Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.
With Obsidian the thing that made me ok with this was it's all just markdown. I have all my data stored locally in an ubiquitous file format
But there's an entire workflow embedded in the use of Obsidian. It's not "just markdown". That's like saying you could move from vscode to notepad because it's "just text".
Yup and that is my problem with startups like supabase too. I have just started using pocketbase for that reason.
Their stack is primarily comprised of other independent open source projects. The one component that isn't is their "realtime" server that serves updates from postgres' WAL over websockets, but that is open sourced[0] under Apache 2.0. From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI. There are plenty of alternative management tools for postgres though. As you can export your database what else would you need to ensure your portability and independence?
Granted they make their docs fairly opaque for trying to self host. Presumably to encourage you to just use their hosted service. Hosting open sourced projects seems like a very ecosystem friendly way of monetizing.