> The issue comes when end-users expect the same level of support and continued updates from hobbyists as they got from commercialized apps.

Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that software will be more commoditized.

If software switching costs get close to 0 [because data is owned and can be opened by any other app], pricing pressure will get intense. Investors love cloud SaaS because they can rent-seek and extract margins of >80%. It's unlikely that apps that do not own and lock-in customer data can rent-seek to such a degree. If they do that, users will switch to the next best solution.

The product is not just the program. People don't just care about function, they care about how the app makes them feel, how it affects how they think others perceive them, etc. -- the companies that can afford to market and make their experiences sexy will run laps around purely functional apps that can't, no matter how well they solve the problem (unfortunately). Good marketers and designers do not have the same proclivities towards working for free as developers do.

The hope is that the markets are large enough that niche apps can carve out a healthy revenue with a more personal, "homegrown" experience. This is where my product lives, and so far it's worked well enough.

Also, switching cost is never zero or even close to it. The user still has to click a button. I know it sounds like I'm being facetious, but coming from a large-scale B2C industry, a single button click is an enormous obstacle.

For most use cases the solution should be evident further down the road. Overwhelming majority of why a server is needed is data sync between clients. Self-hosting should have it's moment where a simple user-maintainable server solution emerges. Then you could just offer a plugin to that platform - a bit like how Synology works already.

I've mostly been cloud free this way. I do send (sometimes encrypted) backups/copies elsewhere, but those are exceptions. And it works well across many client devices (and remote via DNS/forwarding).

But the reality is that there’s plenty of hobby app businesses that do the one time sale revenue model.

The internet is rife with stories of hobbyists who would love to give adobe $500 to just buy their software outright. Many Adobe competitors offer exactly this!

> However, hobby apps will not be able to afford designers or support or long-lived servers.

It's not like many professional services manage the long-lived part, either, is it?

I have much more confidence in my WebDAV server still being around in a decade than pretty much any cloud-based service.