The default in 2026 is SaaS for everything: email, CRM, CI runners. Agent orchestration is different. With a SaaS agent platform, your prompts, pipeline definitions, audit logs, model configurations, and every agent output live on someone else's infrastructure, with concrete consequences for how you can use the system.

What is at stake

Data sovereignty. Every prompt, pipeline, agent output, and audit event lives in the vendor's database. For regulated industries - finance, healthcare, defense, government - that is often a hard block. Self-hosted keeps your data on infrastructure you control: the difference between "we can use this" and "we cannot," with no vendor-run database holding agent outputs and no cloud dependency in the control plane.

Vendor lock-in. Your pipeline definitions, connector configurations, and agent prompts are stored in the vendor's format on the vendor's infrastructure, so switching costs are high. Self-hosting Farna Control on Docker Compose or a cluster behind a load balancer keeps your configuration yours.

Audit ownership. The audit trail is the most valuable output of a governed agent system. In a SaaS database you have read access while the vendor controls retention, export formats, and deletion. Self-hosted audit events live in your Postgres database, where you control retention, backup, export, and deletion; audit export is a feature of the software, not a request to the vendor.

Upgrade control. A vendor upgrade runs your pipelines on the new version immediately, with no staging, pinning, or rollback. Self-hosted lets you test against a staging instance, pin to a known-good version, and roll back if something breaks.

Cost model. Most SaaS platforms charge per seat, per agent invocation, or per token, so cost grows linearly with value. Self-hosted has no per-unit pricing; the cost is the infrastructure you choose to run it on.

The trade-off

Self-hosted means you manage the infrastructure: Docker Compose on a single machine or a small cluster. The operational cost is minimal - Postgres and Redis are well-understood technologies - but it is not zero. If you do not want to manage infrastructure at all, a hosted demo is planned but not yet available. In the meantime, the product tour shows the interface, and the install guide gets you running locally.

For production use, especially in regulated environments, self-hosted is the only model we offer that gives you the control and sovereignty governed automation requires. We built Farna Control self-hosted first: governance without data ownership is theater.

Farna Control is licensed under the Business Source License (BUSL), not a traditional open-source license. The source is available for self-hosting, but the license is restrictive by design. The critique of SaaS lock-in above is only credible if we are open about our own licensing, so we say plainly that "self-hosted-only" means no hosted SaaS edition is offered today, and the BUSL terms, not just infrastructure placement, define what you can and cannot do with the software.

The principle behind this: self-hosted, no telemetry - your infra, your data, no cloud dependency.