Strapi is open source, so the licence costs nothing. That is true, and it is the least useful fact in the decision. Open source moves cost from a licence line to an operations line. Sometimes that is a saving. Sometimes it is the same money wearing different clothes.
This is more topical than it was: Strapi is removing the free plan from Strapi Cloud, so a number of teams are pricing this up right now.
What you actually pay for
- Infrastructure. Application server, database, asset storage, and a staging environment. Modest, and it is not nothing.
- Upgrades. Strapi moves quickly. Somebody has to keep up, test upgrades and fix what breaks.
- Security. Patching the application, the runtime and the operating system underneath it. This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that matters.
- Backups and monitoring. Both, tested. A backup nobody has restored is a hope.
- Somebody on call. The real cost. When it goes down at seven in the morning, there is no vendor to ring.
When it is clearly worth it
When you need the data on your own infrastructure for regulatory or policy reasons. When you need to customise beyond what configuration allows. When you want no ceiling on seats or records. When you want to leave without renegotiating anything.
Choose self-hosted because you need control. Choosing it purely to save money is how people end up with an unpatched CMS.
When managed is the better answer
If nobody owns infrastructure at your company, and nobody is going to, a managed platform is not a compromise. It is a correct decision. An unmaintained self-hosted CMS is more expensive than any subscription, and the bill arrives all at once.
The short version
Price both properly: infrastructure, upgrades, security, backups and someone’s time. If self-hosting still wins, it wins for good reasons. If it only wins because you assumed the licence was the whole cost, price it again.