8 questions I ask before depending on any self-hosted technology

I kept seeing the same pattern. A project starts open. Then something shifts. HashiCorp changed Vault's license. Docker put Desktop behind a paywall. Plex keeps pushing deeper into cloud dependency. Every time, people who built on these tools found out after the fact — after they were already dependent. So I started asking: how do you evaluate a technology not just by what it does today, but by where it's heading? I built The Autonomous Stack (TAS) — an open framework with 8 questions for any technology. Three structural questions 1. Pause — Can you stop it without permanent damage? If you shut it down for a week, does anything break irreversibly? 2. Exit — Can you leave with all your data? Not a partial export. Everything, in a format you can use elsewhere. 3. Recoverability — Can you roll back if something breaks? Snapshots, versioning, known restore path. Five diagnostic questions 4. Personalisation — Does it build a behavioral model of you? The more it knows about you, the harder i