Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it.

In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database. If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship, I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack. Hopefully it’s growing pains and they’re sorting it out, but it doesn’t make me feel confident about the security of my (most sensitive) data.

It’s maybe also a cautionary tale about what happens when you dismiss too many early decisions as “premature optimization.” You ship fast in the beginning but a few years later you’re buried in all the debt you generated.

Granted, it’s a good problem to have. If the choice is between a profitable, popular company buried in tech debt, or the perfect stack with no customers, I’ll take the debt.

Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem.

Curious what you'd be willing to pay for this, as it's exclusively an enterprise feature. My guess is an absolute minimum of $50k/year contract value, or 250-350 users at an enterprise per-seat price (just guessing).

Aside from going fully on prem, the idea of strictly dedicated storage is interesting -- like "bring your own S3 bucket" simplicity. I don't see that often outside of $10 desktop apps.

You're right about Asana -- but it's worth noting that RoamResearch ($100/yr) offers private, offline dbs, and Roam's OSS "vassal" app (ie, clone) AthensResearch is self-hosted and free-as-in-beer.