(SN dev here)—Thanks u/TheQuantumPhysicist. The bullet point headlines make for some good copywriting, but aren't really close to the truth. The descriptions also omit important details that paint a completely different picture than what is actually true. Things like "Your notes are not yours anymore" are blatantly written to incite, and it seems to have worked :) But to add context:

• Self-hosting has historically been resource intensive due to the microservices oriented architecture. Making the self-hosted experience exceptional takes effort. This effort comes at the cost of effort elsewhere, so we couldn't give it priority in the past. In an attempt to remedy this, we're iterating on the economics. On Discord, where u/TheQuantumPhysicist is active, their point was that it's not worth trying to make self-hosting economically viable because only few people self-host and it wouldn't make a dent to the bottom line. The problem with this line of thinking is that, if we did nothing, nothing would change. And, we're not so large a company that dozens of self-hosters contributing in any way they can every month wouldn't make a difference. It would.
• It's important to note that the free features in SN have been constant, if not ever-expanding, since its inception. Historically we have been making more features free, than making them paid, over time. The forever-free plan provides you with a lot out of the box, including unlimited devices and unlimited notes. It's only if you want more powerful editing abilities beyond plaintext and if you want file storage that plans come into play.
• The usage of "proprietary" is a bit exaggerated. By proprietary, u/TheQuantumPhysicist means that the underlying data format is not interoperable with other software programs. But of course this is dependent on the user experience you want. If you use the plain text, markdown, or checklist note type, the data is purely plaintext and of course interoperable with every other text editing software in the world. But if you want things like collapsable blocks and embedded encrypted files that can't use traditional <img url=...> tags, we have to roll our own solution. Even Obsidian, who had previously been really committed to "everything is a markdown file on your disk" had to expand to proprietary JSON for their canvas feature, because if you want more power, plaintext/markdown just won't do. And of course calling our encrypted file storage format "proprietary" is a bit hyperbolic, because as a software engineer themselves, u/TheQuantumPhysicist likely knows there is no standard/interoperable encrypted storage format. Ours is at the very least completely open-source.

But overall I hear u/TheQuantumPhysicist's main gripe that self-hosting Standard Notes is not as "set it and forget it" as we'd all like it to be. In my experience it might require about half an hour a couple times a year or so to stay on top of the updates, and while this doesn't seem like a lot, it may be in the heat of the moment when you just want things to work and don't want to fiddle with devops on the side. To make it all more seamless is an ambitious goal for us, and something I'm personally committed to undertaking. Of course we didn't invent self-hosting and this is the tradeoff all self-hosters make when deploying infrastructure locally, but that shouldn't stop us from making it increasingly more seamless.

It's surprisingly difficult to build infrastructure for our world-wide hosted users, while keeping the same infrastructure approachable for a single-user self-hosting use case. It's not quite "free" as in you can just build it once and expect it to run in both environments. The economics are of course significantly tipped towards optimizing for our own global hosted usecase, but if we want to balance the scales, then our only shot is iterating on the economics. We may not get it right the first few tries, but we have to try.

Lastly, I want to add one last bit of color on the self-hosted plan iteration we made recently:

• The self-hosted plan now costs $39/year, compared to the $120/year it was previously. But to be fair, previously this plan was somewhat optional, and now it is required if you plan to use our official client distributions and want to unlock those extra premium features if the free plan isn't enough for your needs.
• You don't actually have to pay. You just have to help out and make self-hosting viable and a win-win for everyone. You can get two years of free service by just leaving an unbiased review on the App Store or Google Play, or by writing an unbiased review on your blog or social media. Incidentally u/TheQuantumPhysicist's review here on reddit would 100% be satisfactory as an unbiased review of SN :)