But if we want self-hosted software to become a real alternative to commercial services, we need people, especially developers, to care enough to build and maintain it.

Is it a real alternative. And not just that, in many cases it’s better. There are many good projects out there which developers care enough about to maintain that make no money at all, simply because those developers enjoy doing that, or if they see the benefit to building such software.

Sometimes they provide solutions like paid hosting while keeping the self hosted version free.