Thanks for the clarifications. Could you explain the hosting part a bit more for a less technical person? We are currently using Softr, which biggest strength is the easiness perfect for building an MVP. We understand that, of course, Softr has limitations. For example, when you want to scale, you can only connect it with Airtable. We thought that once our community would grow, we would move to Weweb.io that allows us to build a more robust platform in the long run because they can allow us to connect everything to Xano, for example.

I think your concept is interesting; I just cannot see yet exactly where it fits. If comparing to those tools, would you say it's easier or harder?

Because we don't want to spend time in the early stage working on the platform but rather on the community first before building a solid platform, I hope you understand what I want to know :). I need to understand where you are here because you seem to offer more flexibilities than your listed competitors:
Alternative to
Discord
Kajabi
Mighty Networks

But they have a completely different approach as they do not allow really customizing anything but rather are platforms for users who want a fast and quick solution without any tech efforts, so ready to use :)But without playing with your app yet, it feels already more complex than that. But maybe I just have to test before making assumptions. It just takes also a lot of time to test those tools.

@Theo_VA

All platform like Discord, Kajabi, Mighty Networks and Softr are software as a service. They host one huge system that has multiple "tenants", that has a fixed set of features available to all. They of course offer some customisation options, too, but again - same set of options for everyone. As you build a community your members become members of their system. In most cases you can't "export" them and in fact you don't really "own" them - they are members of Discord, Kajabi... etc that happen to also use your community - much like Facebook Groups with extra options and ability to point a domain.

UNA is quite different. It's your own, independent, fully customisable platform. You can make your own Kajabi, own Facebook, own X and if you need to, say, create a unique feature or scale to multi-domain network, or completely branch off and get your team to develop it into something very different - you can. You don't have to adhere to some other service's policies or plans. You make your own.

This does mean that the initial configuration is more involved and it may be more difficult to put together same level of experience as some of the SaaS products, but the benefit is that you own it once you've done it. And you can host it wherever you want.

I would suggest that it’s not really 3 stages but 3 different approaches.

1. If you choose SaaS you’re “married” to it in a way. Even if you can export data you won’t have the platform o inject it and keep all links same (and the community will share a lot internal links). Growing your community on SaaS and transitioning later usually means a full reboot.

2. UNA starts you off with building blocks and you can adapt as far as you need. It’s not necessary to do a “write from scratch” later. We develop custom modules and modifications if you need to adapt, or your team can do it. None of our larger clients moved to a rewrite. UNA can scale well to millions of members and at later stages you can isolate features to own servers/microservices. Similar to how Facebook and lost large networks, you can expand and optimise modules as you grow.

3. Writing from scratch is possible, but is very complex and time consuming for a full stack social app.