If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust. With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering. If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.

This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.

I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.