Self-Hosted vs Hosted Marketing Tools

TL;DR: Self-host critical assets (website, press kit, email list) to avoid platform dependency. Use SaaS for convenience tools (analytics, scheduling, key distribution). Woovit shutdown, presskit() breaking, and VGInsights acquisition prove the risk is real. A professional marketing stack costs $11-15/month, not hundreds.

Key Takeaways

• Every hosted tool has a bus factor: one company changes direction and your workflow breaks (presskit(), Woovit, VGInsights all died or changed)
• Self-host: your website, press kit, and email list since these are long-term assets that should survive tool shutdowns
• Rent: analytics dashboards, social scheduling, key distribution since migration cost is low if these disappear
• A complete marketing stack costs $11-15/month: WordPress hosting ($10), presskit.gg free tier, Buttondown free tier, Steamworks analytics
• Keep exports current: whatever hosted tools you use, download your data regularly so it survives platform changes

Every indie game marketing tool you depend on will eventually do one of three things: raise its prices, get acquired, or shut down. Sometimes all three, in that order. The circle of SaaS life, if you will.

This isn't pessimism. It's a pattern that developers who've shipped multiple games see repeatedly. VGInsights got absorbed by Sensor Tower. Woovit shut down in December 2024 after seven years. presskit() (dopresskit) stopped working when PHP hosting moved on and nobody maintained it. Each time, developers scrambled. Spreadsheets got rebuilt. Press kits went dark. Years of organized data evaporated because someone else's server went offline.

The question isn't whether to use marketing tools. You need them. The question is which ones you should own, and which ones you're comfortable renting. This guide breaks down every category of indie game marketing tool, compares the options honestly, and helps you build a stack that won't collapse when a startup pivots to AI.

The Spectrum: It's Not Binary

Self-hosted vs. hosted isn't a toggle switch. It's a sliding scale.

On one end: you run everything on your own server, your own domain, your own database. Full control. Full responsibility. On the other end: you log into someone's website, fill out forms, and trust them to keep the lights on.

Most developers end up somewhere in the middle, and that's the right call. Self-host the stuff that matters most to your long-term business (your website, your press kit, your email list). Use SaaS for the stuff where convenience outweighs risk (analytics dashboards, social scheduling, key distribution). The trick is knowing which category each tool falls into.

A few principles before we get into specifics:

Own your critical data. Your press contacts, your email subscribers, your press kit content. If the platform disappears, this data should survive.

Domain authority compounds. Anything living on yourstudio.com builds SEO value for your domain over years. Anything on someone-elses-platform.com builds SEO value for them.

Switching costs are real. Moving off a hosted platform is always harder than they promise. Export features are often "coming soon" forever.

Press Kits: Where This Decision Matters Most

Press kits sit at the center of your marketing presence. Journalists, content creators, and publishers all visit them. They should stay online for years, ranking in search results and providing assets whenever someone writes about your game. This makes press kits one of the worst candidates for a throwaway hosted solution.

The cautionary tale: presskit()

Rami Ismail built presskit() (dopresskit.com) around 2013. It became the industry standard almost overnight. Free, open source, and built with genuine love for the indie community. Thousands of developers used it.

Then PHP hosting moved on. The tool required manual FTP uploads, XML configuration files, and a specific PHP version that modern hosts stopped supporting. Rami (understandably) moved on to other things. Nobody maintained it. Thousands of press kits broke. Some silently. Developers discovered their press kit was serving errors only when a journalist told them.

The tool's own website still exists, frozen in time, still referencing Vlambeer and beta features. The download link still works. The reality is that installing it on modern hosting ranges from difficult to impossible. If you're using presskit() right now, you're living on borrowed time.

This is the core risk of any tool that depends on external maintenance. It doesn't matter if it's free or paid, open source or proprietary. If you can't keep it running yourself, you're one abandoned repo away from a dead press kit.

Current options compared

presskit.gg (self-hosted WordPress plugin). Installs on any WordPress site. Your press kit lives at yourstudio.com/presskit, on your domain, on your hosting, in your database. Free tier plus a Pro option. Because it's a WordPress plugin, it inherits WordPress's massive ecosystem: themes, backups, security updates, and the fact that 43% of websites run WordPress. You can customize it. You can theme it to match your brand. If presskit.gg as a company disappeared tomorrow, your press kit would still be online, still serving pages, still ranking in Google. The tradeoff: you need WordPress hosting. If you don't have a website yet, that's an extra step. [Full disclosure: this is our tool. We're biased. We also think the self-hosted argument stands on its own merits.]

