9 ms·

Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow gr

Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it. In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database. If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship, I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack. Hopefully it’s growing pains and they’re sorting it out, but it doesn’t make me feel confident about the security of my (most sensitive) data. It’s maybe also a cautionary tale about what happens when you dismiss too many early decisions as “premature optimization.” You ship fast in the beginning but a few years later you’re buried in all the debt you generated. Granted, it’s a good problem to have. If the choice is between a profitable, popular company buried in tech debt, or the perfect stack with no customers, I’ll take the debt.

kyawzazaw 5y ago
Apart from the HN growd + a few more, I think more users likely just don't care about options to host data.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Many regulated organizations do, though. Single reason we didn't adopt notion is lack of ability to self host.
  - pfd1986 5y ago
    Same for my org. We'd have the entire team move, if self host was an option.
  - jamiequint 5y ago
    Out of curiosity what do you use for documents and email? Not using Office365/Google Docs/Outlook/Gmail at all?
    - mafro 5y ago
      In my experience, you will find this kind of org uses Office365/Outlook, and not Gsuite/Gmail, as they have in place a commercial agreement with Microsoft which covers regulatory requirements put upon them (and some they put upon themselves). Of course they could _try_ to get an agreeable contract in place with Google, but Microsoft is Enterprise-friendly and can make this happen much more readily.
      - TechBro8615 5y ago
        We use Microsoft over Google simply because they are not an advertising company.
      - jamiequint 5y ago
        That's still not self-hosted though ...
        breakfastduck 5y ago
        Hes right though, certainly in our case. Microsoft has been deeply embedded in the org for years and they can certainly give stronger contractual assurances than Notion can.
    - breakfastduck 5y ago
      We use plenty of cloud stuff, I guess that wasn't clear from my initial comment. We use Office 365 & teams for our 'business' teams, Slack for tech teams & Monday.com for our 'Jira'. The business has evolved from on prem exchange so its natural a trust in MS is embedded. I wanted notion to get out of document hell. Legacy business with many spreadsheets and word documents. With notion it wasn't the cloud being the issue, we run all in house software & DBs in AWS. But some startup from San Fransisco offering a platform with notable downtime / performance issues and no direct ownership of DBs was an issue for something like a wiki where you want to be able to publish sensitive information, ip etc. We're in a regulated industry so compliance & security input is ultra relevant. Sharepoint is a fucking abomination, it's what was previously used. Notion makes a perfect wiki solution. If it had a self hosted option we'd have adopted it. It was turned down, and fairly so, by our ops team for the hosting situation. There's no reason for something as *simple* as a wiki should be completely outsourced. Portability is a factor too. We chose wikiJS in the end. Great wiki but terrible writing experience. Tend to write everything in an external markdown editor and just copy it in.
- codemac 5y ago
  They totally care about their data though.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  It’s probably a Pareto distribution like anything else. Maybe 20% of users care about it enough to pay for a 4x more expensive plan. I’d be curious to read more about what their architecture looks like now and how they’re planning to evolve it to fit their priorities.
- disordinary 5y ago
  I'd imagine the HN crowd cares less than executives at large organisations and government departments. There's a requirements for industries and businesses to either own their own data or keep that data onshored in their jurisdictions.
cristinacordova 5y ago
(Cristina from Notion here) We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliability-89f937a6ccc04905b1dcfa878537e08d https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally. Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
- tacosaretasty 5y ago
  Do you at least have plans to expose audit and access logs to customers yet?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bradgessler 5y ago
  My company had Notion hit us up for an Enterprise contract. When we asked if they offered enhanced security, single tenancy, or even they’d accept some sort of liability if they had a breach … the answer was no, no, and no. We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion. I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger guarantees to their customers. If they pull it off they’ll easily be mission critical software.
  - marcc 5y ago
    Notion doesn't even need to offer these guarantees in their SaaS service. They can just ship to my Kubernetes cluster, and let me manage the ingress and storage, and that would be enough to make it mission critical software. In the meantime, we end up using tools with a little bit less good UX, but we just can't share that data publicly. UX can't win over security, and I hate having to choose.
    - anonymouse008 5y ago
jitl 5y ago
(I work at Notion, but not on the Infrastructure team) We completed our sharding migration almost a month ago (https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21 https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21), and are now using >1 primaries. The project took a long time and really made the “changing the engine while the car is doing 200MPH” analogy true for me.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  I bet you have lots of fun challenges! I hope I didn’t come off as too critical. I do love Notion as a product and my org is a paid member. I just wish there were more options around data hosting. None of these problems are the mark of bad engineers, either. It’s just what happens when you ship fast and grow fast. Like I said, good problem to have :)
  - jitl 5y ago
    You didn’t :)
closeparen 5y ago
I have more respect for and trust in a product that I know is keeping things simple and straightforward vs. fucking around with Big Data consistency problems prematurely.
robbiemitchell 5y ago
Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem. Curious what you'd be willing to pay for this, as it's exclusively an enterprise feature. My guess is an absolute minimum of $50k/year contract value, or 250-350 users at an enterprise per-seat price (just guessing). Aside from going fully on prem, the idea of strictly dedicated storage is interesting -- like "bring your own S3 bucket" simplicity. I don't see that often outside of $10 desktop apps.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  > Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem. Sounds like an opportunity ;) Starting or rearchitecting a project gives you the rare chance to make decisions that your competitors never even had available to them. You can leverage new tech to move faster, and you can learn from their mistakes to avoid their most costly traps. “Bring your own S3 bucket” actually sounds pretty awesome and I wish more companies would do this. Everybody wants to be a middleman controlling the transaction, but they’re missing a whole class of customers by not offering self-directed storage options. This is a great example of a decision Notion could make now, that Asana would have a hard time adapting to. As long as they’re rearchitecting, they should keep an eye out for opportunities like that. As for how much I’d pay – if I’m the only party with access to my raw data, and I can run the software locally even if Notion goes out of business – for a team of 5-10, I would pay $50-75 per user per month.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    You might want to take a look at AthensResearch (free, self-hosted RoamResearch clone).
