[HN Gopher] Squarespace S1
___________________________________________________________________
Squarespace S1
Author : pabl8k
Score : 245 points
Date : 2021-04-16 17:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| chdaniel wrote:
| Profitable since 2016, ~$621m in revenue 2020, $30.5m profit in
| 2020
|
| Curious to see how the reception'll be for this, given they're
| not on the 'if we're not on a loss, we're not spending enough
| money to _grow_ ' path
| yreg wrote:
| If I considered investing, I certainly would not be worried
| about this company not spending enough on marketing.
| avipars wrote:
| too many superbowl ads
| 55555 wrote:
| For the curious and lazy. where'd that money go?
|
| 168 million on R&D, 260 million on marketing&sales, 54 million
| on running the business, 10 million in interest payments
|
| Wonder what all that R&D is for. Maybe they are working on a
| coronavirus vaccine.
| reggieband wrote:
| R&D = Research and Development. In many orgs product
| development falls under R&D. That would include all of the
| people involved in developing the product including
| engineers, product owners, QA, graphic design, etc.
|
| One tidbit I recall about that is there are often tax grants
| for business development that include R&D expenditures. So
| while it often feels weird to think of your primary product
| as tangental to "research", there are potentially some tax
| benefits to categorize it as such.
| eloff wrote:
| R&D is basically the expenses for software development - the
| cost of the product for a software company.
| markdown wrote:
| $168M though? It's just a website.
| yreg wrote:
| So is Facebook.com
| thebean11 wrote:
| It's a tool to build and host websites, pretty big
| difference
| markdown wrote:
| Yes, but two devs in a garage could build this website
| that builds websites. Certainly not $170M worth of
| development.
| mrcarruthers wrote:
| Sponsoring YouTube videos :P
| masklinn wrote:
| That would be the 260m marketing & sales budget I expect.
| european321 wrote:
| Does R&D include things like salaries for engineers/product?
| gen220 wrote:
| It usually does. If a company really cares to follow GAAP
| to the letter, teams are supposed to estimate how much of
| their work should be categorized as maintenance or keeping
| the lights on, and that counts towards OpEx, while
| development work counts towards CapEx (R&D).
|
| Context is that Companies prefer to spend capex, because it
| produces "depreciable assets" (your soon to be legacy
| software system), that make financials look better.
|
| Then they use this to allocate a proportion of the salary
| towards one bucket or another.
|
| Of course the lines are fuzzy and arbitrary in many cases,
| but 80/20 Cap/Op is the typical net distribution in
| departments that employ software engineers, from what I've
| seen.
| otoburb wrote:
| >> _If a company really cares to follow GAAP to the
| letter, teams are supposed to estimate how much of their
| work should be categorized as maintenance or keeping the
| lights on, and that counts towards OpEx, while
| development work counts towards CapEx (R &D)._
|
| The problem with following US GAAP 350-40-05-1D[1] to the
| letter is that if you capitalize development costs then
| you generally should only do this for internally
| developed software. If you "externally market" said
| software (which is now a capitalized asset on the balance
| sheet), which usually means selling to external customers
| upon which your revenue is then derived, you have to
| derecognize the capitalized asset before you can record
| any revenue.
|
| IFRS differs from FASB (US GAAP) in this regard; it's
| more in line with what you noted. Having said this, since
| Squarespace is based in the US and subjects themselves to
| US GAAP, they expense all of their R&D costs. Skimming
| the S-1 it was interesting to note the $10.6MM in R&D
| credits for 2020 only (possibly due to the pandemic; not
| sure).
|
| [1] https://fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Document_C/DocumentPage?cid
| =117617...
| Cshelton wrote:
| I haven't read the S1 yet, but typically yes. Unless they
| have a separate breakout, the R&D in this case would
| include engineering salaries.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Spending on sponsorships for what feels like 100% of all
| podcasts in existence.
| spike021 wrote:
| Not just podcasts. Many of my favorite Youtube channels
| have websites built with it and then usually have an in-
| video advertisement with a promo code.
| ProAm wrote:
| There were VERY early on the podcast revolution. I would
| say they helped make the landscape we see in podcasts today
| possible.
