There are two ways to run an AI agent in production. You can self-host it on your own infrastructure, or you can pay someone to host it for you. Both work. Neither is universally better. The right choice depends on what you have more of: engineering time or money.

The self-hosting path

Self-hosting means you control everything. You pick the server, you configure the environment, you set up the process manager, you handle SSL, you write the monitoring scripts, and you get paged when something breaks. If you have a competent DevOps engineer and they have spare capacity, this is a reasonable path. You pay $5–20/month for a VPS and you own the whole stack.

The hidden costs are real though. Setting up a production-grade environment takes 4–8 hours if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it takes days. Then there's the ongoing maintenance: security updates, monitoring, crash recovery, scaling when load increases, and debugging when things go wrong at 2am. None of this is hard individually, but it adds up to a part-time job.

The managed path

Managed hosting means you pay someone to handle the infrastructure. You tell them what your agent should do, which channels it should connect to, and what API key to use. They handle the server, the networking, the process management, the monitoring, and the crash recovery. Your agent is running in minutes, not hours.

The tradeoff is cost and control. You pay $49–200/month instead of $5–20. You don't have root access to the server. You depend on someone else's infrastructure being reliable. For some teams this is a dealbreaker. For most, it's a reasonable trade: you get your time back, and the agent just runs.

When self-hosting makes sense

  • You have an engineer who knows Linux, Docker, and process management
  • That engineer has spare capacity (not working on your core product)
  • You need full control over the environment for compliance reasons
  • Your agent is a side project, not a business-critical system

When managed makes sense

  • Your agent handles real customer interactions and downtime costs money
  • You don't have someone who wants to maintain servers
  • You want to move fast — deploy today, not next week
  • You'd rather pay a predictable monthly fee than deal with ops surprises

We obviously have a bias here — we run a managed hosting service. But we started it precisely because we kept seeing teams waste engineering weeks on infrastructure that had nothing to do with making their agent smarter. The right answer depends on your situation. If you're not sure, email us and we'll give you an honest assessment.