Cloud vs self-hosted employee tracking for a 50-person company
At fifty employees the decision is genuinely close, which is exactly why it gets made badly. Here is the arithmetic and the three questions that settle it.
At ten employees, cloud. At two hundred and fifty with a compliance requirement, self-hosted. At fifty, it is genuinely close — and close decisions are the ones that get made on instinct rather than arithmetic.
The direct cost
| Cloud (Growth, annual billing) | Self-hosted licence | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | ₹47,520 | ₹70,000 |
| One-time setup | — | ₹25,000 (first year only) |
| Server | Included | ~₹24,000 to ₹60,000 a year for a suitable VM |
| Someone to run it | Included | Two to four hours a month of an engineer’s time |
| Backups | Included | Your storage and your script |
| First-year total | ₹47,520 | ~₹1,35,000 plus staff time |
On the numbers alone, cloud wins at fifty people. The licence looks cheaper in isolation and stops looking cheaper the moment you count the server and the person. This is the part vendors selling self-hosted licences tend not to spell out, and it is why we are spelling it out.
So why does anyone self-host at fifty?
Because for a meaningful set of companies the decision is not about cost at all. Three questions decide it, and if the answer to any of them is yes, the arithmetic above stops mattering.
Question 1: does a contract or policy require it?
Client agreements in banking, insurance, defence, healthcare and government-adjacent work increasingly specify where employee and project data may reside. If your contract says it, the decision is made and the only remaining question is how to do it well. This is the most common driver we see.
Question 2: what would be in a screenshot?
A screenshot of a developer’s machine may contain client source code, customer records, credentials or unreleased product. Some organisations look at that and decide it does not go on a vendor platform at any price. That is a defensible position and no feature comparison will change it.
Question 3: is there someone to run it?
The honest one. Self-hosting adds a server that needs patching, a backup that needs testing and a disk that needs watching. If your answer is "our developer will look after it", ask that developer. A neglected self-hosted installation is worse than a cloud subscription in every respect, including security.
If the answer to 1 and 2 is no, take cloud. If it is yes but the answer to 3 is also no, take private cloud — a single-tenant instance in your region, operated by someone else. It exists precisely for this case.
Where the crossover actually is
| Employees | Cloud Growth | Self-hosted licence | Lower |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | ₹23,760 | ₹40,000 | Cloud |
| 50 | ₹47,520 | ₹70,000 | Cloud |
| 100 | ₹95,040 | ₹1,20,000 | Cloud |
| 250 | ₹2,37,600 | ₹2,25,000 | Self-hosted |
The crossover on licence price alone sits around sixty people. Add the server and the staff time and the practical crossover moves out to roughly eighty or a hundred, unless one of the three questions above has already decided it.
What you give up either way
Choosing cloud, you give up
- Control over where the data physically sits.
- Control over when upgrades happen.
- The ability to say "no sub-processor" in your privacy notice.
- Operation on a restricted or air-gapped network.
Choosing self-hosted, you give up
- Somebody else worrying about patching and backups.
- Being live this week rather than after provisioning.
- Automatic scaling when you hire forty people.
- An answer to "what happens when that engineer leaves".
Related
Frequently asked questions
At what headcount does self-hosting become cheaper?
Around 60 employees on the Growth plan, and earlier on Pro. But the licence price is not the whole cost — add the server and the person who maintains it before concluding anything.
Is self-hosted more secure than cloud?
Not automatically. It is more *controlled*. A well-run cloud platform is more secure than a self-hosted server nobody patches. Self-hosting is the better answer when you have the operational capability, or when the requirement is contractual rather than technical.
Can we start on cloud and move later?
Yes. Data exports in full and imports into a self-hosted installation, and the desktop trackers are repointed at your own URL. Starting on cloud is not a one-way door.
Try it on your own team this week
Start on the cloud in ten minutes, or tell us your headcount and where the server has to live and we will price the self-hosted licence on the call.
- 7-day trial
- No credit card
- Cancel anytime