I'm currently in the process of moving my family off of Google photos to Immich. Both my partner and I pay Google at the moment because we have to due to amount of photos. And that's only going to increase.
Immich is great but there are also a lot of bugs. The shared albums that my wider family use for example is very buggy. So paying an amount that I might have paid Google for those bugs to be fixed while self hosting I would be very happy with I think.
However, I was thinking of attacking those bugs myself and contributing bug fixes to the project. But what happens now that it's a commercial product essentially? Will they still accept code from pull requests from outside their organisation? Will any devs who spend a lot of time contributing get anything for their work? E.g. if I was providing time and code for a product then had to pay to use it that might seem a bit mean.