maybe its just not the right business model, youre trying to offer to your very aimed targeted audience (who specialized in self hosting) a SaaS model when they are clearly servers enthusiasts...
Seems like business knowledge 101 to me
The main reason to me to offer my Pannel as SaaS is because two customers wanted it like that, then I had the idea to make it a "business model". If this model doesn't fit with your needs I'm okay with that, but just stop to coming here and seeding doubts over it if you even know what you talking about.
Why? Because your affirmation of "I can see the code, we do know pho very well and it’s been checked and used by other people I know for a while and always had extremely good results" has no value, first because it's rely no the information of third-party people that, as they have a chance, they just leech free contents and use on servers with less than 100 players and live less than 3 months, bankrupt then reopen with another name months later. Also, as I can see (and anyone that really knows PHP and download these ICP codes), their entire "engine" is a homebrew bunch of files with not a single protection or filter against query string injection, nor object-oriented or MVC structure: it's a big mess of includes, classes and functions with zero documentation. I've coded like that on early days and stopped doing things like that when I learn how PHP should work properly. You can show it to any Senior PHP developer, I bet they're point the same problems on minutes of analysis.
As conclusion: what I'm offering is, for sure, an very-small-audience-targeting product, but my knowledge on the contexts of this audience come from more than a decade of working within it and I really know what I'm takling about. And please don't get me wrokg, but some of these "enthusiasts" you saying can't even startup a local server without using WAMP and/or reading some tutorials more than once, or even know how to open ports on SO to let it accessible worldwide. Some of them don't even know basic CRUD concepts, as the database user's can have ready-only permissions on tables. Then, a huge part of my "small audience" aren't "specialized in self hosting" nor even close to that, and I'm willing to help them as I could, and that includes to not enter on random people posts and say they're not reliable because theirn't known.