You are correct. That gives their customers little under 5 months to rebuild their applications and critical workflows on a different platform.
Earlier this year the no-code platform Dynaboard was acquired by Figma and gave their users a 2-month warning before they deleted their apps and all their data.
It's not just startups that fail. In February Amazon shut down its No-code platform Honeycode after 4 years. Before them it was Google with their App Maker platform.
SaaS companies shut down all the time, but these cases are different. These weren’t just services. They were the core technology that their users built products on top of. There is no option to move your code to another platform when there is no code.
When you choose to build an application on a proprietary platform you give away control. The platform might have long paragraphs of legal gibberish that states you own all the rights to the application you build, but do you really? If you can't run your own software without a platform's permission, do you really own it? What is your application worth if that platform is no longer around?
The problems with vendor lock are not limited to platforms that are shut down. In the last couple of years we have seen several no-code and low-code platforms introduce massive changes to their pricing models.
Customers have three choices:
In many cases, businesses that used to flourish with healthy financials are now no longer viable.
Few platforms now offer the option to export your code as a proposed solution for this very problem. While this does allow the customer an opportunity to maintain business operations for a while, it does little to solve the problem that the platform left behind. Now the customer is stuck with a codebase they are unfamiliar with and likely a set of developers with little coding experience. Alas they are still stuck with option 2.
Toddle's choice to open source was not about readable and accessible code. We made the choice to open-source to give any developer that works on this platform the freedom to make their own choices about their application. You own what you build. We will release toddle's runtime, which is the part you need to self host your application, under the Apache 2 license. This means that you will be able to use it for whatever you want. You can use it as is, modify it, resell it etc. It means that you truly own the applications you build in toddle.
Once the first phase is complete, we will begin the work to make the entire toddle editor open-source. That means you can build, deploy and run your applications entirely without relying on our hosting platform.
We want you to choose our platform because it is the best way to host your application, not because you are forced to. That also creates a natural tension for us to make sure that our customers continue to choose our platform because it is the best, not because you don't have a choice.
You can follow our open source progress here. Make sure to leave a star.
