> Can't really plan ahead without some kind of certainty.
You can only plan ahead with uncertainty, because that's the only way that humans interact with time. Nothing is 100%. Even if you paid enterprise rates for the privilege to run a local instance, and ran that on a physical server on your site, and had backup hardware in case the production hardware failed...the stars might be misaligned and you might fail your build. You can only estimate probabilities, and you must therefore include that confidence level in your plans.
Sure, depending on free third-party sources is much more risky than any of that, but no one knows the future (at least for now, and ignoring some unreliable claims of some mystics to the contrary, though I estimate with very high confidence that those claims are false and that this state of affairs is unlikely to change in the next 5 years).
You can only plan ahead with uncertainty, because that's the only way that humans interact with time. Nothing is 100%. Even if you paid enterprise rates for the privilege to run a local instance, and ran that on a physical server on your site, and had backup hardware in case the production hardware failed...the stars might be misaligned and you might fail your build. You can only estimate probabilities, and you must therefore include that confidence level in your plans.
Sure, depending on free third-party sources is much more risky than any of that, but no one knows the future (at least for now, and ignoring some unreliable claims of some mystics to the contrary, though I estimate with very high confidence that those claims are false and that this state of affairs is unlikely to change in the next 5 years).