Compare
Open source vs Cloud
Feature comparison
| 🌈 | Open source | ☁️ | Cloud (even Free plan) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Webhook madness | ✅ | Eliminated | ✅ | Eliminated |
| Hosting | ✅ | Self-hosted | ✅ | Cloud |
| Edge first performance | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| Low latency updates | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| Same core engine | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| Complete per-customer data isolation | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| Unified ingest mode | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| ↳ Dependable unified webhooks | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| ↳ Automatic retries to your endpoint | ✅ | Yes | ✅ | Yes |
| ↳ Rate limits | ⚠️ | Higher chances of hitting Stripe rate limits if exceeding ~$10-50K ARR | ✅ | Practically impossible even at $100M+ ARR, graceful fallbacks built in if ever needed |
| Instant access mode | ❌ | Cloud only | ✅ | Included |
| Deep sync mode | ❌ | Cloud only | ✅ | Included |
| Infra monitoring & maintenance | ⚠️ | You / your team is responsible | ✅ | Set it up once and never worry about syncing billing state again |
| Product focus | ⚠️ | Build for & debug billing webhooks | ✅ | Focus on your core product 🎯 |
| Zero downtime | ⚠️ | Webhooks need to be paused during version upgrades | ✅ | Zero downtime |
| API schema updates | ⚠️ | You need to manage updating Sanebase as soon as possible to ensure compatibility | ✅ | Never worry about API updates again |
| Data sovereignty | ✅ | Use your own cloud infra | ✅ | Bring your own cloud (Enterprise) |
Cost breakdown
Open source
- Cloudflare Workers -> $0 or $5/mo+
- Neon Postgres -> $0 or $20/mo+
- Maintenance cost -> $1,200/month or ~16 hours/month
- Sanebase is built with minimal maintenance in mind.
- So lets say, 1 engineer spends 4 hours a week on maintenance.
- Engineer’s hourly rate: $75/hour (varies by country; adjust as needed).
- Weekly Cost: 4 hours x $75 = $300/week
- Monthly Cost: $300 x 4 = $1,200/month
Cloud
- Start for free, stay free till you exceed some minimum ARR.
- Pricing scales as your transactions increase
- Costs $20/mo per 100K ARR
- Even at $1M ARR, you pay only $200/mo to eliminate serious state-sync chaos.
- Once you cross $1M+ ARR, maintenance time/cost skyrockets debugging sync issues.
- You’re not paying for a webhook gateway, your paying for proper state management, peace of mind and freedom from debugging Stripe webhooks.