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If you're curious, check out this app: https://umai.noeldemartin.com/
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It doesn’t have to be offered for free. If you sell a lifetime license for your software it’s actually sort of in your interest for customers to self host since then you’re off the hook for server costs. The main thrust here is if you buy a “lifetime” license, it should be your lifetime, not the lifetime of the company that sold it to you.
I think I'm not really communicating my point effectively. If you sell a lifetime license for your software, then the customer provides a single one-time payment (essentially CapEx) which obliges you to indefinite long-term work and support and maintenance (costs). But you can't support indefinite future costs with a single payment from a customer. The math doesn't work. Again, if the data is small enough that it can…
You could run an ejectable server with other funding models. For instance, you pay yearly subscription and get updates within that year, but you get to keep your version forever if you want.
Or your server phones home for a license, but perhaps with an escrow license key if the company goes bankrupt and you have to pay subscription.
Either way, the business model is somewhat independent of the ejection mechanism.
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The same way anything else gets created before it exists in order to create revenue - loans and/or early investors. EDIT: whoops, I missed the second part of your question ("...how can it be maintained and enhanced over time..."). I've already implicitly answered that in my original reply, by claiming that the attractiveness of "optional hosted services" is higher than the average HN reader - who is predisposed to be…
You give your server.exe away for free, and make all of your revenue in value-add hosting, and maybe professional services stuff to specific customers. You still have to maintain server.exe -- fix bugs, add features, etc. -- which requires engineering resources, time, money. Someone else comes along, downloads your server.exe, and offers hosting and professional services themselves, as a competitor. To a customer the…
I still don't think this is an intractable problem, though - there are still some properties that provide a moat to allow you to survive:
* the experience of having developed the server.exe means that you have some institutional knowledge that makes you better able to offer support - you don't have to "learn it from scratch"
* you can offer upcoming features to your paid subscribers earlier than they get released in the free version
* name/brand recognition is A Thing - there is some non-zero dollar value that customers will assign to the comfort and security of buying from "the real source"
But I do recognize and agree that those are slim and not _necessarily_ decisive. In some cases, the differential revenue accrued by those things will be enough to continue development on the product that is otherwise given away for free; in others, it won't. A careful balancing act, to be sure!
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For the desktop version just watching the directory for changes is enough to achieve that. Nestful is not aware the files are syncing, it just reads files as they are.
Ah ok so Nestful doesn't integrate with Dropbox/Drive directly, but if the user uses something like them for sync, the app picks up the changes?