Every now and then a real story captures the essence of what a product is meant to do. This one did that for me.
A few days ago, LS Retail, a long-time Ninja user, reached out and asked a simple question:
“Can you help us move from our private endpoints to your hosted backend?”
At first, this surprised me. LS Retail has been using AL Object ID Ninja literally since day one—the very day it was released. Not only that: they never used the public backend. From the beginning, they chose to run Ninja entirely on their own infrastructure.
Why they self-hosted in the first place
Their reasoning was clear and, frankly, perfectly logical:
- “Running a public backend costs money.”
- “If we aren’t paying, someone else is—and that someone may eventually stop. When they do, we’re in trouble.”
- “We want reliability, so we’ll run Ninja on infrastructure we control and pay for.”
In other words, they believed in the product enough to bring it into their own Azure subscription from day one. And they didn’t do this halfway. This team—100+ users, 20+ apps, across 3 app pools—maintained what is, statistically speaking, an extraordinarily rare setup: a fully correct, fully consistent private Ninja backend.
Telemetry shows that while about 3% of teams use private endpoints, only around 1% keep them configured correctly across their entire team. LS Retail belonged to that 1%.
And then they asked to switch back to the public service
When they read that Ninja was moving to a commercial model, they reached out immediately:
“Now that Ninja is becoming a professional, commercial service, we’d rather rely on that than on our own setup. We trust a paid platform with a committed company behind it more than we trust a free public service—or our own maintenance.”
And that was the entire point.
They weren’t trying to save money. They knew they wouldn’t really save anything. They were trying to buy peace of mind.
Their reasoning was simple:
- They no longer wanted to maintain their own infrastructure.
- They no longer wanted to worry about breaking changes, re-configurations, and keeping everything aligned with the newest features.
- They wanted a professionally run, stable, supported service—one they could depend on without thinking about it.
Two hours later, their consumption databases were migrated, their repositories reconfigured, and their entire team was back to work—now transparently using the hosted endpoints.
No fuss. No downtime. Ninja kept doing what Ninja does.
The epilogue: “Free” is never really free
This story perfectly illustrates something important.
Running Ninja on your own backend will always remain an option. I fully support teams that prefer that path. But:
- You will still pay your Azure bill.
- You will still spend time maintainining the infrastructure.
- You will still spend time monitoring updates, read docs, rerun pipelines, redeploy when needed.
- You may miss an update or you may misconfigure a critical setting
- And, unless everything is configured perfectly across every repo and every developer, you may still face the occasional object ID collision—the very thing Ninja is designed to prevent.
Telemetry shows that two out of every three private-endpoint apps today are misconfigured.
Even a minor mismatch in configuration negates the whole point of having a conflict-avoidance tool.
LS Retail realized that—and decided their team’s time was more valuable than the infrastructure they were maintaining.
A final reflection
What struck me most was the clarity of their reasoning:
“We trust a professional service more than a free one. Now that Ninja is becoming that professional service, we want to rely on it rather than maintain our own.”
To me, that’s the heart of this transition.
Not pricing. Not pressure.
Just enabling teams to choose the option that lets them work with the least friction and the most confidence.
And for this team, the choice was easy. And I hope their legal department approves me using their actual name for this post.
Get your 25% lifetime early-bird discount until December 6 at https://alid.ninja
(Thanks to LS Retail marketing department for allowing me to actually publish their name with this story)
Thanks for sharing, Vjeko. Your Ninja is a great tool and I can totally relate to that story.
Thanks 😊 It does make sense. Most teams will see about €20 per month (expected average based on current telemetry). This should be low enough for it to be an absolute no-brainer for customers, and high enough for me to allow me to dedicate time and love to Ninja and turn it into a product it deserves to be (and return even more value to my customers).