| simias wrote:
| Surely that's marketing&sales, not R&D.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Accounting can get weird for tax purposes, but you're
| probably right.
| topicseed wrote:
| Yup, and some of these I'm not sure the audience is even
| into having their own website.......
| arcturus17 wrote:
| The point of the solution is that it crosses the line
| between B2B and B2C so pretty much anyone can be a
| potential customer...
| weego wrote:
| I my bet is they'll be spending money like water on AI
| research to build base websites automagically for people
| based on their taste and industry and nothing will ever come
| of it.
| politician wrote:
| Cubespace. They're redeveloping their solution for 3D/AR/VR.
| rokob wrote:
| R&D == software engineer salaries
| bostonsre wrote:
| Disclaimer: I don't know much and I'm probably wrong.
|
| > CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME/(LOSS) (In
| thousands)
|
| Doesn't that mean they're not profitable? Or am I reading that
| wrong?
| nrmitchi wrote:
| You're reading it wrong.
|
| The section includes income, or loss, depending on the
| situation. Losses (negative income values) are typically
| represented with parenthesis.
|
| Income of $25000: 25
|
| Loss of $25000: (25)
| bostonsre wrote:
| Thanks.
| bootwoot wrote:
| They're indicating explicitly that it's parentheses here
| with the text "INCOME/(LOSS)"
| arkitaip wrote:
| > We may acquire or invest in companies, which may divert our
| management's attention and result in additional dilution to our
| stockholders. We may be unable to integrate acquired businesses
| and technologies successfully or achieve the expected benefits of
| such acquisitions.
|
| Squarespace and Shopify would be an super combo. Individually
| they currently suck at the other's main area of focus - Shopify
| has weak design capabilities, Squarespace e-com is too basic -
| but together they would offer great value in terms of online
| presence for businesses and still keep their edge.
| pavlov wrote:
| Shopify's market cap is $146 billion, so any acquisition would
| certainly be them buying.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Shopify is indeed a way larger company operationally
| speaking. But one interesting thing about market caps is that
| they are not correlated with present operational value.
|
| There are companies with large market caps that have small
| cash reserves and no structural access to large debt. In
| contrast there also companies with smaller market caps that
| have large cash reserves, established lines of credit and
| perhaps other instruments to leverage debt.
|
| Wall Street is surprisingly bad at valuing those things (or
| maybe surprisingly good?).
|
| People want to trade stocks that have unrealized value.
| That's why solid stocks like VZ and T barely can keep up with
| the S&P 500 growth. They are seen as companies with fully
| realized value. There's not too much for those companies to
| do besides solidifying their monopolies.
| kansface wrote:
| They can just issue more stock, dilute everyone by 1%, and
| net ~1 billion dollars, no?
| zeusk wrote:
| Depends on if there is more demand for their stock.
|
| VIAC and AMC didn't fare well for additional stock
| offering while TSLA did it quite regularly in the last
| couple years.
| mcny wrote:
| > Shopify's market cap is $146 billion, so any acquisition
| would certainly be them buying.
|
| Not that I know anything about this specific instance but the
| story can be... complicated. For example, would you say
| CenturyLink acquired Level 3 or did Level 3 subsume
| CenturyLink?
|
| If you read the news headline, you'd probably say CenturyLink
| bought Level 3.
|
| > https://archive.fo/rdNYn
|
| > CenturyLink to acquire Level 3 for $34 billion
|
| > Telecommunications company CenturyLink is upgrading its
| network with the acquisition of Internet backbone provider
| Level 3 Communications in a deal valued at $34 billion.
|
| > In the cash and stock transaction, Level 3 shareholders
| will get $26.50 and 1.4286 shares of CenturyLink stock for
| each share of Level 3 stock. At $66.50 per Level 3 share,
| that represents a premium of about 42% over Level 3 closing
| share price of $46.92 on Oct. 26. Included debt brings the
| deal to $34 billion, the companies said.
|
| > When the transaction closes, expected by the third quarter
| of 2017, CenturyLink shareholders will own about 51% of the
| combined company, with Level 3 shareholders owning about 49%.