    - TechBro8615 5y ago
      Oh I have. Problem is Notion is most popular with the least technical people on our team. Migrating would be a hard sell.
      - 5y ago
skadamat 5y ago
Craft Docs is a good Notion alternative I personally like, and they're avoiding the data moat angle: https://museapp.com/podcast/26-no-data-moat/ https://museapp.com/podcast/26-no-data-moat/
- nvrspyx 5y ago
  Craft is really slick, but it's not really an option for those not using Apple products. Well, I guess until the web editor is out of beta. I'm keeping an eye on AnyType https://AnyType.io https://AnyType.io
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    Honest question, since this thread seems to be mostly about the data. If AnyType uses IPFS, doesn't that mean data will vanish at some point?
    - nvrspyx 5y ago
      From what I understand, it's all stored locally on your devices. IPFS is just used to sync between your devices and to share with others.
0x5f3759df-i 5y ago
This is the reason I use Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in. All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.
- ryneandal 5y ago
  I've also recently migrated to Obsidian and it's been fantastic.
- weakfish 5y ago
  I personally like Joplin[0] the best - it can sync via Dropbox or any other host of options. [0] https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org
- ruffrey 5y ago
  It doesn’t work well for a team though, with a bunch of local markdown files - does it?
  - c_thain 5y ago
    Admittedly harder when there is frequent concurrent modification required, but Syncthing works well for me to share between nodes.
- dimal 5y ago
  I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.
- singhkays 5y ago
  +1 on Obsidian. It requires a different way of taking notes to be really useful but it's all part of learning to take better notes.
- 5y ago
ezekg 5y ago
Do they still not support things like 2FA? At my previous company, we couldn't get buy-in from our security team due to them not supporting 2FA. The team loved Notion, but that was a deal breaker. Also, if I remember correctly, magic email links could not be disabled. There is no excuse for not implementing 2FA w/ an authenticator app -- it took me a couple days to implement it into my product. They've had people asking for 2FA for literal years (just search Twitter!)
- m-p-3 5y ago
  Maybe your security team could implement an authentication server with 2FA to cover those softwares that don't support it natively? For example, https://www.authelia.com/ https://www.authelia.com/ is open-source.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - OJFord 5y ago
    That only works if you can put the app on your internal network; Notion is neither self-hostable nor available 'on-premise' w/peering, that's what people are complaining about here. You can't magically put 2FA in front of some third-party public site. (You could from within your own network.. but that's perhaps worse than pointless!)
  - ArchOversight 5y ago
    How does this solution help if the SaaS offering doesn't support alternate authentication providers and doesn't offer 2FA?
    - m-p-3 5y ago
      Sorry, I thought it was self-hostable. Yikes, no 2FA or SSO isn't good..
IceWreck 5y ago
> For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. You mean a broken wiki and slow project management tool is better than specialized open source tools which are way better at the same thing
namelosw 5y ago
Sigh, it is a paradox. As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable. As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from tracking. This paradox is not just limited to the software industry: For example as a consumer, I prefer reading texts. But as a producer, I found videos are easier to monetize because of the attractive/addictive nature. More often than not, the formers which benefit consumers are not justifiable in pure economic senses compared to the latters, thus the reality we are living in nowadays.
- monsieurbanana 5y ago
  It's not a paradox as much as a difference between you and the public you target. Compared to you, they don't care about tracking, don't want the hassle to set-up on-prem and don't mind or prefer videos over text.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Why do you want your software on-prem and be responsible for deployment and monitoring,”?
  - namelosw 5y ago
    Sorry I wasn't being clear about this part. What I meant is a comparison: If there is an on-prem option, the release, the update/migration, the installation environment, and the documentation on deployment should be carefully crafted. All of these not only require more effort, but also require people to keep in mind not to stomp on things. And even worse, they have to search for potential problems with their imagination because they don't have access to the data with edge cases they're dealing with. If people are not careful, it's very easy to seriously screw things and lost some customers forever. On top of that, if fixes are required, the team usually needs to fix multiple versions over and over, of which the codebase might have drastically changed. The teams are usually less and less "brave" as time goes by. For most SaaS without on-prem options, people can just focus on the functionalities and deploy many, many times a day. For non-critical issues, people don't need to worry about them, just debug what's going on and respond fast, and the issues are very likely fixed in hours. Plus they can use components like Kafka, Elastic Search, or even other SaaS as needed, without having to choose between re-invent things or ask everybody to install a zoo of components in their on-prem solutions. That's one of the key reasons why web application is so popular nowadays compared to what we've done in the 90s desktop applications. Because it enables the "move fast and break things" mentality because more things are fixable in web applications. On-prem is like 90s desktop applications in disguise. Just try to imagine how horrifying if someone breaks the upgrade functionality. Or if one needs to fix a bug in Windows 10, they also need to fix it from like Windows Vista to Windows 10, where the codebases are drastically different. In conclusion, on-prem sounds applaudable to the audiences on HN, but the reality is it doesn't work well for most for-profit businesses.
cuffe 5y ago
I'm actually working on launching a self-serve on-prem version of Retool over the next few weeks. Would love your feedback on whether the way we're thinking about it resonates with how you feel about on-prem/self-hosted tools. If you're open to it, let's connect jamie at retool.com
timwis 5y ago
I’m curious: notion lets you export everything as markdown and CSV. If you had a sync/backup job running, that, say, imported the csv to a Postgres database every night, how would you feel about your concern?

