Every so often there's a post on HN where a someone lists their income and expenses and the comments are always full of things like "why are you paying $100/year for Notion when you can just use org-mode for free?" Don't listen to them. Your time is worth more than any reasonable subscription fee.
Sure, but what do I do, if that service just closes tomorrow? Or they change the fee to "unreasonable" (after they gained control of the market).
A SaaS would have to be way better than any offline tool, I could use 10 years from now in this shape. But in general yes, don't skimp and loose time, when there is a working alternative.
You're far more likely to die tomorrow than Notion to close abruptly tomorrow.
I checked and the probability of death for an American in their 30s (median American is 37 years old) is under 0.2% in any year. I think there’s a far larger than 1 in 500 chance that Notion goes under or is acquired and cancelled.
Services shut down all the time. I've been selling indie software for a bit more than a decade, and at least half a dozen services that I was using have either shut down, pivoted, or slowly became crappy enough that I had to move.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you should build everything yourself, that's not practical. But the stuff that I have built myself doesn't suddenly stop working.
But with many SaaS you are lucky if you even get your data out. And then importing it into omething else sadly is very much a big deal in many cases.
Using Notion as an example, your entire workspace can be exported in standard formats.
https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content
It’s not zero effort to migrate, but for a small business migration should be both rare and not so bad.
If Notion announces a shutdown at some point, you can export your content and import it somewhere else. The amount of time it takes to do that later won't be that big of a deal.