> Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds.

Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate the DOM after it loaded.

It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

> Stop self hosting.

Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want to get going and don't have resources for this.

Let me empathize but say, to put it bluntly, they do not have qualified IT Staff. They have 1 or 2 people who understand only basic web server stuff and nothing else. Thus the two week outage.

Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer and certainly cheaper than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their effort to save a few bucks.

> It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

You’re also locked into an ecosystem. It’s called Stripe or PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway.

> Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging

Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging, if it’s cheaper than an engineer to properly support a self-hosted solution, I’ll still make that trade as even $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it.