kyawzazaw 5y ago

Apart from the HN growd + a few more, I think more users likely just don't care about options to host data.

breakfastduck 5y ago
Many regulated organizations do, though. Single reason we didn't adopt notion is lack of ability to self host.
- pfd1986 5y ago
  Same for my org. We'd have the entire team move, if self host was an option.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  Out of curiosity what do you use for documents and email? Not using Office365/Google Docs/Outlook/Gmail at all?
  - mafro 5y ago
    In my experience, you will find this kind of org uses Office365/Outlook, and not Gsuite/Gmail, as they have in place a commercial agreement with Microsoft which covers regulatory requirements put upon them (and some they put upon themselves). Of course they could _try_ to get an agreeable contract in place with Google, but Microsoft is Enterprise-friendly and can make this happen much more readily.
    - TechBro8615 5y ago
      We use Microsoft over Google simply because they are not an advertising company.
    - jamiequint 5y ago
      That's still not self-hosted though ...
      - breakfastduck 5y ago
        Hes right though, certainly in our case. Microsoft has been deeply embedded in the org for years and they can certainly give stronger contractual assurances than Notion can.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    We use plenty of cloud stuff, I guess that wasn't clear from my initial comment. We use Office 365 & teams for our 'business' teams, Slack for tech teams & Monday.com for our 'Jira'. The business has evolved from on prem exchange so its natural a trust in MS is embedded. I wanted notion to get out of document hell. Legacy business with many spreadsheets and word documents. With notion it wasn't the cloud being the issue, we run all in house software & DBs in AWS. But some startup from San Fransisco offering a platform with notable downtime / performance issues and no direct ownership of DBs was an issue for something like a wiki where you want to be able to publish sensitive information, ip etc. We're in a regulated industry so compliance & security input is ultra relevant. Sharepoint is a fucking abomination, it's what was previously used. Notion makes a perfect wiki solution. If it had a self hosted option we'd have adopted it. It was turned down, and fairly so, by our ops team for the hosting situation. There's no reason for something as *simple* as a wiki should be completely outsourced. Portability is a factor too. We chose wikiJS in the end. Great wiki but terrible writing experience. Tend to write everything in an external markdown editor and just copy it in.
codemac 5y ago
They totally care about their data though.
TechBro8615 5y ago
It’s probably a Pareto distribution like anything else. Maybe 20% of users care about it enough to pay for a 4x more expensive plan. I’d be curious to read more about what their architecture looks like now and how they’re planning to evolve it to fit their priorities.
disordinary 5y ago
I'd imagine the HN crowd cares less than executives at large organisations and government departments. There's a requirements for industries and businesses to either own their own data or keep that data onshored in their jurisdictions.

