Hey, that's me!
When I posted this myself on Reddit, I said the following:
I've long held off on actually posting this article to a platform like this one (don't bash your competition and all that), but "isn't Sentry self-hosted?" _is_ one of the most asked questions I get, and multiple people have told me this blog-post actually explains the rationale for Bugsink better than the rest of the site, so there you have it.
Well done! I came to the same conclusion (with the exact same bewilderment steps) as I do love Sentry myself. I will definitely try Bugsink, it’s something i’ve been looking for ages.
Feedback on competition bashing: sometimes they deserve it, they should really just come out and say it: “open sourcing our stuff isn’t working for us, we want to keep making money on the hosting”, and that would be ok
fwiw I was always pretty transparent about our priorities:
https://blog.sentry.io/building-an-open-source-service/
We enable self-hosting because not everyone can use a cloud service (e.g. government regulation), otherwise we probably wouldn't even spend energy on it. We dont commercialize it at all, and likely never will. I strongly believe people should not run many systems themselves, and something that monitors your reliability is one such system. The lesson you learn building a venture backed company, and one that most folks miss: focus on growth, not cost-cutting. Self-hosting for many is a form of cost-cutting.
We do invest in making it easier, and its 100% a valid complaint that the entire thing is awful today to self-host, and most people dont need a lot of the functionality we ship. Its not intentional by any means, its just really hard to enable a tiny-scale use-case while also enabling someone like Disney Plus.
Despite my earlier comment, the way Sentry approaches open source is at least a little better than the majority, so its good that you at least provide an escape hatch that means heavy integration with Sentry isn't a complete vendor lock.
On your second point, you're right that self-hosting is cost cutting, but I found that when a business is growing, the features that sentry offers are more of a nice to have along the way, not quite critical to its success (No point capturing errors if no-one's using your bloody thing). Its easy to rack up that monthly bill with nothing but nice to have hosted services.
What I'd love to have is dumb versions of tools to self host initially when the requirements (and traffic) is very low. Kibana for example is a pig to self host, at one point it was taking up 25% of our production capacity. I found Loki is much better for simple cases in the beginning.
Good example that strikes a balance is Grafana / Prometheus. Its practically impossible to run a software shop without them, and everywhere I worked went through the same phases: Chuck a set of random containers in prod -> Deploy helm chart -> Migrate to Thanos -> Move to hosted Grafana when user/teams management gets out of hand.
Benefit is that absolutely everyone is familiar (and even likes) your tooling, I hope that's enough of a reason to give away a simpler offering.
Your project is awesome, you should do a show HN later.
Thanks for the kind words!
In fact I did one last week, but it got only a fraction of today's article's traction... I'll try again in whatever the prescribed interval is :-)