[tobypadilla]

As one of the Charm co-founders, I think that's fair! That being said, others have asked us about this recently as well. I'll paste a reply I made the other day on Reddit:

Your concerns are well founded! I've certainly been burned by services disappearing...

It's a compromise to have a business model that allows us to develop Charm full-time vs. being completely open source. Our plan is to have a business model similar to GitHub: free and low cost services for individuals with enterprise hosting options (colo or hosted by us).

One thing that I think we should do is allow for a very easy export of all of your data. We can build that into glow and charm (vs. having to email us and ask for it or some other draconian option).

This is very much a 1.0 release of the Charm Cloud and one of the reasons we wanted to ship it early was to get feedback from the community and build out the features our users want. Your point is a great one that we should solve for ASAP. A glow export feature that spits out a .tar.gz of all your stashed markdowns seems like a great idea.

We're also open sourcing the libraries we use to build glow and charm, most of which don't require the Charm Cloud. We just made our TUI framework Bubble Tea open source for instance:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

We also have a library for applying JSON stylesheets to Markdown called Glamour that is independent of the Charm Cloud (and currently in use in GitHub's cli):

https://github.com/charmbracelet/glamour

Thanks for your question, it's a problem worth addressing.

[sanbor]

Please consider having an open source self-host option and a paid cloud service. Many people (and enterprises) doesn't want to spend time securing and maintaining servers. If your company disappears there is the self-host option as backup. This model seems to work well for Ghost and Gitlab.

[novok]

Also bitwarden is doing something similar!

FWIW, I get the impression that they want to charge money soon. Keybase never really wanted to bother with that and the implicit SLAs that come with it? Charging money is a great way to actually guarantee it will be around for a while longer than your typical ad or VC funded 'free' service.

I feel like the major problem with E2EE cloud services is getting apps to adopt it. For example, I like bear editor, but I don't like their encryption model. I like standard notes & inkdrop's E2EE encryption models, but I don't like them as editors that much since a bunch of their energy is probably being consumed by encryption stuff. It feels like the engineers who make good UIs have a hard time doing well on the security standpoint and the ones who bother to make things secure have a hard time dealing with making good UIs.

I want something that the bear's of the world will adopt and then they don't have to think about E2EE anymore.

[abnercoimbre]

I've switched to Ghost for my business precisely to support this model. And since I don't want to spend time maintaining servers, I pay them handsomely.

[3np]

Thanks for following up!

Well-structured exports is certainly something that I think will make a lot of people more confident (and also a necessity if you intend to have first-class support for EU customers with any kind of individual identifiers, with GDPR and all).

I’d still put a dogfed (same as you run yourselves, possibly missing select enterprise-targeted features) FOSS self-hosted server version.

Look at Hashicorp for a great example of that this works in practice when you're targeting a techy audience!

I’m sure a lot of your potential customers are happy to pay exactly because they want someone else to take care of all the technicalities - and on the other end of the spectrum (and I’m sure you’ve thought of this already) you have the enterprises that for legal or compliance reasons simply have to own the whole stack - and there you’ll have free users providing back tutorials, documentation, bug report and the occasional PR that you’d otherwise have to do yourselves or neglect. Just food for thought :)

[tobypadilla]

Thank you and sanbor for the detailed reply. I think it's really interesting. We can't promise anything now but it's definitely something we can look into. I self-host Sourcegraph and Gitea and enjoy the freedom (and can also see why someone would pay to not self-host).