If you’re the CEO, would you rather have a frustrating but profitable product or a non-frustrating but non-profitable product?

I think people forget this part of the math.

(I work at Notion)

"Lock in" is not a part of our strategy. We try to offer data portability via import and export; you can export your entire workspace as HTML (most metadata, pages link to each other and can be browsed offline), PDF, or Markdown (most easily editable). Given an HTML export and a few hours of scripting, I think you could migrate to any API-accessible document storage strategy.

Except if the export is broken, as it has been for us for months with no answer from support. Our company account got quite large to about 40 GB. Ever since, all export options just result in "export failed"... and as nothing can really be deleted; I'm scared we'll be locked in permanently.

Don't get me wrong. We love Notion. But we also need our data to be portable and backed up to not be liable.

You know, it could be that they just have a product vision and want to build and sell it to people that want it. If it's not what you want, you don't have to use it.

If your product is only profitable because you created artificial friction, your business is unlikely to exist a decade from now unless you are thinking about diversifying already.

Allowing me to host my data myself should not reduce your profits as long as your product is still the best.

If you’re focused on (relative) short term profits to get paid and retire on a beach, and you succeed, good for you. I’m totally jealous and wish I was you.

Unfortunately, I’m also not your target customer.

I don't see how or why these things have to be related in any way whatsoever? Atlassian offers self hosted solutions and presumably do so because it's profitable. I don't see why offering a self hosted solution has to somehow mean less profit, or to the extent of non-profitability for that matter.

You could make it *more* expensive to use the self hosted version. It's straightforward to justify if you consider the additional development overhead, and if you include some kind of a support package.

My question is genuine. I see strange justifications like this often when it comes to self hosted versions of X, Y, or Z product. What exactly is the risk to profit here? I can see extra engineering overhead as a possible risk, but that's a solvable problem. There are many ways to handle software updates. Spinning up new backend environments is often done on devs machines daily when developing. I don't see any novel problem that hasn't been solved.

The "we have no plans for this", or "we are looking into it" are all often used ways of avoiding the question of "why aren't you doing this?" There are plenty of companies out there that for one reason or another, need to control the environment where their data lives. Why give up that business? Why do people who work at those places have to often settle for worse products because of this? Why not give businesses *choice* of storing their data or having someone else deal with the complexity?

Is it that the presumed market for this is too small? And why is nobody being transparent about this?

You are reasoning about this well. Offering a self hosted solution is a solvable problem that can be profitable. The challenge might be that there are multiple different strategies the folks at Notion could follow, but choose not to. Each is solvable and each can bring more profit. And yet they need to decide what to do and what not to do. You should not chase every rabbit and solve every solvable problem.

Hey, I just don't like the way the numbers shake out. I'm just letting people know that I voted with my dollar.

You should try obsidian plus syncthing. I use notion at work but hate how slow it is most of the time. For everything else and for all of my own stuff at work I use obsidian.