|
| However, the new CenturyLink/Lumen CEO is the Level 3 CEO.
|
| > Jeffrey K. Storey (born May 12, 1960) is an American
| business executive whose career has focused on the
| telecommunications industry. He was the president and chief
| executive officer of Level 3 Communications between April 11,
| 2013, and the company's acquisition by CenturyLink in 2017,
| at which point he became president and COO of the combined
| company. He became CEO of CenturyLink on June 1, 2018.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Without knowing anything else, that sounds like it could've
| just been partially an acqui-hire to get the CEO.
| boringg wrote:
| While your point is taken, Shopify >> Squarespace in terms
| of almost all metrics. No way would Squarespace usurp
| Shopify in a merger, not even close.
| throwastrike wrote:
| Shopify ecom functionality is mostly third party no? Payment is
| Stripe. What are you paying Shopify for? It's just a platform.
| kentosi wrote:
| Sorry but I'm really not clued up on reading S1s. How does one
| find out when they intend on hitting the market?
| Etheryte wrote:
| The first page reads the following boilerplate text, but beyond
| that I don't think there's any more info available at the
| moment:
|
| > Approximate date of commencement of proposed sale to public:
| As soon as practicable after this registration statement is
| declared effective.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Love squarespace, but what's up with the wacky pro-forma vs
| 'actual' in the operating income on pg 8?
|
| Difference of $300m in operating income from sg&a (2020) and then
| $500m+ in balance sheet assets on the next page...
| NationalPark wrote:
| I think the pro-forma number includes the G&A costs associated
| with the public offering. See page 57.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| Probably something having to do with knowing they were going to
| go public and hoping no one would catch that!
| subpixel wrote:
| I will pay them $100 - keep your stock - if they remove the
| insanely annoying feature that triggers login anytime a visitor
| hits the escape key on a site built with Squarespace.
| troymc wrote:
| You can turn that off:
|
| Settings - Advanced - Escape Key - flip the switch
| lupire wrote:
| Why does that feature even exist?
| swyx wrote:
| pg 121
|
| Accel/General Atlantic/Index Ventues own 80.8% of class A shares,
| but have total voting control of 14.8%.
|
| CEO Anthony Casalena owns 75.7% of class B shares, and has 68.2%
| of voting.
|
| this is what job security means.
| paxys wrote:
| That didn't work out well for Travis Kalanick.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| I love Squarespace. I find it to be as close to the perfect mix
| of flexibility, usability and beautiful defaults that I've ever
| seen in a website builder. I can hand off management of the site
| to someone with almost zero technical skill (my 70 y/o father
| with almost no technical knowledge manages a Squarespace site I
| built him!) and when I look back in 2 years the site will still
| look pretty good and will still work on mobile. Chances of the
| site being hacked are much much lower than on Wordpress. Prices
| are reasonable. The layout engine is exactly what I want, it
| looks nice on all devices and can handle most layouts, which is a
| totally worthwhile tradeoff for the few times that something just
| doesn't quite look the way I want it to without custom css.
|
| I know people say this stuff:
|
| "You can't transfer your site away" - I know, but I can build a
| reasonable site in ~2 days, so the tradeoff is worth it and the
| sunk cost is lower
|
| "But I want a fully custom design" - Yeah, fair enough, there is
| a cap on the high end of design with it but I think that cap is
| pretty high, especially in 7.1
|
| "But it is making the whole internet look the same!" - Not
| really, between colors, photos and sections in 7.1 I just don't
| think this is true. If you use unsplash for all of your photos
| then maybe, but if you are doing that you are probably too small
| to care, worry about that when you hit 2MM in revenue
|
| "But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't
|
| As I write these I think that maybe it is just the perfect thing
| for my subset of clients (SMB), so read this from that
| perspective. I know this isn't really the discussion on this
| thread, I just wanted to see what experiences of others have
| been.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > "But it is making the whole internet look the same!"
|
| You know, that's alright with me in many cases. The internet is
| a utility, and consistency can allow for providing people with
| a normalized, accessible, fast, fine-tuned experience. A lot of
| the internet would benefit immensely from that. If it comes at
| the expense of your website not looking super cool or unique,
| that's probably fine - a lot of internet users aren't all that
| concerned with that.