Press Kitty (hosted, part of IMPRESS). Free for up to 3 games and 1 company page, with 100MB storage. The Plus tier bumps you to 10 games, 1000MB, custom domains, AI translations, and high-resolution asset support. Setup is genuinely fast. You can import directly from your Steam page and have a press kit live in minutes. The IMPRESS ecosystem adds creator discovery, outreach campaigns, social listening, Twitch stream alerts, and coverage reporting. For a solo dev who wants everything in one dashboard, that's compelling. The downsides: your press kit lives at impress.games/your-game by default. Custom domains require the paid tier. And you're trusting a single company with your press kit, your outreach, your coverage data, and your creator relationships. That's a lot of eggs.

PressKitHero (hosted SaaS). $20/month for a single press kit, $80/month for unlimited. Not game-specific, which means the templates are generic. No Steam import. For a small studio paying $240/year for one press kit page, the value proposition gets thin fast, especially when free alternatives exist.

Pressdeck (hosted, freemium). A general-purpose press kit tool, not gaming-focused. Functional but you'll be adapting a generic product to game-specific needs.

Google Drive / Dropbox folders. Some journalists (including former Eurogamer EIC Martin Robinson) have said a well-organized Google Drive folder is fine. And for raw asset distribution, it works. But a Drive link doesn't rank in Google. It doesn't build your domain authority. It doesn't look professional when a journalist shares it with their editor. It's a filing cabinet pretending to be a storefront.

Notion pages. Quick, free, looks decent. But no custom domain, no SEO value, no analytics, and Notion's public page URLs are ugly. Fine for a game jam project. Not a serious long-term solution.

The verdict on press kits

If you have a WordPress site (or plan to build one), self-hosting your press kit is the obvious choice. You get full control, full SEO benefit, and zero dependency on another company's survival. If you don't have a website and need something today, Press Kitty's free tier is the best hosted option. Just know what you're trading away.

PR and Outreach Tools

Getting your game in front of journalists and content creators is half the marketing battle. The tools here range from all-in-one platforms to spreadsheets held together with good intentions.

IMPRESS (hosted suite). IMPRESS has grown from a coverage tracking bot into a full indie game marketing toolkit. Creator discovery with genre-based matching, email campaigns sent from your own email address, social listening across YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, TikTok, and podcasts. Coverage reports with SimilarWeb metrics. Steam market research. It's the closest thing to an all-in-one marketing platform built specifically for indie games. Pricing varies by tier. The breadth is impressive. The risk is concentration: if IMPRESS changes direction or pricing, you're migrating everything at once.

Manual spreadsheets. A Google Sheet with columns for name, outlet, email, last contacted, and notes. It's ugly. It's tedious. It also works, it's free, and you own the data completely. Most developers who've shipped multiple games still maintain a spreadsheet alongside whatever other tools they use. The spreadsheet is the backup that never goes down.

Mailchimp for outreach. Some devs repurpose Mailchimp to send press emails. It works, technically. But Mailchimp's free tier now caps at 250 contacts, and journalists can tell when they're getting a mass-mailed campaign instead of a personal pitch. Use it for newsletters, not press outreach.

Analytics: Knowing Your Numbers

You need data to make marketing decisions. How many wishlists are coming in? What's your competition doing? What's the realistic revenue for your genre?

Steamworks built-in analytics. Free, always available, and better than most developers realize. Traffic sources, wishlist data, regional breakdown, conversion rates. This is your primary analytics tool. Everything else is supplementary.

SteamDB (free). Tracks player counts, price history, update frequency, and some sales estimates for every game on Steam. Invaluable for competitive research. Free to use, community-run. No account needed for basic features.

Gamalytic. A Steam analytics database with estimated revenue, sales, player data for 50,000+ games. Free tier for basic browsing. The Starter plan at $25/month unlocks filters, historical data, wishlist estimates, and visual asset change tracking. Useful for market research before you commit to a genre or price point. Indie-friendly pricing.

VGInsights (now Sensor Tower). VGInsights was the go-to for indie devs doing Steam market research. Then Sensor Tower acquired it. The tool now redirects to Sensor Tower's enterprise platform. Pricing is opaque. The product that indie devs loved is effectively gone, replaced by something aimed at larger companies with larger budgets. Another cautionary tale for hosted dependency.

Steam Spy. Still around, still free for basic data, but its accuracy dropped significantly after Valve made player data private in 2018. Useful for rough estimates. Not reliable for serious decision-making.

