I don’t ever plan on using the Cloud hosted version, I have nothing against it and I think you are doing right by offering it as an option for those who do not care about self-hosting.
For those of us who will only self-host, I would like to see a paid tech support option. Mainly as a way to support the development of the open source agent and get prioritized responses on questions. I hope that if this becomes an option that there is always only one version of the agent, that being 100% open source with no paid extras.
I’m also an “on-prem only” user and I’d like to chime in that the whole “cloud enabled by default” design architecture put me and my colleagues off quite a bit initially since it seemed like the first thing you needed to do when installing netdata was to manually disable a bunch of privacy concerns that don’t seem like they should be the default to begin with.
I appreciate that you need to make money and that there’s a large demand for a cloud service, but i’d ask you to please consider what appearance this gives for users who for whatever reasons have high privacy and self-hosting requirements.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. You could, for example, offer separate releases with all cloud functionality removed as well as offer on-prem support contracts without having to stop offering the cloud solution.
What amount of business is lost because of this is of course anyones guess, maybe it’s not worth it, but it’s also possible you’re leaving money on the table because of this strategic decision of prioritizing cloud.
Thanks @tirpitz for the input. I actually do think “on prem” approaches are for sure being actively considered again. Nothing concrete that I know of yet but I get the impression we defo are thinking through it technically, if/how we could do it in terms or backend architecture etc.