Why I stopped building a monthly AI visibility SaaS and switched to self-hosting (one-time pricing)

Over the last year, I noticed a pattern with many AI visibility and SEO tools I tried.

They usually start useful, but over time become expensive, opaque, and hard to justify on a monthly basis — especially when usage isn’t consistent.

We actually built a subscription AI visibility SaaS ourselves. But while using it internally, something felt off. We wanted full control over data, prompts, and API costs, yet we were charging people monthly for a black-box experience.

So we stopped the SaaS version and rebuilt it as a self-hosted AI visibility tool with a one-time price instead.

Not saying SaaS is bad — it’s convenient in many cases — but I’m curious how others here think about this trade-off:

For AI visibility tools, do you prefer convenience or ownership?

Sharing the link here for context:
https://www.mayin.app/