For most indie devs, Steamworks + SteamDB + Gamalytic's free tier covers 90% of what you need. What developers who've evaluated dozens of tools consistently report is that the free options are genuinely sufficient—the paid tools add convenience, not essential capability. The paid analytics tools are nice-to-haves, not necessities.

Key Distribution: Getting Codes to Creators

Sending Steam keys to journalists and content creators sounds simple until you're managing 400 requests and trying to figure out which ones are legitimate.

Keymailer. The biggest platform for connecting developers with content creators. Creators apply for keys through Keymailer, and you approve or deny based on their channel size, relevance, and history. It works. It's also become the default, which means creators expect to find your game there. Free for basic key distribution. Premium tiers add targeting and campaign features. Keymailer's main risk: it's a middleman. You're trusting their verification of creators. Some developers report fake or low-quality requests slipping through.

Woovit (dead). Was a key distribution platform for seven years. Shut down December 20, 2024. "Thanks to all the publishers and creators who have made Woovit possible," reads the shutdown notice. If you'd built your entire key distribution workflow around Woovit, you had to rebuild from scratch in the holiday crunch. This is exactly the risk we keep talking about.

Terminals.io. More of a publisher-facing distribution platform than an indie tool. Useful if you're working with a publisher who uses it. Not something most solo devs will interact with directly.

Manual distribution (spreadsheet + email). Tedious but bulletproof. You maintain a list. You verify each requester yourself. You email keys individually or in small batches. It doesn't scale past a few hundred contacts, but most indie games don't need to scale past a few hundred contacts. The developers behind Cairn reached out to roughly 400 content creators before Steam Next Fest. That's manageable by hand. See our Next Fest content creator outreach guide for a step-by-step approach.

presskit.gg's key request feature. Built into the press kit itself. Journalists and creators request keys directly from your press kit page. You review and approve from your WordPress dashboard. The requests, the approvals, and the data all live on your server. No middleman platform required.

For most launches, a combination of Keymailer (for discoverability) and manual tracking (for control) works well. Don't put all your keys in one platform's basket.

Website and Portfolio: Your Digital Home

Your website is the foundation everything else sits on. Press kit, blog, contact page, game pages. Where you build it determines how much control you have over everything downstream.

WordPress (self-hosted). The 43%-of-the-web option. Hosting starts at $5/month with providers like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or even shared hosting. Unlimited customization. Thousands of plugins. Works with presskit.gg for an integrated press kit. The downside: you're responsible for updates, security, and backups. For developers who already manage game servers or CI pipelines, this is trivial. For someone who's never touched a server, it's a learning curve.

Squarespace / Wix. $16-33/month for polished templates and zero server management. Drag and drop. Looks professional out of the box. The tradeoff: limited customization, no WordPress plugins (so no presskit.gg), and you're locked into their ecosystem. If Squarespace doubles their prices, your choices are pay up or migrate. To their credit, they've been stable and reliable for over a decade.

itch.io page. Free. Great for game jam projects and early visibility. Terrible as a primary web presence for a studio. No custom domain on free tier. Limited design control. Journalists searching for your game name should find your website, not an itch.io page.

Static site (Hugo, Jekyll, Astro). Free hosting on GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages. Maximum speed, maximum control, zero hosting costs. Requires comfort with code. No database means no WordPress plugins. Great for developers who want to write HTML. Overkill for developers who just want to put up a website and get back to building their game.

The recommendation for most indie studios: WordPress on decent hosting. It costs $5-15/month, it runs everything you need, it gives you full control, and it plays nicely with the rest of your marketing stack.

Email and Newsletters

Your email list is the one marketing channel that no algorithm can take away from you. Twitter can suppress your reach. Discord can change notification policies. Your email list is yours.

Buttondown. Free for 100 subscribers. Each feature (tagging, paid subscriptions, surveys, analytics) is a $9/month add-on. You pick what you need. The interface is clean and writer-friendly. For an indie dev sending a monthly devlog update to a few hundred fans, the free tier is enough for a long time. If you outgrow it, pricing scales sensibly.

Mailchimp. The name everyone knows. The free tier has been gutted to 250 contacts and limited sends. Paid plans start around $13/month. The platform has ballooned into an enterprise marketing suite with features indie devs will never touch. It works fine. It's also bloated, expensive relative to simpler alternatives, and owned by Intuit, which means it'll keep getting more enterprise-focused over time.

SendGrid (API-based). Free for 100 emails/day. Built for developers who want to send email via API rather than a drag-and-drop editor. Great if you're building a custom signup flow on your website. Not great if you just want to write a newsletter and hit send. More of a plumbing tool than a marketing tool.

Self-hosted options (Listmonk, Mailtrain). Open-source email tools you run on your own server. Listmonk is surprisingly good. No subscriber limits, no monthly fees (beyond hosting), and you own everything. The tradeoff: you need to configure email deliverability yourself (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and getting out of spam folders requires either a clean IP or a relay service like Amazon SES ($0.10 per 1,000 emails). This is a power-user option. If you know what those acronyms mean, consider it. If you don't, stick with Buttondown.

For most indie devs: Buttondown's free tier until you outgrow it, then evaluate whether to pay them or self-host.

Social Media Management

Here's the honest take that most tool comparison articles won't give you: if you're a solo dev or a team under five, you probably don't need a social media management tool.

Buffer. Free for 3 channels with 10 scheduled posts each. Pro at $5/month per channel for unlimited scheduling. Clean interface, does what it says. If you're managing Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok with planned content calendars, Buffer saves real time.

Hootsuite. Starts at $99/month. Built for marketing teams at companies with multiple brands. Overkill for indie games by an order of magnitude. Unless you're running a mid-size publisher with 10+ titles, look elsewhere.

Just posting manually. For a solo dev posting 3-5 times per week across 2-3 platforms, the time spent setting up and managing a scheduling tool is roughly equal to the time saved by using one. The YAPYAP team didn't use scheduling tools for their 1.5 million-view TikTok announce video. They just posted it. Most viral game content happens organically, not on a content calendar.

The exception: if you're disciplined about batching content creation (recording clips, writing captions, preparing images all at once), a scheduler pays off. If you're the kind of dev who creates content spontaneously when something cool happens in your build, just post it.

The Cost of a Marketing Stack

Let's do real math. What does a complete indie game marketing tool stack actually cost per month?

The $0 Budget

This works. It's ugly. Your press kit is a Drive link. Your website is minimal. But you can ship a game and do real marketing at this budget. Desktop Defender had 200 followers before Steam Next Fest and still broke into the Top Demos chart. Money isn't the bottleneck.

The $50/month Budget

Wait, that's only $11. Good. Put the other $39 toward a trailer editor or more wishlists-per-dollar experiments. The point is that a professional stack doesn't require professional pricing. A WordPress site with presskit.gg, free tiers everywhere else, and you're running at 90% of what studios spending $200/month get.

The $200/month Budget

Still under budget. And now you've got serious market research, scheduled social content, email automation with segmentation, professional press kits, and coverage tracking. This is a legitimate marketing operation for a small studio.

The Bus Factor: When Platforms Disappear

Every hosted tool has a bus factor. One company changes direction, and your workflow breaks. Let's look at real examples from the games industry.

presskit() (dopresskit). Industry standard from 2013. PHP dependency rot made it uninstallable on modern hosting. No one maintained it. Thousands of press kits broke silently. Developers only discovered the problem when journalists told them.

Woovit. Seven years of operation. Key distribution platform used by publishers and indie devs. Shut down December 20, 2024, with a brief goodbye message. Data archived. Workflows gone.

VGInsights. Beloved indie analytics tool. Acquired by Sensor Tower. Redirected to an enterprise platform with opaque pricing. The tool indie devs relied on for market research effectively ceased to exist in its original form.

distribute(). The companion service to presskit(), built by Rami Ismail for managing press lists. Also dead. Also took data with it.

The pattern is always the same. A tool fills a real need. Developers build workflows around it. The tool changes or dies. Developers scramble.

Self-hosted tools aren't immune to abandonment. But they fail differently. If presskit.gg stopped releasing updates tomorrow, every existing installation would keep running. Your press kit would still be online. Your data would still be in your WordPress database. You'd lose future features, not existing functionality. That's a fundamentally different failure mode.

When Self-Hosted Makes Sense

Self-hosting is the right choice when:

You're building a studio, not shipping a one-off. If you plan to release multiple games over years, your website and press kit are long-term assets. Investing in infrastructure that you control pays dividends across every launch.

Your team has technical skills. If someone on your team can manage a WordPress install (or a VPS, or a static site build), the overhead of self-hosting is minimal. If everyone on the team is an artist or designer with no server experience, the overhead is real.

SEO and discoverability matter to you. Your press kit on your own domain builds your domain's authority. Every backlink from a journalist's article points to your site, not to a third-party platform. Over years and multiple releases, this compounds significantly.

Data ownership is non-negotiable. Your press contacts, your analytics, your press kit content. If losing access to any of this would seriously hurt your business, self-host it.

When Hosted Makes Sense

Hosted is the right choice when:

You need something running today. Press Kitty can have a press kit live in minutes. WordPress takes an afternoon at minimum. If you have a demo day tomorrow, go hosted and migrate later.

You're a solo dev and time is your scarcest resource. Every hour spent configuring servers is an hour not spent on your game. If self-hosting means your game ships later, the tradeoff isn't worth it.

The tool isn't mission-critical. Social media schedulers, analytics dashboards, key distribution platforms. If any of these disappear, you're inconvenienced, not damaged. The migration cost is low. These are fine to rent.

You're testing whether you need the tool at all. Free tiers exist for a reason. Try IMPRESS's free tier, Buffer's free tier, Gamalytic's free tier. If the tool becomes essential, then decide whether to commit or self-host an alternative.

The Hybrid Approach: What Actually Works

The developers I've seen handle this best don't pick a side. They self-host the foundation and rent the conveniences.

Self-host: your website, your press kit, your email list. These are your long-term assets. They build your domain. They contain your most important data. They need to survive tool shutdowns.

Use SaaS for: analytics platforms, social scheduling, key distribution, coverage monitoring. These are operational tools. They help you work faster. If one dies, you lose workflow efficiency, not critical data.

Keep exports current. Whatever hosted tools you use, export your data regularly. Download your press contact list from IMPRESS. Export your email subscribers from Buttondown. Save your analytics reports. If the tool disappears tomorrow, your data shouldn't disappear with it.

This isn't paranoia. This is the lesson that every developer who used presskit() or Woovit or VGInsights learned the hard way. The tools will change. Your data should outlive them.

Picking Your Stack: A Decision Framework

For each tool category, ask three questions:

1. How long will I need this? If the answer is "years" (website, press kit, email list), lean toward self-hosted or tools with strong export options. If the answer is "for this launch" (analytics deep-dive, key blast), hosted is fine.

2. How painful is migration? Press kits are hard to migrate because URLs change and SEO breaks. Email lists are easy to migrate because you export a CSV. Base your ownership decision on migration difficulty.

3. What happens if it disappears? If the answer is "I lose my entire press kit and every link ever shared with journalists breaks," self-host it. If the answer is "I lose my social media schedule and have to post manually for a week," don't worry about it.

Final Thoughts

The indie game marketing tools ecosystem is better than it's ever been. You can run a legitimate marketing operation for under $15/month. Free tiers are genuinely useful, not just bait. The options are real.

But the tools are also more fragile than they look. Seven years of Woovit, gone overnight. The entire industry's press kit standard, broken by a PHP version bump. Your favorite analytics platform, absorbed into an enterprise product you can't afford.

Build your stack with your eyes open. Own what matters. Rent what doesn't. Export everything. Save your game often, as it were. And when the next tool shuts down (it will), you'll be the developer who shrugs instead of the one who scrambles.

Free Tool: Launch Checklist — Track your marketing preparation across all tools and platforms with our interactive checklist. Runs in your browser, no signup required.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to presskit() (dopresskit)?

PHP hosting moved on, nobody maintained the tool, and it stopped working on modern hosts. Thousands of press kits broke silently. Developers only discovered the problem when journalists told them their links were dead. The tool's website still exists, frozen in time.

Is Press Kitty or presskit.gg better for my press kit?

Press Kitty is faster to set up (15 minutes, no hosting needed) but builds impress.games domain authority, not yours. presskit.gg requires WordPress but lives on your domain, building your SEO. If you don't have a website yet and need something today, use Press Kitty. If you're building a studio, self-host with presskit.gg.

Do I really need to pay for marketing tools?

No. The $0 stack (GitHub Pages, Drive folder, Buttondown free, manual posting, spreadsheet outreach) works. It's ugly and tedious, but Desktop Defender broke into Next Fest's top demos with nearly zero budget. Money isn't the bottleneck.

How do I protect myself from tool shutdown?

Own critical data (press contacts, email subscribers, press kit content). Export regularly from any hosted service. Use tools with strong export features. For press kits specifically, self-hosting on WordPress means if presskit.gg disappeared tomorrow, your press kit would still be online.

Related Guides

Dive deeper into each aspect of marketing tools:

• Modern alternatives to presskit()
• Press Kitty vs. presskit.gg
• Google Drive press kits vs. dedicated websites
• Notion press kit templates
• Migrating from presskit() to presskit.gg