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https://keet.io is this industry's best kept secret. Encypted p2p chat with audio and video, no signups, it just works. My kids and their friends switched from Discord to Keet to avoid all the signup / authentication friction.

It looks interesting but no source availability is a red flag for me.

Is it open source?

Not being a fan of SaaS, I applaud your intentions, but want to add a note of warning.

As a case study, Atlassian do 'source available' with self-hosted or cloud-hosted options. This is a result of history, and I suspect Atlassian wishes they were cloud-only. The self-hosted option is de-emphasised on the website, costs more than SaaS per-user at most usage points. The Cloud product codebases has been totally redesigned over the last 10 years for horizontal scalability. Cloud-only features are rapidly being added, while development on the self-hosted codebase languishes (Atlassian's public bugtracker is full of trivial feature requests ignored for years, my favourite being https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-27618).

As for source code for self-hosters, while the bulk of it is still available, it isn't buildable because Atlassian routinely neglect to publish build dependencies, and they don't publish source for new libraries like Confluence's real-time editor.

In Atlassian's defense: consider the costs of offering self-hosted. SaaS products these days are built on top of other IaaS and SaaS: you can't do that without adding abstractions (docker/containers) or finding self-hosted equivalents. You need to maintain installation and administration documentation, and offer support for weird customer-environment-specific problems. Your build infrastructure needs to spit out both SaaS-deployable and self-hosted versions. Your billing systems need to handle both cases. Even your license agreements need to address two possibilities.

OTOH, while software companies love SaaS, many of their customers (particularly large, conservative ones) do not. Having a self-hosted option can thus become a competitive moat, since 99% of your competitors won't offer it.

So good luck with your strategy, if you feel you can pay the costs of offering that flexibility.


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