I'm afraid so. On-premises is expensive (VERY expensive). I tried to estimate the necessary pricing for on-premises deployment and the final price was never attractive to customers. In all cases it turned out the need for on-premises deployment was not a business need (we must deploy this locally because of X and Y, which implies a value of Z in USD), but rather a point of view (I'd rather have this locally because that's what I prefer).

Why is it expensive? On-premises deployment means maintaining a separate version of the software, a complex arrangement to make upgrades, inability to fix potential upgrade problems by modifying the database, having to maintain deployment documentation, having to always have code that creates a database from scratch (rather than migrating an existing one), extending legal arrangements for third-party services, additional configurations that need to be tested and much more. It constrains development in many ways.

You are very wise. The last company I worked for started as a SaaS product but in an industry that was on-prem. They were unable to resist customer demands for on-prem, so now have mostly hybrid solutions that are very costly and terrible to support.