cristinacordova 5y ago

(Cristina from Notion here) We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliability-89f937a6ccc04905b1dcfa878537e08d https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally. Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.

tacosaretasty 5y ago
Do you at least have plans to expose audit and access logs to customers yet?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bradgessler 5y ago
My company had Notion hit us up for an Enterprise contract. When we asked if they offered enhanced security, single tenancy, or even they’d accept some sort of liability if they had a breach … the answer was no, no, and no. We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion. I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger guarantees to their customers. If they pull it off they’ll easily be mission critical software.
- marcc 5y ago
  Notion doesn't even need to offer these guarantees in their SaaS service. They can just ship to my Kubernetes cluster, and let me manage the ingress and storage, and that would be enough to make it mission critical software. In the meantime, we end up using tools with a little bit less good UX, but we just can't share that data publicly. UX can't win over security, and I hate having to choose.
  - anonymouse008 5y ago

jitl 5y ago

(I work at Notion, but not on the Infrastructure team) We completed our sharding migration almost a month ago (https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21 https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21), and are now using >1 primaries. The project took a long time and really made the “changing the engine while the car is doing 200MPH” analogy true for me.

TechBro8615 5y ago
I bet you have lots of fun challenges! I hope I didn’t come off as too critical. I do love Notion as a product and my org is a paid member. I just wish there were more options around data hosting. None of these problems are the mark of bad engineers, either. It’s just what happens when you ship fast and grow fast. Like I said, good problem to have :)
- jitl 5y ago
  You didn’t :)

closeparen 5y ago

I have more respect for and trust in a product that I know is keeping things simple and straightforward vs. fucking around with Big Data consistency problems prematurely.

robbiemitchell 5y ago

Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem. Curious what you'd be willing to pay for this, as it's exclusively an enterprise feature. My guess is an absolute minimum of $50k/year contract value, or 250-350 users at an enterprise per-seat price (just guessing). Aside from going fully on prem, the idea of strictly dedicated storage is interesting -- like "bring your own S3 bucket" simplicity. I don't see that often outside of $10 desktop apps.

TechBro8615 5y ago
> Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem. Sounds like an opportunity ;) Starting or rearchitecting a project gives you the rare chance to make decisions that your competitors never even had available to them. You can leverage new tech to move faster, and you can learn from their mistakes to avoid their most costly traps. “Bring your own S3 bucket” actually sounds pretty awesome and I wish more companies would do this. Everybody wants to be a middleman controlling the transaction, but they’re missing a whole class of customers by not offering self-directed storage options. This is a great example of a decision Notion could make now, that Asana would have a hard time adapting to. As long as they’re rearchitecting, they should keep an eye out for opportunities like that. As for how much I’d pay – if I’m the only party with access to my raw data, and I can run the software locally even if Notion goes out of business – for a team of 5-10, I would pay $50-75 per user per month.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  You might want to take a look at AthensResearch (free, self-hosted RoamResearch clone).
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    Oh I have. Problem is Notion is most popular with the least technical people on our team. Migrating would be a hard sell.
    - 5y ago

skadamat 5y ago

Craft Docs is a good Notion alternative I personally like, and they're avoiding the data moat angle: https://museapp.com/podcast/26-no-data-moat/ https://museapp.com/podcast/26-no-data-moat/

nvrspyx 5y ago
Craft is really slick, but it's not really an option for those not using Apple products. Well, I guess until the web editor is out of beta. I'm keeping an eye on AnyType https://AnyType.io https://AnyType.io
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  Honest question, since this thread seems to be mostly about the data. If AnyType uses IPFS, doesn't that mean data will vanish at some point?
  - nvrspyx 5y ago
    From what I understand, it's all stored locally on your devices. IPFS is just used to sync between your devices and to share with others.