|
| I'm not saying squarespace offers that. Just - a lot of the
| internet being uniform isn't in and of itself a bad thing.
| superfrank wrote:
| > You can't transfer your site away
|
| From an investment perspective, that's a pretty big positive.
| High switching costs locks existing customers in.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Sounds like you know what your customers want and deliver on
| that. That's better than most devs who want to shove their
| favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor
| customers.
| soperj wrote:
| >That's better than most devs who want to shove their
| favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor
| customers.
|
| This is exactly that.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Okay, but in this case, the favourite framework has a GUI.
| Sure, you can't use WYSIWYG HTML editors with it, but it
| has its own sort-of WYSIWYG editor.
| markdown wrote:
| It's ridiculously expensive though. Almost $150/yr for what
| probably costs $5/yr to host.
| boringg wrote:
| Are you valuing your own time at all? At $150/year for a
| business that barely registers as an expense.
| neom wrote:
| Ridiculously cheap if you factor in the costs of time/effort
| spent learning to do it yourself when your primary focus is
| launching your jewelry making business.
| mrcarruthers wrote:
| But they're not just hosting. A website shop will probably
| charge you a few thousand to build a site and then charge you
| again whenever you want changes. $150/yr just for that alone
| is a bargain to someone who cannot do it themselves.
| shmoe wrote:
| $12 a month? Not really breaking the bank here man.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It's more of the principle. I don't like giving giving any
| company money, especially when there are cheaper
| alternatives.
|
| I'm cheap when it comes to spending money on tech. I'm glad
| people are questioning the price.
|
| We need more competition. It seems like we are just giving
| into the bigger companies, and I don't see the innovation I
| saw a few years ago.
| lupire wrote:
| If you refuse to pay for anything, to won't get
| innovation.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Don't confused the cost of production with the value to the
| user.
|
| (Fwiw I tried squarespace and found the UX awful)
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I hear you, but I feel like that ignores a lot of
| externalities to hosting a site for a client, including:
|
| 1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc)
|
| 2. Updates (copy, design, patching)
|
| 3. Admin (billing, contracts)
|
| And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is
| rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively
| become a technical resource and field all the duties that
| entails.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| When your Wordpress site gets hacked and you pay someone $500
| (if you are lucky) to fix it this flips pretty quickly. If
| your Wordpress site doesn't get hacked its because you
| manually maintain it, and time at most of my clients is worth
| more than that.
|
| If you are on something that can't get hacked (static site)
| it is because you are a developer or at least pretty
| technical and the ease of use doesn't apply to you.
|
| Again, this is all targeted at US (West Coast to be specific)
| SMB.
| rchaud wrote:
| Automated backups exist for Wordpress.
|
| If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP
| wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.
|
| In any case, if you have a mature website, it's going to be
| complicated to switch from WP to Squarespace and vice
| versa. But with WP you still have the flexibility to host
| wherever you want, on whatever you want.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> If hacked sites were really that much of an issue,
| then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business
| sites.
|
| Business owners have no idea how often they get hacked.
| They get hacked because business owners want a DIY
| approach and start installing plugins willy nilly without
| sandboxing and testing them, making their sites
| vulnerable to attack
|
| September 2020:
|
| _Millions of WordPress sites are being probed and
| attacked with recent plugin bug_
|
| _The sudden spike in attacks happened after hackers
| discovered and started exploiting a zero-day
| vulnerability in "File Manager," a popular WordPress
| plugin installed on more than 700,000 sites._
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-of-wordpress-
| sites-ar...
|
| That's a hell of a vector for a hacker. Target one plugin
| - hit over 700K machines? Unreal.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| All of this is 100% correct and if its easier / easy
| enough for you then that works. I wasn't really making
| the case that it was explicitly better for everyone, but
| it is awesome for my clients.
|
| For backup, I either end up paying as much as Squarespace
| (WPEngine) or have to keep an eye on it to make sure its
| working.
