IMO, one way to retain the power user crowd is to do the hard parts that they might have skipped themselves. For a couple examples:

- after selecting your observability apps, every _other_ app could automatically configure centralized logging, its own dashboard of metrics, etc

- the host OS could ask the user simply for the backup destination (S3 url creds, attached local disk, SMB share, etc) and every app is again automatically configured with backups

- the host could have a control panel to roll back apps between versions (maybe it's FS snapshots or something)

- everyone can use containers, but if the project went through the extra effort to make each app its own VM instead, that could be worth something

- if there was a companion Android/iOS app for management and (importantly) alerting?

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That doesn't really solve the monetization issue you described, but I do think you can still get powerusers on board if you handle even harder problems than they'd want to take on themselves. Or...harder problems than they'd risk taking on themselves if their family uses what's being hosted, for example. Less tolerance for downtime

Edit: formatting