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Most CRMs built for insurance brokers are sold as SaaS: you sign up, your data lives in the vendor’s multi-tenant database, and you trust their security team with your clients’ financial and personal records. NodaBroker takes a different position — it runs on hardware or a cloud account you control.
The case against multi-tenant SaaS for brokers
A brokerage’s book of business is sensitive in a way that most SaaS products don’t have to think about: policy numbers, claims history, KYC notes, and financial detail on real people and companies. In a shared multi-tenant database, your data’s exposure is only as good as the vendor’s weakest customer-facing bug, and a breach notification is out of your hands entirely.
Self-hosting removes that shared blast radius. Your instance is the only tenant on it.
What self-hosted actually means here
NodaBroker isn’t “on-prem-only” in the inconvenient, 2005 sense. It installs the same way whether you’re running it on:
- An office server sitting in a cupboard
- A VPS from any cloud provider
- A home server through an Umbrel app store
The installer handles HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt, sets up the firewall, and schedules database backups automatically. From the browser, it looks and feels exactly like a hosted product.
What still talks to the outside world
NodaBroker is not air-gapped by default — it needs to reach out for:
- The licence check (so your annual licence can be validated)
- Any optional service you switch on yourself: outbound email, or cloud document storage (S3, WebDAV, Bunny.net)
Nothing else leaves your server unless you’ve explicitly wired it up.
Portability is the real test of “your data”
Self-hosting only means something if you can actually leave. NodaBroker’s full snapshot export bundles every table, setting, API key and document file into a single zip, and it imports cleanly onto a different instance — re-encrypting everything with the target server’s own keys. That’s the same mechanism used for routine backups and for moving to new hardware.
If a vendor can’t show you that export path on day one, ask why.