Anecdotally, the majority of people I’ve seen who self host are doing it to replace subscription services. This ranges anywhere from piracy to libre office. So, they’re not gonna pay you a subscription for something they can do themselves.
The audience is niche because you’re aiming at a subset of a subset of a subset of people. You’re looking to sell this to someone who:
- Doesn’t want to pay for a service they can do by themself (self-hosters)
- Has the knowledge and desire to handle networking (no amount of preconfiguration will make them not have to set up which ports their services need while allowing freedom)
- But doesn’t have the time/energy to do it themself
- Can afford to shell out a rather large amount of money ($150 is a lot to many people, and as the other person brought up; you’ll likely end up selling it for much more than this after manufacturing costs)
- For a piece of equipment that is eclipsed by a 3 year old desktop computer from eBay
The amount of people who self host anything is already abysmally low - just look at the social media user count. There are more than twice as many people on r/pathofexile (which is already pretty niche) as on r/selfhosted. Obviously reddit isn’t the end-all be-all of representation in that way, but you can definitely get an idea of trends from it.
Beeper + a python script could get this done