I now have my own disposable income, but I still think long and hard in case I have to spend money; the actual price being secondary to the fact, that the thing is not free.
Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc).
I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.
If you’ve some, do share those
I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.
I do pay money for useful software! For example, I have no problem paying for intellij. With intellij, my data isn't trapped behind my subscription. If I stop paying for intellij, the software I've written is still on my computer. It still works, and I can still edit it just fine using vs code or something.
Likewise, I don't have a problem paying for Procreate on my ipad. Now that I've paid for procreate, I own it forever. And I can backup all my procreate documents onto an external hard disk (though the process is awkward) and they're mine forever. Thats important.
I even don't mind paying for Fastmail. All my data is stored on their computers, but because its email, I can at least get all my data off fastmail's servers if I ever want to. And then I can migrate my custom domain somewhere else, and I won't have lost any of my data.
But programs like Notion are no good to me. If I do creative work in notion, as far as I know my data is trapped. Does Notion even have a data export tool? Can anything even read notion's data format? Not that I know of. Google docs has the same problem (though at least thats free for personal use). And Figma.
(I just checked - you can export notion data to HTML & PDFs. But you can't get the raw data. Presumably, notion databases and things are all lost. I'd have to copy+paste into another tool losing all my formatting and start again.)
I don't like my creative work being trapped like that. I don't want to be lose access to my own work because the only tool which edits that data gets shut down or aquihired. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to have access to my own work.
I bought MonoDraw years ago (an ascii art drawing program). The developer has stopped working on it, but the software still works great. If it were a web app, I'm sure the website would have stopped working or gone down a long time ago. Just like Google Wave did. Or LiveJournal. Or hundreds of other sites over the years.
> in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.
So long as they put up an API that lets you get your data out. And the data you can get out has the full data model (lots of sites don't provide this!). And you personally remember to back it all up before the site goes down. (Oops - I've failed at this before). Even then, you can't really interact with your data any more except through 3rd party tools.
Sounds like a bad deal.
Bad example. You only own it as long as you're in possession of a working iPad which runs the thing. Might be a long time, but I've got lots of apps from the mac and iOS 32 bits era which don't run anymore on new hardware.
There's a couple of Notion to Obsidian import tools too like https://github.com/connertennery/Notion-to-Obsidian-Converte...
Even with Notion, it’s obviously a degraded experience to import the data into obsidian using some motley set of extensions. Especially since obsidian isn’t designed to have feature parity with Notion. My experience as a user is straight up better with shrink wrapped software that I can but once and run indefinitely, even long after the vendor has moved on. I don’t want to play the guessing game, wondering which of the products I use will die before someone makes good 3rd party tooling. After being burned a couple times by this stuff, I really prefer not needing to worry about my work sinking below the waves. Local software gives me that power.
And owning your data and your tools isn't a theoretical or fringe concern. It is a central aspect of many people's lives, with wide practical consequences.
Ironically, most development eschews this practice. The default approach appears to be: "Import it... if you can."
All code presents risk. With modern dependencies chains, those risks compound through time too.
Most core tech is trivial to rebuild for a single user. It becomes complex over time due to scale and with the addition of user-guardrails.
I've been running a homegrown Object-Oriented Database for months without issue. It's less than 100 lines of Python including the interface.
Yes, and beware of the people who want you to ignore the second two categories. "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" is an insidious way to make you think there's no escape from being monetized, while simultaneously lying to you by saying you won't be a product if you pay using money. It's pretty universal that paying customers are a product sold to bigger customers, and I'm very wary of the motives of anyone who wants me to forget that.
These days, I can afford it. Hell, I even bought Winrar as a thanks for many years of using it.
On the other hand, that was an early indication of the entitlement that we have; we rail against the streaming services and resort to piracy not because it's unfair that they ask for money, but because we believe we're entitled to consume content. We're afraid of missing out, too.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag I think.