The number one thing I care about in such a product, and it's make or break, is 'where is my data, how is it stored, what do I do when you disappear'. (And you disappearing of course includes a 'successful exit', congrats, but there's at least a 50% chance of an 'incredible journey' blog post to follow.)
Since it's not mentioned anywhere, I assume I don't own it. It's all in your database in AWS or wherever, maybe there's some export that's about 60% complete in a sort of workable format. But it's not going to be usable 'plaintext' on disk, parseable with other tools, and usable even if the Emery app stops being updated/disappears.
Because of this, I've come to distrust any offering that's not self-hosted on my homeserver. Sounds drastic, but I've been burned too often. The quality I get from this is significantly lower, the amount of work I need to put in is much more, and though often fun it's not always at convenient times and sometimes I hate it. But I'm fairly confident that all my data, be it email, cal, notes, pictures, whatnot, will still be accessible 3 years or 10 years from now. Some things from 10 years ago I dearly miss, and I don't want that to happen again.
While I generally want control of my data too, I think if the small team has to prioritise creating final APIs (on a data model that probably still in flux) and export functions for the 1% of users who might end up using that… OR… building features and trying to find a product that has market fit and that people like to use and find valuable.. I hope they choose the later. People are less likely to try out (let alone choose) a product based on export functions than they are actual productivity functionality. Well done on the launch it looks really exciting!
I sadly agree. While I love seeing products like this, I always hesitate to fully embrace them because it would have a major impact to my day and I don't want surprises there.
That's a very valid concern. Given how often it was expressed in this topic, looks like we need to find a way to accommodate it (e.g. export option). We'll think about it, thanks!
Since it's not mentioned anywhere, I assume I don't own it. It's all in your database in AWS or wherever, maybe there's some export that's about 60% complete in a sort of workable format. But it's not going to be usable 'plaintext' on disk, parseable with other tools, and usable even if the Emery app stops being updated/disappears.