Owning your data platform is liberating right up until it pages you. Six months of running the full stack ourselves taught us more than any managed dashboard ever did.
What worked
- Full control over backups, keys and versions.
- Local development against the exact same stack as production.
- Costs that scale with hardware, not per-row pricing.
What bit us
Configuration files are sharp objects. A single file with the wrong line endings once took authentication down entirely — the config parsed, matched nothing, and failed in silence. The lesson: when a config mysteriously does nothing, check the file before the service.
Self-hosting does not remove complexity. It moves it somewhere you can finally see it.