|
| I have no global stats on Wordpress hacks, of the clients
| I have running it (40???) I think probably 10 have been
| hacked. Zero have been hacked since moving to WPEngine
| (which is the first thing we do when we take over
| management), which is certainly something.
|
| I'm not sure what the exact definition of mature website
| is, but I'm not sure it is that difficult. Certainly if
| you have 100s of pages, posts, articles etc. then it
| could / would take a while to make the move. At that
| point we're just talking about target market. Most of my
| clients have stopped posting tons of news / blogs because
| they were only doing it for SEO and it didn't really work
| anymore. In my world where sites have 25 pages with semi-
| limited complexity it just doesn't take long to move
| anymore.
|
| I do certainly have clients with more complicated needs
| (member areas, ecommerce, etc.) but most of the time I
| just recommend they link out to that content and use
| another service (client portal in their main line of
| business app, shopify, etc.) rather than building it into
| their site.
| passivate wrote:
| What expenses are you considering in that $5 though? Even so,
| keeping things running might be cheap, but its expensive to
| get to that stage. By the same token, it costs the same ~$50
| to fill gas in a camry or a lambo.
| ac29 wrote:
| Good luck finding decent hosting for $5/year, and hosting it
| yourself would cost more like $5/month (entry-level linode or
| something).
| benbristow wrote:
| To be fair, building a static website and hosting on
| something like Azure Blob Storage Static Websites with an
| Azure Function for your contact form (or Azure Static Web
| Apps for both in one solution) would cost cents (pennies) a
| month have about the same maintenance fees, if you know
| what you're doing.
|
| You're not going to have any support with that though and
| lacking the CMS part of it, and if you want to use any of
| the more advanced features like Ecommerce then you're going
| to have to spend a while building that.
| lupire wrote:
| I just spent more than $5/yr reading your comment.
|
| $5/yr for a whole site is simply not worth even talking
| about. It's not relevant.
| markdown wrote:
| I have three dozen client sites (mom and pop businesses)
| running on Google App Engine that cost between $0.05 and
| $0.20 per month.
| ghaff wrote:
| For low traffic sites that end up mostly just being
| object store and bandwidth, the public clouds are almost
| certainly the cheapest (from a computing bill
| perspective) way to do things. My personal website is
| similar.
|
| The main caveat is that _theoretically_ your costs could
| spike for some reason given you 're paying based on
| usage. But if you're not doing anything complicated, I
| consider that pretty low odds.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| Makes no sense why anyone who likes good software could also
| like Squarespace
| pembrook wrote:
| Squarespace is the perfect solution for non-tech-savvy brick-
| and-mortar business who probably won't update their site more
| than once every 5 years. I'd say it has way better defaults
| than Wix.
|
| Beyond the mom-and-pop flower shop down the street or the
| friend that needs a portfolio site...not so much. Squarespace
| is good for the aforementioned users because the platform makes
| it hard for them to create bad designs and do stupid things.
| Putting either of those types of users on a Wordpress site
| would just be a total nightmare.
|
| HOWEVER, if you're even mildly tech-savvy, Squarespace (or site
| builders like Wix) become frustrating and limiting almost
| immediately.
|
| This is why I believe Webflow is ultimately the answer. It
| addresses all the downsides of Wordpress with none of the
| limitations.
|
| I think 5 years from now, Squarespace/Wix will completely own
| the mom-and-pop and portfolio space.
|
| I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today
| by Wordpress (as well as static site generators), and be
| powering the marketing & content sites for most businesses.
| Which is where the real money is.
| armonraphiel wrote:
| If Webflow added native i18n support, I wouldn't be surprised
| if they ate up considerable marketshare from most headless
| CMS providers.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited
| today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators)
|
| Not sure about static site generators though. They already
| have a pretty big head start. Netlify, Stackbit and others
| are constantly adding services for both tech savvy and non
| technical folks.
|
| The area where Squarespace sets itself apart is really their
| available themes. Most are way better than Wordpress themes,
| and easier to change to suit your needs without much work.
