekend. Running cost: cloud is metered (seats, storage packs, AI credits — fully transparent, but volumetric); licensed is the license plus hardware; open source is hardware plus people-time, and people-time is the most expensive unit in IT when multiplied by months. Failure cost: cloud carries vendor liability; licensed carries yours with a support line to call; open source carries yours, alone, with your own escalation tree. Exit cost: all three should be exportable — insist on it in any model, because the migration door has to exist or today's choice becomes next decade's tenancy.
Be honest with yourself row by row before the choice compounds. Managed cloud assumes: a person who can invite teammates and read a settings screen — nothing else; every infra role is the vendor's. Licensed self-host assumes: someone comfortable running Docker Compose, attaching volumes, reading logs, and applying a monthly release — a part-time generalist, not a department; the vendor carries product engineering, release testing and the support channel, which is precisely what the license prices. Open source assumes: the full stack in-house — Linux administration, database care, reverse proxy and certificates, monitoring, security patch triage, upgrade rehearsal on staging — plus time on the project's tracker, because upstream is a community, not a contractor. Two concrete litmus tests that have predicted outcomes well: first, could your team independently perform the restore drill and document it quarterly without prompting? Second, when the desk must be upgraded this week for a security grade, who exactly does it, and is their Tuesday the cost you intended to buy? Where the honest answer to either is "nobody yet" but data residency still demands self-hosting, that is the licensed model's exact use case — control without pretending to be your own software department.
A rule that fits most organizations: choose by who owns the consequence, not by who owns the code. If no one in your organization can or should own support infrastructure consequence — most young companies, most non-technical shops — take the managed cloud; with Onsites the free tier (3 seats, 100 MB, everything included) makes that a zero-cost default, upgraded only when meters genuinely bite. If consequence ownership is a requirement but ops staffing is thin — regulated teams, residency-contract winners, sovereignty-sensitive trades — licensed self-hosted is the model that delivers control with an answerable party. If consequence ownership is a core competence — you run infra anyway, engineers want the internals, and the vendor relationship is what you are escaping — open source is legitimate and its ledger is honest as long as the people-time line is written in. The mistake is only ever one of ordering: choosing the license without needing the answerability, or choosing the free code without pricing the pager.
One more honest note to end on: these models are delivery modes of software that increasingly looks identical from the agent's chair. The desk your team lives in — queue, CRM, quotes, invoices, AI copilots — is the variable that changes their week; the deployment mode is the variable that changes yours. Price both, choose deliberately, and let the trial windows — the 60-day self-host trial, the free cloud tier that never expires — do the arguing for you.
What is the real cost difference between open source and licensed self-hosted help desks?
Open source has zero license fee but makes your team the vendor — updates, security triage and 2 a.m. failures become internal engineering time. A licensed deployment (Onsites: $15/seat/month annual, 10-seat minimum) buys tested updates, installation and support as included services, so the ledger is license plus hardware plus roughly an ops hour a month.
Why would a regulated company pick a license over open source?
Answerability: a licensed deployment ships engineered, tested updates and provides a named support channel — the same data control as open source (your network, your jurisdiction, your AI model) without your team owning upgrade and incident risk alone.
Does open source actually save money for small teams?
Usually not: a 3-seat cloud team pays $0 on Onsites' permanent free tier, while any self-hosted option exchanges dollars for people-time. Open source pays off mainly where infra competence is already on staff and the software's internals are a reason to run it, not a burden.
Can we migrate away from whichever deployment we choose?
Yes — insist on it in all three models. Exports of conversations, CRM and documents are yours by design; the migration path between cloud and self-hosted is a parallel-run week, not a rebuild.
What is the one-question version of this decision?
Choose by who owns the consequence: no in-house owner → managed cloud (free to start here); owner required but ops team thin → licensed self-hosted; owner as core competence → open source, with the pager priced honestly.