If you’re the CEO, would you rather have a frustrating but profitable product or a non-frustrating but non-profitable product?
I think people forget this part of the math.
I think people forget this part of the math.
"Lock in" is not a part of our strategy. We try to offer data portability via import and export; you can export your entire workspace as HTML (most metadata, pages link to each other and can be browsed offline), PDF, or Markdown (most easily editable). Given an HTML export and a few hours of scripting, I think you could migrate to any API-accessible document storage strategy.
Don't get me wrong. We love Notion. But we also need our data to be portable and backed up to not be liable.
Allowing me to host my data myself should not reduce your profits as long as your product is still the best.
If you’re focused on (relative) short term profits to get paid and retire on a beach, and you succeed, good for you. I’m totally jealous and wish I was you.
Unfortunately, I’m also not your target customer.
You could make it *more* expensive to use the self hosted version. It's straightforward to justify if you consider the additional development overhead, and if you include some kind of a support package.
My question is genuine. I see strange justifications like this often when it comes to self hosted versions of X, Y, or Z product. What exactly is the risk to profit here? I can see extra engineering overhead as a possible risk, but that's a solvable problem. There are many ways to handle software updates. Spinning up new backend environments is often done on devs machines daily when developing. I don't see any novel problem that hasn't been solved.
The "we have no plans for this", or "we are looking into it" are all often used ways of avoiding the question of "why aren't you doing this?" There are plenty of companies out there that for one reason or another, need to control the environment where their data lives. Why give up that business? Why do people who work at those places have to often settle for worse products because of this? Why not give businesses *choice* of storing their data or having someone else deal with the complexity?
Is it that the presumed market for this is too small? And why is nobody being transparent about this?