Bitwarden is a niche application which handles very sensitive data. Value is created when it is hosted internally by a security sensitive organization.
When it comes to business and productivity applications the situation is very different. Many IT admins are tasked with moving to cloud (or other outsourced) solutions. When you see posts you have to realize you, or I, who value autonomy and control may not be the expected customer of these solutions.
To reduce the economics further:
* Startups like this have a product which may not have a complete market fit or reknown. They can't build something that's most likely to stick e.g. a required mail system because a couple of cloud products own the market. Therefore, they move up the productivity stack to team and document collaboration.
* Since they aren't a mature product and will likely change it considerably in the short-term, possibly "firing" customers as they search for a bigger market, they'll need their product to keep up. If they host it, then they can change it end-to-end.
* Any time you release a product that gets deployed on-prem it's virtually impossible to get people to update in a timely manner. Even if you decide to provide an on-prem version to a potentially huge customer, the enterprise sales cycle means that there is a risk your product will have changed before it gets deployed, but some person/process will prevent you get updated to the latest version as they advocate for a competitor.
* Worse, they like the old version and want to stay on it. How do you support these on-prem customers? They liked the value at your cloud pricing, but the cost to support on-prem customers can be much larger.
When it comes to business and productivity applications the situation is very different. Many IT admins are tasked with moving to cloud (or other outsourced) solutions. When you see posts you have to realize you, or I, who value autonomy and control may not be the expected customer of these solutions.
To reduce the economics further:
* Startups like this have a product which may not have a complete market fit or reknown. They can't build something that's most likely to stick e.g. a required mail system because a couple of cloud products own the market. Therefore, they move up the productivity stack to team and document collaboration.
* Since they aren't a mature product and will likely change it considerably in the short-term, possibly "firing" customers as they search for a bigger market, they'll need their product to keep up. If they host it, then they can change it end-to-end.
* Any time you release a product that gets deployed on-prem it's virtually impossible to get people to update in a timely manner. Even if you decide to provide an on-prem version to a potentially huge customer, the enterprise sales cycle means that there is a risk your product will have changed before it gets deployed, but some person/process will prevent you get updated to the latest version as they advocate for a competitor.
* Worse, they like the old version and want to stay on it. How do you support these on-prem customers? They liked the value at your cloud pricing, but the cost to support on-prem customers can be much larger.