I don’t entirely disagree… But, if they build the entire platform and you can just self host and use someone else’s editors inside their platform, they’re not making any money and the fact that they made their code open source and overly generous is ultimately probably a major factor in that.
Ultimately you may be about to use someone else’s markdown editor, but they made that possible.
As it stands they claim to give you a pretty steep discount if you use your own servers. I don’t know how steep of a discount it really is…
But standard notes was never free as in beer, it was free as in speech… And AFAIK there’s nothing to stop you from learning to code, forking the app, removing the licensing mechanism, and making your own build.