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Comment by smoe | Hacker News Reader

After quickly skimming the terms of service[0]. Do I understand correctly that in the free version, all your content has to be public?

I'm not against that model (actually like it), but it isn't at all clear to me from the blog post or the main page.

[0]: https://about.modeanalytics.com/tos/ under "4. Financial Terms"

"The public function is available free of charge for public use and allows you only to view information other Mode users disclose using the public function. When you use the public function, you may disclose or upload Your Content using only the public function. "

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Hey! I'm Mode's CEO. We host a database that contains all the data for tutorials. You can also upload CSVs to this database and do analysis to share with others, but the data and analysis are publicly visible. This is a feature we have had for awhile.

The paragraph below the one you cited says "The private function is available in two versions: (i) free of charge (with limited functionality) and (ii) as a premium paid Service (“Premium Service”)." This is the thing that's new today -- you can now work with private data for free.

Sorry for the confusion.

That's a really interesting approach. Give away the platform to get everyone's data for free. Like GitHub for data.

Nobody at Mode will ever look at data in your database without express written permission. Period.

Maybe I misunderstand, if you are a free user the data has to be public right? And any user can use the public data?

Regardless of whether you are on a free or paid account, you have two options:

-Public: Upload data or use data that is already in a database that Mode hosts. All data and analysis done here is visible to anyone. This is most commonly used with the SQL tutorials that others have posted about here.

-Private: Connect your database to Mode and do analysis on your own data. This is only visible to people you add to your Mode Organization. In fact, making your private data accessible to people outside your Organization is a paid feature and comes with more granular permission controls.

We have tried to make this as clear as possible in the product and ToS, but looks like we missed on the latter. We will revise to make it clearer.

None of these platforms "get" your data other than running the queries in your databases and displaying the results (and sometimes caching it for future lookups).

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