What happens when the vendor changes the deal

Nebosa Company — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:13:12 +0000

In January 2026 SmartSuite withdrew its free plan. Existing free workspaces kept
working until July, and then they expired.

I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of story that gets told
unfairly. SmartSuite did nothing dishonest. They gave six months' notice, the
plan was free, and no company owes anyone a free tier forever. Their paid plans
start at $30 per editor per month for Professional and the
product is well regarded.

The point is not that they behaved badly. The point is that it was entirely
their decision to make, and everyone whose team ran on that plan found out
what that meant on the same day.

The thing you are actually buying

When you adopt a hosted work OS you are buying two different things and only one
of them is on the pricing page.

The first is the software: views, automations, formulas, permissions. That is
what you evaluate.

The second is a standing dependency on someone else's commercial decisions —
their pricing, their packaging, their roadmap, their acquisition, their
continued existence. That one is not on the page, has no SLA, and is the one
that decides whether the thing you built is still there in three years.

Nothing about this is unique to SmartSuite. In the last few years this category
has produced:

free tiers withdrawn;
entry plans repriced;
features moved up a tier, so the same workflow costs more without changing;
AI sold as a separate meter on top of the seat you already bought;
companies acquired, and their products folded into someone else's roadmap.

None of that is misconduct. All of it is a vendor doing what a vendor is allowed
to do with a product it owns and hosts.

The product tour, silent by design. Full-resolution video.

What changes if you can run it yourself

Appdor is a work OS on top of a Postgres database rather than inside a vendor's.
The whole install is:

docker compose up

That does not make us immune to being a company that makes decisions. We can
change our pricing too. What it changes is what happens to you if we do:

The database is ordinary Postgres and you can point psql at it. Your data does not need our cooperation to be readable.
The build you self-host is the same build we host. There is no licence server to call, no activation, and no feature that notices it is running outside a hosted plan and turns itself off.
Nothing is behind a plan. All 48 page elements, 25 chart types and 24 dashboard widgets ship in every tier, so there is no ladder for a feature you already use to be moved up.
If you want to leave, the exit is a pg_dump rather than a support ticket.

⚠️ That is a smaller claim than "you are safe", and I would rather make the
smaller one. Self-hosting moves a risk; it does not delete it. You now own
backups, upgrades and uptime. For a lot of teams that trade is not worth it, and
the hosted option exists for exactly that reason.

The question to actually ask

Not "is this vendor trustworthy". They usually are, and it does not help you
anyway — the SmartSuite decision was made by people acting reasonably.

Ask instead: if this vendor changed the deal tomorrow, what would it cost us
to say no?

For most hosted tools the honest answer is "a migration we do not have time
for", which is another way of saying the deal cannot be refused. If the answer
is "we keep running the build we already have, on our own hardware, while we
decide" — that is a different position to negotiate from.

Originally published at appdor.com. I build Appdor, so weigh accordingly.

Your spreadsheet-database can run on hardware you already own

Nebosa Company — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:11:14 +0000

Every spreadsheet-database product on the market will tell you your data is
safe. Almost none of them will tell you where it is.

That distinction stops being philosophical the first time somebody in
procurement asks which sub-processors touch your production records, or the
first time a customer's contract says the row has to stay inside a particular
jurisdiction. At that point "safe" is not an answer. "It is in a Postgres
instance on hardware you control, and here is the connection string" is.

The product tour, silent by design. Full-resolution video.

What running it yourself actually means here

Appdor is a work OS that sits on top of a Postgres database rather than
inside a vendor's. The database is the system of record, it is ordinary
Postgres, and you can point psql at it.

docker compose up

That is the whole installation. There is no licence server to call, no
activation step, and no feature that notices it is running outside a hosted
plan and turns itself off.

The consequences are worth being precise about, because "self-hostable" is a
word that has been used loosely enough to mean nothing:

The schema is yours. Tables are tables. A migration you write by hand, a read-replica you attach, a nightly pg_dump into your own object store — all of it works, because there is no proprietary storage layer between the product and the database.
The product does not phone home. No telemetry endpoint and no licence check. The application and marketing bundles are served from the origin you deployed — no CDN. One exception, stated because you would otherwise find it in a network tab: the Map element fetches its basemap tiles from OpenStreetMap's servers by default, which tells that host a viewer's IP address and roughly where they are looking. It is one setting (tileUrl) pointed at your own tile server, and nothing else changes.
Nothing is gated. All 48 page elements, 25 chart types and 24 dashboard widgets are present in the build you just started. There is no plan that unlocks them.

The part that usually breaks

Most migrations off a hosted spreadsheet-database do not fail on the data. They
fail on the logic — the several hundred formula cells somebody wrote over
three years, in a dialect that only exists inside one vendor's product.

Appdor reads 7 formula dialects and transpiles them into its own. That
is a separate piece of work with its own article, but it is the reason this
particular migration is finishable rather than merely startable.

What you should check before believing any of this

Reasonable scepticism about a self-hosting claim looks like this, and all four
are things you can verify yourself in about twenty minutes:

Bring it up with the network disconnected after the images are pulled. If it needs the internet to run, that is where you will find out.
Connect to the database directly and read a record you created in the UI. If you cannot, the storage is not really Postgres.
Grep the built assets for absolute http(s) URLs. Third-party requests are not a matter of policy; they are a matter of fact.
Turn off a feature's network path and see whether the feature admits it.

The fourth is the one that separates products that are honest from products
that are merely quiet.

Where this leaves you

If you are running a spreadsheet-database today and the answer to "where does
this row live" is a vendor's region list, you have a dependency you did not
choose and cannot audit. Running the same class of tool on your own Postgres
turns that into a deployment decision — which is the kind of problem your
infrastructure team already knows how to have.

The product is free to run on your own hardware, and it is available in
36 languages.