PostHog after 18 months - is the self-hosted savings real or a trap?

We moved to a self-hosted PostHog instance 18 months ago to control costs after our event volume started to scale. The initial setup was straightforward, and the early savings versus the cloud plan were significant.

But lately, I'm questioning the true total cost. Our infrastructure team has started billing our product team for the dedicated engineering time to maintain and upgrade the cluster. We've also had to scale the underlying ClickHouse nodes twice, which wasn't in our original calculations.

For those who have been self-hosting for a couple of years: does the operational overhead eventually outweigh the license savings? Are we just trading a predictable SaaS bill for hidden internal resource costs?