Self-hosting means you own the whole runtime: the database lives on your disk and the service processes answer to you — a vendor going under or changing its terms can't touch you. The cost is a bit of hands-on skill, though modern tooling has lowered the bar to a single docker compose command.
Enclave is fully open source under MIT; self-hosting is free, and you only pay for the model API you choose. Or pick the official hosted cloud and skip the ops entirely.
Try it yourself in Enclave
Open it in your browser — no credit card, no install.