Hello! Thank you for your feedback! Before moving to our current pricing model, we thought long and hard about what it should look like, what use cases we wanted to support, and what pricing models, the primary objective being creating value for our users and sharing that value with them.
The final result was always going to be a compromise, but our hope was to satisfy the majority of WeWeb’s target users, and based on the feedback we have received since April, we succeeded in doing that. We listened carefully to our community and addressed things we needed to get right after the initial rollout of the new plan - like the plugin limit on the Starter license, which we removed a while ago.
The pricing or business model is far from perfect and never will be. We realize that USD pricing does not work well in countries with lower USD GDP and/or unfavorable local currency vs. USD exchange rate (Brazil is a great example). While we recognize that this makes WeWeb “expensive” in many countries, we have no plans to implement any regional pricing at this point as it would not be feasible for us as a company in the era of VPN.
Regarding code export and self-hosting - we are very proud of this feature but, statistically speaking, it is not a must, as the vast majority of WeWeb users use the WeWeb infrastructure to deploy their apps. And building apps using our no-code editor and deploying them on our infrastructure is the primary use case for WeWeb - as opposed to some other platforms where the user is expected to “bring their infrastructure” as default.
To accommodate this secondary use case, we offer best-in-class code export and self-hosting as a premium feature tied to the annual license for either Starter or Scale project plans. We recognize that others do it differently, but it is never an apples-to-apples comparison; different tools serve different audiences with different features, and different objectives.
We are delighted to hear that you are enjoying WeWeb, and we wish our pricing or business model aligned more with your objectives. However, we are not planning to change our business model at this time since it seems to work very well for our target user base, as evidenced by the dramatic growth of WeWeb adoption worldwide.
Finally, to get code samples, please contact our support and they will share the samples with you.