It strikes me as a really, really bad idea. Besides the obvious lock-in issues, I've found the only hope of keeping documentation uptodate is to either generate it from the code or keep it checked it in git besides the code.
What's really needed are (1) authoring tools that can produce decent documentation (ideally as docbook XML or maybe asciidoc) for checkin and (2) product guys who are willing to write docs for features before or during feature development and (3) translation services that can actually do a decent job between the big three business languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish).
It's frustrating that 1, 2, and 3 are so very hard to find. Many products live or die by their lack of documentation, but there don't be seem any simple solutions here.
I get that these companies need to make money, but $35-40/month is a tough sell for personal projects and the like. I happily pay for GitHub at $7 or $12/month and I wish one of these many companies would offer that pricing tier for docs.
That being said, the value of having up-to-date docs that anyone can edit is invaluable. Docs are more than just reference guides!
At the moment, we provide data portability on e-mail request, but very soon we'll provide you the tools to export and to handle your documentation outside of our website, and to import it back.
We are aware of the longer loading times in Australia due to having our servers in the Ireland. We will be launching soon our CDN to provide faster site speed. Sorry about that!
Keep updated!
$39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible.
Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive.
Additionally the actual docs and demo site are not loading in time from Australia. The `main.{digest}.js` file is reliably giving me a 15s download time (not TTFB, oddly) (http://i.imgur.com/ay6le8H.png), which causes the entire page to be blank. I have like a 300MS RTT to the server. Get a CDN and use it effectively.