They should just do what everyone else does and finance themselves by selling your data to the highest bidder! There are lots of advertisers who would pay a fair amount to know this much about your social graph and what you think of them.

Well, basic Google suite for a small business user costs around that much per month. It is not a bad alternative to your product, no? As the search over the documents, photos, contacts and emails works rather well there. And integrations with the 3rd party software and apps is great. I’m not sure Google sells the data of their business suite subscribers. I doubt they do.

A comparable personal product would normally be freemium, but very limited in storage space and events number. And then, for US/European markets you’d have a $0.x per month subscription, to lift that limit. Asking early adopters to pitch in more (maybe for some token appreciation or special treatment/logo) also makes a lot of sense.

(Take this with a lot of salt, I easily can be very wrong in any of the above).

A bit less. It just seems like a service that is "easy" to host, as in does not need much maintenance or ressources, thus allowing you to host tens of instances on a cheap VPS.

But maybe I'm overlooking something. Hence me asking.