4 ms·

It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs. From my perspect

It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs. From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team? Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data. So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.

tombert 9mo ago
Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
- horsawlarway 9mo ago
  The honest answer is because I backup a large number of other things to backblaze anyways. I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host. I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software. Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc... Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge). --- Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain] https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea. Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable. And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!
  - tombert 9mo ago
    Totally fair. I've heard that Mercurial has competent binary diffing, so I might at some point try using that to sync my Obsidian stuff. Anyway, it's not like 22 cents a month is going to bankrupt you so I am certainly not criticizing, I was just curious.

tombert 9mo ago

Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).

horsawlarway 9mo ago
The honest answer is because I backup a large number of other things to backblaze anyways. I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host. I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software. Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc... Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge). --- Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain] https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea. Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable. And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!
- tombert 9mo ago
  Totally fair. I've heard that Mercurial has competent binary diffing, so I might at some point try using that to sync my Obsidian stuff. Anyway, it's not like 22 cents a month is going to bankrupt you so I am certainly not criticizing, I was just curious.