Under software-as-a-service, indie development is not viable; for low-budget software to succeed, users must be able to run their own instances at no cost to the developer.

In today’s popular software-as-a-service model, indie development simply is not viable. People do it anyway, but their software is not accessible to the masses. In order for low-budget software to succeed, and in order for open source to make any sense at all, users must be able to run their own instances of the software, at no cost to the developer.