What happens when the vendor changes the deal

Vendor risk · 4 min read

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• free tiers withdrawn;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.

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:

docker compose up

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. There is no licence server to call, no activation, and no feature that notices it is running outside a hosted plan and turns itself off.
• 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_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 running the build we already have, on our own hardware, while we decide" — that is a different position to negotiate from.