We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally.
Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
My company had Notion hit us up for an Enterprise contract. When we asked if they offered enhanced security, single tenancy, or even they’d accept some sort of liability if they had a breach … the answer was no, no, and no.
We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion.
I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger guarantees to their customers. If they pull it off they’ll easily be mission critical software.
Notion doesn't even need to offer these guarantees in their SaaS service. They can just ship to my Kubernetes cluster, and let me manage the ingress and storage, and that would be enough to make it mission critical software.
In the meantime, we end up using tools with a little bit less good UX, but we just can't share that data publicly. UX can't win over security, and I hate having to choose.
That seems exactly like what customers want — just when you share things publicly it goes to a separate public sandbox? It should be fairly trivial to obfuscate
Thanks for being upfront about “don’t have any plans for that”, instead of a vague “we’re looking into it” which sounds better but effectively means the same thing.
>Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
This is unfortunate. I tried Notion a few months back, and almost loved it enough to pay for a subscription. Once I saw that, I refunded the subscription and went back to markdown and git. I love your software, but the lock-in is frustrating.
"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.
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.
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.
(Notion here) We agree! The new personal plan enables you to have unlimited pages & blocks and share with up to 5 guests for free. https://www.notion.so/pricing
Guests have to be invited to individual pages though, right? So this means I still need to either invite my spouse to every single shared page (which is problematic if my spouse wants to create a new top-level shared page in my workspace), or nest all the shared stuff under a single top-level page which is annoying (and hurts navigation on mobile).
so does that mean the person you've shared it with can have access to the full workspace?
I honestly don't mind paying $8/month for 2 but it seems that the only way we can both be admin immediately bring this cost to the team plan at $16/mo for two....
(Notion here) This update gets rid of of that exact block limit for personal use. We do hope and plan to be around for awhile. We're profitable and have raised money to ensure we're able to invest in the product for the long-term (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup...).
We just released some performance improvements across the board (improved mobile startup times from a ship a few days ago linked here: https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1261037710665322496). We'd love if you could try it again and we'll definitely continue to work on this.
(Stripe here) Stripe's pricing varies depending on the country you're doing business from. If useful, you can see our pricing for businesses in the UK here, which starts at 1.4% + 20p for European cards: https://stripe.com/gb/pricing
Control provides a number of services (business intelligence, analytics reporting, etc.) in addition to mobile apps to view your Stripe account details. We let Control know we were planning to build an iOS app in September of 2014 and we plan to continue to work with and support their efforts to build on top of Stripe's platform.
More broadly, we want to balance being good ecosystem stewards with building the best product for our businesses. Occasionally, what we do will overlap with what others are building. When that happens, we'll try to give as much notice as possible.
If you have any questions about this, please drop me a line (cristina@stripe.com). We want to ensure we're building out the Stripe ecosystem to make our partners successful.
You actually don't need to carry a balance with Venmo to send funds to a friend. If you have a balance of $0, you can send funds and Venmo will pull the funds from your bank account.
We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally.
Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.