What happens when the vendor changes the deal

Vendor risk · 4 min read · 3 September 2026

On 1 January 2026 SmartSuite stopped offering its free plan to new sign-ups. Existing free workspaces kept working until 1 July, and then they were locked.

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 with Team; Professional lists at $30 per editor per month, billed annually (US list price, July 2026).

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 this category, recently:

• a free tier withdrawn (SmartSuite, above);
• AI sold as a meter on top of the seat you already bought (Airtable's AI credit top-ups, ClickUp's AI add-on);
• a company acquired (Airtable, by Bending Spoons, completed in September 2026).

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.

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 psql at 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.
• No element 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 one you already use to be moved up. (Seats, record limits and a few admin features such as SAML are tiered, and say so.)
• If you want to leave, the exit is a pg_dump rather 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 every row readable and exportable on our own hardware, and keep editing until the licence we hold runs out, while we decide" — that is a different position to negotiate from.

Sources: SmartSuite's free-plan dates from its free plan sunset guide; SmartSuite's and Airtable's prices and AI credits as published on their pricing pages in July 2026 (US list prices in US dollars, billed annually); ClickUp's per-user AI add-on as shown on clickup.com/pricing on 4 October 2026; the Airtable acquisition from Airtable's newsroom, 4 September 2026.