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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 gu

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.
    - jrcii2 5y ago
      This might be an interesting alternative: https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea. Open source Notion clone that you can host locally.
      - TobTobXX 5y ago
        Looks awesome, but it relies on an S3 (or compatible) backend, which I personally find too much of a hassle.
        sbarre 5y ago
        Min.io[0] is pretty easy to set up, if you haven't heard of it, and is S3-compatible. 0: https://min.io/ https://min.io/
chrisweekly 5y ago
You're right about Asana -- but it's worth noting that RoamResearch ($100/yr) offers private, offline dbs, and Roam's OSS "vassal" app (ie, clone) AthensResearch is self-hosted and free-as-in-beer.
- boraoztunc 5y ago
  Obsidian (https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md) also offers offline, + for free.
  - rattray 5y ago
    Are either Roam or Obsidian collaborative?
    - hokumguru 5y ago
      Roam seems to be working on it. I’m unsure the status as I haven’t checked in a few months.
      - mbrock 5y ago
        I think Roam has been fully collaborative since the launch. The browser keeps the whole database in IndexedDB and syncs it continuously with a WebSocket streaming Datomic-style transactions.
    - chrisweekly 5y ago
      Roam: yes Obsidian: unsure (I think not)
    - boraoztunc 5y ago
      Not sure about Roam, I've been using Obsidian, and my purpose is for personal, making note archive offline. So never had any need for collaboration. But with Sync and Publish features, maybe there is a possibility.
  - dancemethis 5y ago
kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
> it's exclusively an enterprise feature Are you suggesting privacy and data ownership concerns are only limited to enterprises?
- gumby 5y ago
  I think it suggests that the support and SLA costs are higher in these situations. These factors make sense to me. Note that Gitlab believes the opposite so on prem is also free.
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    The support costs are a solvable problem. The challenge is architecting your stack to accommodate external storage, and delivering a usable experience to your users when they connect their resources. It would be nice if AWS could deliver a smooth OAuth experience so that in a few clicks, a user could provision an S3 bucket and share it with a service provider as easily as they can grant access to a GitHub repository.
polote 5y ago
Even if the offer is appealing, this is unlikely to happen. Confluence who used to offer it, has stopped and soon everyone would need to use the cloud version. The thing is that for a collaborative tool like Notion (and others) being Saas, and in the cloud is kind of mandatory. As you need your tool to integrate with other services and thus, can't be static. The only possibility left is "dedicated storage". That works for static ressources. But the `page` content itself is dynamic and changes often, so you will need more than "bring your own S3" and something like "bring your rds" but that starts to be pretty complicated. Quip though still offer on prem AFAIK. At the end of the day, the issue with collaborative tools, is that you can't e2e encrypt easily, and almost impossible if you offer full text search. The best solution is to trust your provider for data security. And use maybe some daily backups in your own network.
- iampims 5y ago
  Backup to s3 every N hours sounds like a good trade off.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Atlassian tools still offer on-prem, but you need a data center license now and they doubled the price of that. Unfortunate, but they'd be losing some huge customers that cannot run in the cloud not just as a matter of policy but technology. The entire IC developer platform is using the Atlassian suite, for instance, but on JWICS, a classified network with no connectivity to Atlassian's cloud. What's going to end up happening if more vendors decide you can only use their service from their cloud is the largest enterprises and governments are going to exclusively use Microsoft and AWS since they're more than willing to just build you your own cloud that meets whatever security and disconnection requirements you have, no matter how stringent. Already no new government projects that still have a choice are going with Atlassian tooling. We'll see how it goes for them, I guess. Maybe they don't need governments and Fortune 500s and can get by selling exclusively to startups with no real security or lock-in avoidance requirements.
  - LilBytes 5y ago
    Well, the comment still stands. You can't /reasonably/ deploy Confluence on premise any more when weighing up the cost feasibility of using the on premise service for Data Centre vs Server. The idea of using their cloud service (Atlassians) wouldn't be that daunting if it wasn't for the consistent feed back I see here and else where that performantly, it absolutely sucks.

