i guess the whole web moved in that direction over the years. from keep it simple, self-host everything and reduce all dependencies, to use the cloud and third-party services as much as possible. just check any of the mainstream websites and see how many connections to external services they make.

even in the case of Plausible, we have this self-hosted (free as in beer and free as in speech) product and a hosted cloud (free as in speech) product, and vast majority of people prefer to use our hosted cloud version.