Managed vs Self-Hosted Paperclip: Which is Right for You?

Running Paperclip yourself gives you full control. But control comes with a cost — your time, your team’s focus, and your infrastructure budget. Here’s an honest breakdown of both approaches.

What Self-Hosted Paperclip Looks Like

Self-hosting means running Paperclip on your own servers (VPS, dedicated, or cloud instances). You handle everything:

• Server provisioning — choose specs, OS, networking
• Docker/Kubernetes setup — containerization and orchestration
• SSL certificates — provisioning and renewal
• DNS configuration — pointing domains to your servers
• Monitoring — setting up alerts, logs, and dashboards
• Updates — keeping Paperclip and dependencies current
• Scaling — handling traffic spikes manually or with auto-scaling groups
• Security — firewall rules, secret management, vulnerability patching

For a single agent, this might take 2-4 hours to set up. For a production setup with monitoring, it’s more like 1-2 days. Then ongoing maintenance of 2-5 hours per week.

What Managed Paperclip Hosting Looks Like

With HostAgentes managed hosting, the setup looks like this:

1. Create an account
2. Click “New Agent”
3. Deploy

That’s it. Behind the scenes, we handle all the infrastructure. You get a live endpoint, monitoring dashboard, and automatic scaling — without touching a terminal.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Factor	Self-Hosted	HostAgentes Managed
Setup time	2-4 hours (minimum)	Under 5 minutes
Ongoing maintenance	2-5 hours/week	Zero
SSL certificates	Manual setup + renewal	Automatic
Scaling	Manual or complex auto-scaling	Automatic
Monitoring	Build your own stack	Built-in dashboard
Updates	Manual, risk of downtime	Automatic, zero downtime
Security patches	Your responsibility	Applied automatically
Global regions	Configure CDN yourself	42 regions, 1-click
Cost (5 agents)	$40-80/mo server + time	$15/mo Starter plan
Cost (unlimited)	$100-300/mo + time	€25/mo Pro plan

When Self-Hosted Makes Sense

Self-hosting is the right choice when:

• You have a dedicated DevOps team
• You need custom infrastructure integrations
• Compliance requires on-premise deployment
• You’re running 100+ agents and need granular control
• You enjoy infrastructure work (some people do!)

When Managed Makes Sense

Managed hosting is the right choice when:

• You want to focus on your product, not infrastructure
• Your team is small (1-5 people)
• You need to move fast and ship quickly
• You don’t have a dedicated DevOps person
• You want predictable monthly costs
• You’d rather spend time building features than managing servers

The Hidden Cost of Self-Hosting

The server cost is just the beginning. The real cost of self-hosting is opportunity cost — every hour your team spends on infrastructure is an hour not spent on your product.

For a team of 3 spending 5 hours/week on Paperclip infrastructure at $50/hour, that’s $750/month in labor on top of server costs. A HostAgentes Pro plan at €25/month eliminates that entirely.

Making the Switch

Already self-hosting? Migration is straightforward. Both setups can run in parallel, so there’s zero downtime. Our migration guide walks you through it step by step.

Compare plans and pricing →