I guess with Zitadel they don't paywall any features, and with self-hosted option you get essentially the same thing as with hosted. I think you can probably even do multi-instance, however maybe without a management interface for that part of it... When I read Ory language, it says to me "you can try it out locally and itegrate, but we want you in our hosted solution right after" (I could be wrong, I was just glancing casually...)

Ory stack doesn’t hide any features behind a paywall. The quality of their documentation sucks quite a bit. It’s a decent product but setting things up can be a bit dull. One has to thread multiple Github repos and their incomplete scattered documentation together.

But once it works, it works.

Is there solid documentation or tutorial on deploying hydra + kratos? That's what stopped me last year. I've found some subtle pointers in some buried github issues, but nothing definitive. Which surprised me because one would thought that's the main use-case for many people and should be documented well.

there's the repository with examples: https://github.com/ory/examples