The essence: who is responsible every month?
Where the server lives is just a consequence. The axis that money follows is this: after delivery, who is responsible for what happens every month — servers, errors, backups, improvements, technology change?
- With the owned stack, responsibility passes to you at delivery. There's no basis for a monthly fee, so a one-time price is the honest price.
- With SaaS, the developer actually works every month. Server costs, AI costs and improvements keep occurring, so a monthly fee is natural.
Avoid services where the monthly fee is just "rent for sitting there." But if it's payment for real work every month, it's far cheaper than one employee's salary.
Six decision criteria
- You have security or air-gapped requirements → the owned stack. Configurations like on-device AI that runs inside your network without internet access (MAEUM Runtime) belong to the owned stack.
- You have nobody to manage servers and software → SaaS. The whole operations burden moves to us.
- Upfront budget is tight → SaaS. Start from a ₩0 build and spread the rest as a monthly fee.
- You want to pay once and be done → the owned stack. Use care session only when needed afterwards.
- Your business keeps changing and you keep wanting features → SaaS. Feature consultation and building are included in the monthly fee.
- You want the IT asset on your company's books → the owned stack. The system becomes company property.
Three common misconceptions
① "With SaaS, the developer owns our data?" No. Business data belongs to you, and export at contract end should be guaranteed — that's the normal arrangement. ② "SaaS is hard to cancel?" Avoid anyone who locks you into long commitments. If the monthly value is less than the cost, you should be able to cancel. ③ "Once you choose, you can't switch?" No. You can start with the owned stack and move to a SaaS operations contract when you want operations handled, or the reverse. Switching scope and cost are confirmed first.
Decide during scoping — with the numbers
You don't have to make this choice by gut feel before signing. MAEUM shows you the system you need first with a free demo, then during scoping (₩0 for 5 sessions) calculates your current workflow, security requirements, operations staffing, upfront budget and long-term cost together and proposes whichever is better for you. You can stop after scoping if you want.
Start with a free demo & diagnosis (₩0). Every plan includes server operations, data management, ongoing updates, the marketing video pipeline and SEO/GEO visibility work — no per-seat pricing. KRW is authoritative. Try the demo, and sign only if you like it.