0x5f3759df-i 5y ago

This is the reason I use Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in. All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.

ryneandal 5y ago
I've also recently migrated to Obsidian and it's been fantastic.
weakfish 5y ago
I personally like Joplin[0] the best - it can sync via Dropbox or any other host of options. [0] https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org
ruffrey 5y ago
It doesn’t work well for a team though, with a bunch of local markdown files - does it?
- c_thain 5y ago
  Admittedly harder when there is frequent concurrent modification required, but Syncthing works well for me to share between nodes.
dimal 5y ago
I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.
singhkays 5y ago
+1 on Obsidian. It requires a different way of taking notes to be really useful but it's all part of learning to take better notes.
5y ago

ezekg 5y ago

Do they still not support things like 2FA? At my previous company, we couldn't get buy-in from our security team due to them not supporting 2FA. The team loved Notion, but that was a deal breaker. Also, if I remember correctly, magic email links could not be disabled. There is no excuse for not implementing 2FA w/ an authenticator app -- it took me a couple days to implement it into my product. They've had people asking for 2FA for literal years (just search Twitter!)

m-p-3 5y ago
Maybe your security team could implement an authentication server with 2FA to cover those softwares that don't support it natively? For example, https://www.authelia.com/ https://www.authelia.com/ is open-source.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 5y ago
  That only works if you can put the app on your internal network; Notion is neither self-hostable nor available 'on-premise' w/peering, that's what people are complaining about here. You can't magically put 2FA in front of some third-party public site. (You could from within your own network.. but that's perhaps worse than pointless!)
- ArchOversight 5y ago
  How does this solution help if the SaaS offering doesn't support alternate authentication providers and doesn't offer 2FA?
  - m-p-3 5y ago
    Sorry, I thought it was self-hostable. Yikes, no 2FA or SSO isn't good..

IceWreck 5y ago

> For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. You mean a broken wiki and slow project management tool is better than specialized open source tools which are way better at the same thing

namelosw 5y ago

Sigh, it is a paradox. As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable. As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from tracking. This paradox is not just limited to the software industry: For example as a consumer, I prefer reading texts. But as a producer, I found videos are easier to monetize because of the attractive/addictive nature. More often than not, the formers which benefit consumers are not justifiable in pure economic senses compared to the latters, thus the reality we are living in nowadays.

monsieurbanana 5y ago
It's not a paradox as much as a difference between you and the public you target. Compared to you, they don't care about tracking, don't want the hassle to set-up on-prem and don't mind or prefer videos over text.
ec109685 5y ago
Why do you want your software on-prem and be responsible for deployment and monitoring,”?
- namelosw 5y ago
  Sorry I wasn't being clear about this part. What I meant is a comparison: If there is an on-prem option, the release, the update/migration, the installation environment, and the documentation on deployment should be carefully crafted. All of these not only require more effort, but also require people to keep in mind not to stomp on things. And even worse, they have to search for potential problems with their imagination because they don't have access to the data with edge cases they're dealing with. If people are not careful, it's very easy to seriously screw things and lost some customers forever. On top of that, if fixes are required, the team usually needs to fix multiple versions over and over, of which the codebase might have drastically changed. The teams are usually less and less "brave" as time goes by. For most SaaS without on-prem options, people can just focus on the functionalities and deploy many, many times a day. For non-critical issues, people don't need to worry about them, just debug what's going on and respond fast, and the issues are very likely fixed in hours. Plus they can use components like Kafka, Elastic Search, or even other SaaS as needed, without having to choose between re-invent things or ask everybody to install a zoo of components in their on-prem solutions. That's one of the key reasons why web application is so popular nowadays compared to what we've done in the 90s desktop applications. Because it enables the "move fast and break things" mentality because more things are fixable in web applications. On-prem is like 90s desktop applications in disguise. Just try to imagine how horrifying if someone breaks the upgrade functionality. Or if one needs to fix a bug in Windows 10, they also need to fix it from like Windows Vista to Windows 10, where the codebases are drastically different. In conclusion, on-prem sounds applaudable to the audiences on HN, but the reality is it doesn't work well for most for-profit businesses.

cuffe 5y ago

I'm actually working on launching a self-serve on-prem version of Retool over the next few weeks. Would love your feedback on whether the way we're thinking about it resonates with how you feel about on-prem/self-hosted tools. If you're open to it, let's connect jamie at retool.com

timwis 5y ago

I’m curious: notion lets you export everything as markdown and CSV. If you had a sync/backup job running, that, say, imported the csv to a Postgres database every night, how would you feel about your concern?