Exactly, after 15 years of web development, I never lock any customers into any proprietary anything. The cost, time, suffering, that come with the failure of a company we rely on is no longer worth it.

We have dealt with this a couple times with shopping cart providers, mls idx search systems, do-it-yourself website systems, captcha systems, cms systems (paid-for, now with no upgrade path for things like PHP5 to 7), payment processing systems, and more I probably can't think of at the moment.

If it's not open source, and self-hosted, then we walk away.

The only things we kind-of lock into now are hosting providers, email providers, and domain registrars. But we use pretty big and established operations for these just so we hopefully don't have to move things.

Not just the failure of a vendor, but the "success" too. They build the product out with a low-cost self-serve model and an army of loyal and enthusiastic customers, but then they get greedy / raise money / realize that they could be going after much bigger fish and they jack prices to the moon to shed all their current customers who are "holding them back". See Segment, Drip, and an endless list of others.

FYI we have and will always grandfather in early customers.

This is the same sort of promise app.net made

Would you mind mentioning who you use for hosting/email/domain registration? I'm doing research for a large migration and I love hearing what works for others in similar situations.

Not OP, but someone who is very familiar with this space:

Hosting... Don't do some crazy VPS thing, you don't want to worry about being a sysadmin. Dreamhost has a good WP setup with most things you'd need ready to go. There are lots of other "managed WordPress" companies too.

Email, just FastMail or G-Suite (Google Apps). Probably just the latter because it's familiar to most.

Registration is pretty negligible these days. I like Namecheap and their corporate values and support.

>Going to be a hard lift to compete with the likes of http://strapi.io when you aren't open source.

Does anyone know how they made their demo thingee on the front page? It's super slick.

They used a project called Typed.js. https://github.com/mattboldt/typed.js/

Looks like it is an animated gif. Not sure if that answers your question or not.

This is a good point. It's a challenge to convince CTOs to choose a startup to depend on for mission-critical services. For the most part, the trend is moving to greater trust for vendors that provide these services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. We're betting this trend will continue. And in the meantime, we're doing our best to off-set the fear of vendor lock-in with an easy export feature to export all of your data if needed.

Stripe/Twilio/Algolia are features for an application: Payments/Notifications/Search. Easier to switch out than the actual CMS (and very often balanced between 2 vendors - especially for stuff like payments and notifications exactly because you don't trust one vendor with a 100% lock-in).

Strapi looks awesome. Are you aware of any relevant competitors to it, MIT as well?

How does Strapi compare to something like Netlify CMS?

The whole point of a headless CMS is to not have to manage the CMS infrastructure. With Strapi, you would still need to manage the infrastructure yourself. This is actually called a "decoupled CMS".

Decoupling doesn't have anything to do with managing infrastructure. It means that the front end and the backend are communicating through an api, not a DB. This way you are not obliged to use the front end rendering of you don't want to. It's a special case of a headless CMS.

If Strapi started a hosted option, they would very much compete with your product. If your company goes under, customers have a lot fewer escape hatches than they do with open-source solutions.