Self-hosted AI coding agents: what the term actually buys you

Two different meanings, one confusing phrase

For an individual, self-hosted means the model runs locally — Ollama or LM Studio on your machine — and the agent is just a client. Nothing leaves the box, and the agent's own hosting is beside the point.

For a team, self-hosted means the agent service runs on your infrastructure so that prompts, diffs and history stay inside your network. That is a different property, and buying one does not get you the other.

The three options that are actually in this category

Roomote is the only one built as a shared, server-side agent: single-tenant, self-hostable, with the model choice left to you. Free for up to ten users, then licensed per band.

Cline and Aider are local clients. They become genuinely self-contained only when you point them at a local model, which is also the only configuration where a hosted provider never sees your code.

What to check before you call it self-hosted

Egress, not marketing. Watch outbound connections from the agent process during a session — telemetry, update checks and crash reporting all count against a claim of isolation.

Licence terms on paper. Source-available is not the same as an OSI licence: you can read the code, and often modify it, but the terms may restrict how you redistribute or offer it as a service.

Who can approve a command. In every option here a human is the control, not a sandbox. If your threat model includes a compromised model, an approval gate is your only real defence.