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.
  - jrcii2 5y ago
    This might be an interesting alternative: https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea https://github.com/QingWei-Li/notea. Open source Notion clone that you can host locally.
    - TobTobXX 5y ago
      Looks awesome, but it relies on an S3 (or compatible) backend, which I personally find too much of a hassle.
      - sbarre 5y ago
        Min.io[0] is pretty easy to set up, if you haven't heard of it, and is S3-compatible. 0: https://min.io/ https://min.io/

chrisweekly 5y ago

You're right about Asana -- but it's worth noting that RoamResearch ($100/yr) offers private, offline dbs, and Roam's OSS "vassal" app (ie, clone) AthensResearch is self-hosted and free-as-in-beer.

boraoztunc 5y ago
Obsidian (https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md) also offers offline, + for free.
- rattray 5y ago
  Are either Roam or Obsidian collaborative?
  - hokumguru 5y ago
    Roam seems to be working on it. I’m unsure the status as I haven’t checked in a few months.
    - mbrock 5y ago
      I think Roam has been fully collaborative since the launch. The browser keeps the whole database in IndexedDB and syncs it continuously with a WebSocket streaming Datomic-style transactions.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    Roam: yes Obsidian: unsure (I think not)
  - boraoztunc 5y ago
    Not sure about Roam, I've been using Obsidian, and my purpose is for personal, making note archive offline. So never had any need for collaboration. But with Sync and Publish features, maybe there is a possibility.
- dancemethis 5y ago

kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago

> it's exclusively an enterprise feature Are you suggesting privacy and data ownership concerns are only limited to enterprises?

gumby 5y ago
I think it suggests that the support and SLA costs are higher in these situations. These factors make sense to me. Note that Gitlab believes the opposite so on prem is also free.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  The support costs are a solvable problem. The challenge is architecting your stack to accommodate external storage, and delivering a usable experience to your users when they connect their resources. It would be nice if AWS could deliver a smooth OAuth experience so that in a few clicks, a user could provision an S3 bucket and share it with a service provider as easily as they can grant access to a GitHub repository.

polote 5y ago

Even if the offer is appealing, this is unlikely to happen. Confluence who used to offer it, has stopped and soon everyone would need to use the cloud version. The thing is that for a collaborative tool like Notion (and others) being Saas, and in the cloud is kind of mandatory. As you need your tool to integrate with other services and thus, can't be static. The only possibility left is "dedicated storage". That works for static ressources. But the `page` content itself is dynamic and changes often, so you will need more than "bring your own S3" and something like "bring your rds" but that starts to be pretty complicated. Quip though still offer on prem AFAIK. At the end of the day, the issue with collaborative tools, is that you can't e2e encrypt easily, and almost impossible if you offer full text search. The best solution is to trust your provider for data security. And use maybe some daily backups in your own network.

iampims 5y ago
Backup to s3 every N hours sounds like a good trade off.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Atlassian tools still offer on-prem, but you need a data center license now and they doubled the price of that. Unfortunate, but they'd be losing some huge customers that cannot run in the cloud not just as a matter of policy but technology. The entire IC developer platform is using the Atlassian suite, for instance, but on JWICS, a classified network with no connectivity to Atlassian's cloud. What's going to end up happening if more vendors decide you can only use their service from their cloud is the largest enterprises and governments are going to exclusively use Microsoft and AWS since they're more than willing to just build you your own cloud that meets whatever security and disconnection requirements you have, no matter how stringent. Already no new government projects that still have a choice are going with Atlassian tooling. We'll see how it goes for them, I guess. Maybe they don't need governments and Fortune 500s and can get by selling exclusively to startups with no real security or lock-in avoidance requirements.
- LilBytes 5y ago
  Well, the comment still stands. You can't /reasonably/ deploy Confluence on premise any more when weighing up the cost feasibility of using the on premise service for Data Centre vs Server. The idea of using their cloud service (Atlassians) wouldn't be that daunting if it wasn't for the consistent feed back I see here and else where that performantly, it absolutely sucks.