Your data never leaves your control
Customers, orders, stock, supplier prices and unpublished content stay in an account you own. There's no copy on our side to leak, subpoena or lose.
Bring your own cloud
The convenience of SaaS, in a cloud you own.
With BYOC, the software runs in your own cloud account, not the vendor's. You keep the data, the AI keys and the controls. The vendor keeps doing the hard part: releases, patches, migrations and support.
Makeships
Signed releases + license file
Your cloud account · your VPC
AWS · GCP · Azure · on-prem
running
Commerce
running
Inventory
running
Procurement
Postgres
Redis
S3 storage
AI provider keys
SSO / SCIM
SaaS, self-hosted or BYOC
Three ways to run business software.
SaaS wins on speed to start. Self-hosting wins on control. BYOC is built to get most of both.
| SaaS | Do-it-yourself self-hosting | BYOC with Makeships | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On the vendor's servers, shared with their other customers | In your infrastructure | In your own cloud account or servers |
| Who runs the servers | The vendor | You, including upgrades and security patches | Your cloud; we ship releases and migrations, or host it for you |
| Time to get started | Minutes | Days to weeks | An afternoon with Docker, or we set it up |
| How you pay | Per seat, per order or a percentage of sales, rising as you grow | Free software, but your team's time | Flat licence plus your own cloud bill; no cut of revenue |
| AI models and cost | The vendor's model choice, often resold as credits with a markup | Whatever you wire up yourself | Your own keys and provider; usage billed to you at cost |
| AI agents on your data | Only through the vendor's API, with their limits | Possible, if you build the access and guardrails | Built in: approvals, audit log and MCP servers inside your network |
| Data residency and audits | Depends on the vendor's regions and paperwork | You choose the region and controls | You choose the region, network rules, backups and access |
| When the vendor has an outage | You're down too | Unaffected | Unaffected: nothing calls back to a service we host |
| Upgrades | Whenever the vendor ships, whether you're ready or not | Whenever you find the time | On your schedule; migrations run automatically |
| Leaving | Export what the vendor allows | You already have everything | You already have everything: the database is yours |
✓ strength · ~ depends · ✕ weakness
The advantages
What you get by owning where it runs.
No tax on your growth
SaaS pricing climbs with seats, orders and revenue. With BYOC you pay a flat licence, and your cloud bill grows with actual usage, not with your success.
Use the cloud you already pay for
Run on your existing AWS, GCP or Azure account, and use the credits, committed spend, security tooling and backups you already have.
Pass security reviews faster
The answer to “where does our data go?” is “nowhere new”. Your own network rules, identity provider and audit trail apply from day one.
Other people's outages aren't yours
Your store keeps selling when a SaaS vendor has a bad day, and you choose when to take each upgrade.
No lock-in
The database, files and configuration are yours. Stop paying and the data is exactly where it was.
Why it matters more with AI
In the AI era, where your data runs decides what your AI can do.
SaaS made sense when software mostly stored records. Now software reads your data, reasons over it and acts on it. That changes who should hold the data, the models and the controls.
AI is only as good as the data it can reach
Useful agents need your real orders, stock, suppliers and content. With BYOC they work where that data already lives, instead of it being copied into yet another vendor's cloud.
Your keys, your models, your terms
Pick Anthropic, OpenAI or Mistral per task and switch as models improve. Calls go under your own agreement with the provider, including its data-use terms, with no reseller in between.
AI costs at cost
AI is billed by usage, and many SaaS tools resell it as credits with a margin. With your own keys, the invoice comes straight from the provider.
Agents that act need guardrails you own
When an agent drafts a purchase order or moves stock, you set the limits, a person approves, and the audit log sits in your account, not the vendor's.
Connect your own agents
Inventory and Procurement include MCP servers, so Claude or your own agents can work with live data from inside your network.
Heavy media stays put
Video dubbing, transcription and image localization process large files. Doing that next to your storage avoids shipping gigabytes to someone else's servers.
Who it suits
BYOC is a good fit for
-
Growing online sellers and D2C brands
Your customer list and margins are the business. Keep them, and stop paying a platform a share of every order.
-
Businesses with data rules to follow
Laws like India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and customer contracts put obligations on where personal data goes. Running in your own account keeps that answer simple.
-
Teams with a cloud account already
If you have AWS, GCP or Azure credits or committed spend, BYOC puts that budget to work instead of paying a SaaS vendor's hosting margin.
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Agencies and IT teams serving others
Deploy into each client's own account, so data never mixes between clients and every client can see where theirs lives.
-
Companies building with AI
You want agents on your data with your models, your limits and your audit trail, not a black box inside someone else's product.
Probably not yet
SaaS may suit you better if
- You have no one technical and don't want managed hosting: a SaaS tool may be simpler for now.
- You need something running in the next hour with zero setup.
- Your usage is tiny, so a few seats of a SaaS tool cost less than any cloud bill.
The honest trade-offs
What BYOC asks of you, and how we help.
You pay the cloud bill
Servers, database and storage are billed to your account. For small setups that's modest; we'll estimate it for yours.
Someone owns the account
A person on your side needs admin access to the cloud account. We handle the software; you control the keys.
Setup takes longer than a sign-up form
Docker makes it an afternoon, not minutes. Our Launch package does it for you.
Rather not run anything? Managed hosting (from ₹4,999 per month) gives you a private copy we run, and you can move it to your own cloud whenever you like.
Questions
About BYOC
What's the difference between BYOC and self-hosting?
Self-hosting usually means you run and maintain the software yourself. With BYOC it runs in your account, but the vendor still ships tested releases, security patches and database migrations, and supports you like a SaaS vendor would.
Do you have access to our data?
No. The apps run in your account and nothing calls back to a service we host. If you ask us to help set up or support your install, you decide what access to give, and you can take it away.
What if we don't want to run anything ourselves?
Managed hosting (from ₹4,999 per month) gives you a private, isolated copy that we run for you. Move to your own cloud later, and your data comes with you.
Which clouds does it run on?
Anything that runs Docker, Postgres and Redis: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, a VPS or your own servers.
How do updates work?
Pull a new release when you're ready. Database migrations run automatically before the new version starts.
See Makeships running in a cloud like yours.
We'll show how the apps deploy into your account, what stays there, and what it costs to run.