Late to the game but another vote from me.

If you haven't seen a lot of demand for a self-hosted version, you might have beem asking the wrong people. Non-cloud advocates and companies with regulatory on-prem requirements tend to not be the loudest in the room for a myriad of reasons.

It's also unpopular and thus a waste of time to argue for self-hosted solutions in a room (or world) full of cloud-first evangelists with dollar-signs in their eyes.

It's just the fashion right now and fashions rarely care about being practical or affordable or safe for the average person, let alone any edge cases.

Why I am saying this: I want to strongly encourage you (and any software vendor really) to build and offer an affordable self-hosted version of your software. The demand is there, believe me, and if word spreads that your solution is a viable on-prem solution, interested parties will come out of the woodwork, you can be sure of that.

On-prem users tend to think more long-term because they (have to) invest more manpower, organizational knowledge and hardware into an on-prem deployment. So they tend to be less fickle and flighty than cloud customers and think long and hard before selecting a solution. However, as a result they tend to be loyal long-term customers and and such can be worth a dozen or more cloud-based customers. Might be worth considering.

Personally, we've planned to move away from Jira before 2022 exactly because of Atlassian's decisions to in effect kill its on-prem versions (by pricing them out of range for everyone but large enterprises customers with money to burn). So I can guarantee that Kitemaker will get a fair consideration (I just saved your page) if it offers an attractively priced on-prem edition before 2022 :-)

Good luck with your product, I do agree that it looks very slick and I will continue to watch with interest.

Thank you so much for this insightful comment. You (and the many others commenting) have given us a lot to think about in terms of on prem!

Just chiming in with a "me too". For my organization it's self-hosted or bust. We're looking to replace JIRA with something else right now.

Talk to companies in the defense and health/medical sectors.

They often have regulatory, privacy, or security issues that require on-prem solutions. Even if one can get some sort of certification regarding those issues for a cloud solution, it may not be universal and can make things much more difficult to confirm that the cloud solution meets their regulatory, privacy, or security requirements.

I have not looked at kitemaker yet, but we are in the same situation. On premise Jira will have to be replaced by something else. Cloud is not option due to privacy/security/compliance reasons.

I wonder why. Putting confidential data in the hands of some cloud vendor doesn't seem to be an option for any company I know in my country (which is why Jira will die out here).

My hunch is it's somewhat related to the companies who have been using us thus far (other startups, mainly) and also that people are pretty used to it since many of our competitors don't offer a self hosted option.

That being said, maybe it's an interesting way for us to stand out from the crowd.

Extra vote for this, my company prefers to keep the data inhouse whenever possible

If we were to use it (which would need gitlab/mattermost integration as mentioned before), we'd very much depend on having a self hosted option.

GitLab is our next planned integration and one of our current paying customers is using mattermost so it's something we're strongly considering.

And this HN launch has given us a lot to think about in terms of self hosting!

Just to balance out the crowd of self hosting fans, I work with compliance requirements and have no issues with managed services. Sign the right agreements and then it's not my problem to manage auditing and compliance requirements. I'm paying you to make it your problem. Self hosting just makes it my problem.

Regulated industry here, we can't use it if we can't self-host it.

How do you self-host? In a VM? Container? Do you prefer to host data on your own sql database? Or would you prefer an embedded sqlite or pgsql server?

Can I ask a probably naive question - is self-hosting the main requirement? Or are there other certifications that are required in addition to ensure, for example, that it doesn't phone home with your data? Or is all of that covered by the fact that you self-host and are in control of outbound traffic?

Not the person you're replying to, but in my case it must be self-hosted and be able to function while completely offline (and therefore no phoning home).

Adding myself to the list. Also worth considering that this would be a requirement for basically any government entity.