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by pritambarhate 836 days ago
Lesson for all of us (customers of SaaS companies): never depend of VC backed non profitable companies for critical components of your infrastructure or business processes. Always build on tried and tested open source software.
3 comments

Even a lot of the open source stuff is runs by companies listed on Crunchbase with millions of dollars of VC backing. That software isn't gonna maintain itself if the cash runs out.

Open source may be safer than proprietary software in that regard, but it's still not a guarantee. Still far preferable IMO.

Yes but if you are already self-hosting it, it really isn't hard to keep it alive. It means there will never be a rug-pull with two months notice.
Pick the tool based on features today and not based on roadmap.
That is true it gives you time to migrate.
> That software isn't gonna maintain itself if the cash runs out.

No, but you can maintain it yourself, or hire people to, or worst case you can at least run it and accept the bugs. You're not going to just get in one morning and find out they've turned off the servers and all the stuff you had in their system is gone.

Look at the mess Vercel created with their Next.js app router.
That's why I never use Supabase.
supabase is open source…
So was ngrok until they abandoned it completely for their cloud hosted v2. Over-engineered JS frameworks might last for a couple weeks in that state if you're lucky. Meanwhile, Rails + Postgres/SQLite need just a couple security fixes per year and they'll keep chugging indefinitely.

https://railslts.com/

The culture that has birthed these mongrol JS frameworks worships shinyness and novelty. These are naturally temporal qualities. It's why for almost no one does it make sense to buy a mid-range Mercedes/BMW. You always lease because you know it will fall apart after the warranty period.

Nope. They are all part of the whole "open source" gimmicky companies where their main focus is the commercial aspect of it. It's a shame they are using "open source" as a marketing gimmick and it's totally against the ethos of open source software.