In January 2026 SmartSuite withdrew its free plan. Existing free workspaces kept
working until July, and then they expired.
I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of story that gets told
unfairly. SmartSuite did nothing dishonest. They gave six months' notice, the
plan was free, and no company owes anyone a free tier forever. Their paid plans
start at $30 per editor per month for Professional and the
product is well regarded.
The point is not that they behaved badly. The point is that it was entirely
their decision to make, and everyone whose team ran on that plan found out
what that meant on the same day.
The thing you are actually buying
When you adopt a hosted work OS you are buying two different things and only one
of them is on the pricing page.
The first is the software: views, automations, formulas, permissions. That is
what you evaluate.
The second is a standing dependency on someone else's commercial decisions —
their pricing, their packaging, their roadmap, their acquisition, their
continued existence. That one is not on the page, has no SLA, and is the one
that decides whether the thing you built is still there in three years.
Nothing about this is unique to SmartSuite. In the last few years this category
has produced:
- free tiers withdrawn;
- entry plans repriced;
- features moved up a tier, so the same workflow costs more without changing;
- AI sold as a separate meter on top of the seat you already bought;
- companies acquired, and their products folded into someone else's roadmap.
None of that is misconduct. All of it is a vendor doing what a vendor is allowed
to do with a product it owns and hosts.
The product tour, silent by design. Full-resolution video.
What changes if you can run it yourself
Appdor is a work OS on top of a Postgres database rather than inside a vendor's.
The whole install is:
curl -fsSL https://get.appdor.com/appdor-latest.tar.gz | docker load
curl -fsSLO https://get.appdor.com/docker-compose.yml
docker run --rm ghcr.io/nebosa-company/appdor generate-keys > .env
docker compose up -d
That does not make us immune to being a company that makes decisions. We can
change our pricing too. What it changes is what happens to you if we do:
- The database is ordinary Postgres and you can point
psqlat it. Your data does not need our cooperation to be readable. - The build you self-host is the same build we host, on the same plans. There is no licence server to call and no activation: a licence is a signed file checked offline against a key inside the image. Thirty days to try it, then a licence to keep editing — and reads and exports never lock.
- Nothing is behind a plan. All 48 page elements, 25 chart types and 24 dashboard widgets ship in every tier, so there is no ladder for a feature you already use to be moved up.
- If you want to leave, the exit is a
pg_dumprather than a support ticket.
⚠️ That is a smaller claim than "you are safe", and I would rather make the
smaller one. Self-hosting moves a risk; it does not delete it. You now own
backups, upgrades and uptime. For a lot of teams that trade is not worth it, and
the hosted option exists for exactly that reason.
The question to actually ask
Not "is this vendor trustworthy". They usually are, and it does not help you
anyway — the SmartSuite decision was made by people acting reasonably.
Ask instead: if this vendor changed the deal tomorrow, what would it cost us
to say no?
For most hosted tools the honest answer is "a migration we do not have time
for", which is another way of saying the deal cannot be refused. If the answer
is "we keep running the build we already have, on our own hardware, while we
decide" — that is a different position to negotiate from.
Originally published at appdor.com. I build Appdor, so weigh accordingly.
