We chose a weird middle ground between SaaS and self hosting for our Discord product
We have been building Daptera and one of the hardest decisions was deciding what the customer should actually own.
Most Discord SaaS products give every customer access to the same shared bot.
The opposite approach is self hosting, where the customer owns everything but also has to manage the server, deployment, updates and uptime.
We chose a middle ground.
The customer creates and owns the Discord application and bot identity. We manage the runtime, updates and the software behind it.
This makes the product slightly harder to explain, but we think ownership matters for communities that want their own identity without becoming infrastructure operators.
We recently launched at $7.99 per month and are now trying to validate whether that ownership model is actually something communities value enough to pay for.
For anyone building SaaS around third party platforms, how much ownership do you give the customer versus abstracting everything away?
Daptera is here for context:
Posted Sep 14, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC