I personally don’t think SaaS is the way to go. I would prefer to offer support for running LibreTime on end-users own hardware and software and provide installation expertise etc. versus getting into the hosting game directly. In addition if anyone where to offer SaaS they would be bound by the Affero GPL v3 to release all of their code thus making it easy for anyone else to copy their setup so there is no real incentive here other than providing mark-up on rented cloud servers. I suspect that Airtime.pro has never been a big source of profit for SourceFabric and I am pretty sure they developed Airtime primarily with grant money they received from various NGOs etc to develop open-source radio software. I suspect that this might be the best route for LibreTime as well.
LibreTime is being used by more and more broadcasters and web streamers. Especially by those that value their freedom and autonomy from cloud services and SaaS platforms that can exert control over their users and create external dependencies. I’d like to make it so that LibreTime has a robust enough setup that people can easily install it on their own and don’t need to pay us to host it. I think that the business model NextCloud has followed is aspire to. I am always suspicious when a business model relies upon a freemium version with a paid version because there is a temptation to water down or limit functionality artificially on the freemium version. This is the issue the founder of NextCloud ran into when he founded OwnCloud and received a bunch of investments. There was a conflict between the community and the company because of this. See this talk at LibrePlanet 2019 that influenced my thinking here - https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/why-i-forked-my-own-project-and-my-own-company-31c3/.
Anyways thanks for moving the conversation forward, going to go back to working on release blockers for v3.