| Static site generators like Gatsby just don't have the depth
| of themes like WP and Squarespace do. Its kind of the app
| store comparison. One is Apple and Android with millions of
| really good apps (WP, Squarespace) and the other is the MS
| app store which has a limited, sort of the run of the mill
| stuff (Gatsby, Netlify, Stackbit).
|
| If WebFlow can offer better designs out of the box, then I
| agree, they will most likely own the space. Design will
| always be the X factor to me.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I don't know if I agree. I recently tried Webflow and was not
| so impressed. It's basically a UI on top of CSS. Which is OK
| for developers, but there is still too much complexity and
| too many footguns for non-technical users.
|
| For example, take position: sticky. This CSS property is
| basically one-to-one mapped to a dropdown in Webflow. So I
| thought it would just work. But alas, just like the CSS
| pendant, it only works if the parent element has the correct
| properties. Also it only works in browsers that support it,
| and isn't polyfilled automatically.
|
| Maybe what I'm asking for is technically not feasible, but
| then the UI should disable the option in such cases and not
| hide this in a support page imho.
|
| I think a truly powerful website builder would have to leave
| the CSS paradigms behind and invent something new.
| migueloller wrote:
| I agree 100%. It can't just be a UI on too of CSS. At that
| point just write the HTML and CSS...
| terpimost wrote:
| Tilda Publishing is the perfect balance
| kenneth wrote:
| I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core
| infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles
| trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to
| use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier
| and more reliable than building it myself despite being more
| than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile,
| upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our
| website.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd
| mostly agree with some caveats:
|
| * The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you
| can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means
| you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push
| to your site will be live instantly). The local development
| server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the
| production behavior. It feels like something that they
| developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much
| time on since then. If I could go back and do this over
| again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it
| instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode.
|
| * The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it
| injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is
| doing, but it definitely increases page load.
|
| That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has
| the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to
| deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is
| much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so
| far.
|
| Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms,
| though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do
| appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after
| initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-
| fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte
| they appear fast-ish.
|
| Do you add a lot of custom scripts?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Have you tried using a static site generator instead? I
| have used one for my personal site on S3 and it works
| pretty well. In my opinion figuring out Squarespace was
| harder for me .
| philjr wrote:
| Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back
| in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done!
| Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well
| executed.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We
| have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and
| easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to
| Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our
| contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't
| easily make changes and images aren't automatically
| optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a
| cost, in dollars and other things.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the
| site is down: https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one?
| https://www.oyster-ventures.com/
| nattaylor wrote:
| His is https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from
| residential Comcast in the U.S.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| IDK the lack of ability to export _your_ data and leave when
| _you_ feel like it is pretty much crap.
|
| Frankly, from a product perspective it's short-sighted. Let
| people leave. Find out why. Fix the problem(s). But if you hold
| them hostage you're holding your own product back _and_ you're
| creating ill-will towards your brand. Lose, lose.
|
| That's not forgivable.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't see anyone's _data_ being held hostage. I do see a
| specialized hosting service that will require you to rebuild
| /redesign your site if you migrate away.
|
| Yes, there are higher migration costs if you use Squarespace.
| For a lot of people those are reasonable in exchange for
| lower up-front and maintenance costs. People should
| absolutely consider the lock-in factor but there's not a
| universal correct answer.
| lupire wrote:
| My website HTML+JS content is my data.
| ghaff wrote:
| Then use a more generic hosting site. I don't see anyone
| preventing you.
|
| There's always a tradeoff.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| They have an export feature right in the settings page for
| your site.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| I get where you are coming from as an idea, and generally I
| agree you should own your data. That being said you can
| export your data from Squarespace, you just can't "transfer"
| your site to alternative hosting because the platform is
| proprietary. So it isn't that they won't let you leave, it is
| that you are trading (pros) not having to think about hosting
| and security for (cons) slightly higher migration costs, and
| I think in this case pros outweigh the cons for sites below a
| certain level of scope.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| TIL that Square and Squarespace are different companies.
| nacho2sweet wrote:
| I used to do like $5000 wordpress websites on a side hustle just
| throwing up edited pre-bought templates and would always feel
| really dirty during it "thank god they don't know about
| squarespace".
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