Although I really like the Appflowy approach, if find that the software is far from stable and robust to ask for almost the same prices as notion (maybe with some AI sparkles more on the Appflowy side), and that is for a general user. For self-hosting is even worse (see the shortcomings below).
Saying your software is open source is misleading and saying it is FOSS is simply wrong. The open-source parts you have work only in a conglomerate with the closed source part. It seems that you want to give the appearance of openness, but true independence or portability is not there.
As a result, instead of wanting to contribute and to sponsor your system, I am frustrated and no longer as passionate about it. I would have gladly paid the seed license as a donation and there are a lot more of “me” I’m certain. Take for instance the self-hosting, there are currently only downfalls in self-hosting, besides the data ownership in my opinion
- Collaborative editing does not work( Self-hosting AppFlowy with AppFlowy Cloud | AppFlowy Docs )
2. Template import works with tedious workarounds which I still have not succeeded in doing
nginx/nginx.conf and external_proxy_config/nginx/appflowy.site.conf are not kept in sync and at least for me with an external nginx proxy only a mix of the 2 worked.
3. Port mapping for the containers is not well documented or almost inexistent.
4. Members invite vs workspace members invite vs guest invite (which does not work currently either) is misleading, not documented, and a lot of information out there is out of date.
5. As a result, for me the setup took something along 5-6h, and I think it is a reasonable estimation given that the information is not complete, nor is it centralized. One needs to read the wiki, GitHub and discord to succeed.
I wanted to make a PR with all my findings (as I usually do for Open-Source projects) but when I stumbled upon this price change topic. Moreover you even ask for contribution from the self-hosters (without giving them a real incentive to contribute):
Your aggressive fee strategy seems to converge more to squeezing the current small family/team users than to try to attract corporations. For new users, especially considering the loss of trust in your long-term strategy and uncertainty about the features being limited/paywalled even further in the future. I find Appflowy losing a lot in its attractiveness to say the least.
I would urge you to update your documentation to open core and be more transparent about what you offer. Also, to avoid frustration and negativity and new users being scared away, it would be a good idea to contact all the tech news sites/influencers who wrote about your product, to update their articles. Because the image I gather from other sources is not the product you are offering/selling. And at least for now, both Transpercy and Open Source are NOT qualities I would relate to your product.