I don't know if I fully agree with this -- how many people were actually self-hosting cal infra? I def could be wrong though

it's not necessarily about people self hosting it, it's about people preferring to pay for hosted stuff that is open source (e.g. I pay for Plausible).

Now it's a lot easier to rewrite open source stuff to get around licensing requirements and have an LLM watch the repo and copy all improvements and fixes, so the bar for a competitor to come along and get 10 years of work for free it a lot lower.

The issue isn’t would-be customers going to the trouble of self hosting to save a measly $30/month.

The issue is competitors popping up to clone your offering with your own codebase.