Yeah, but exporting is not really an option... When you are running, have massive traffic, 100+ million api requests/month etc, it's not very interesting that you can 'export all data'. I need the services otherwise I need to rebuild them right? I would consider this a massive risk for my business. Which happens with most PAAS/SAAS thing ofcourse, but this seems to be very fundamental to my apps; I mean; apps won't work without this service.
I like the Ning proposition; if you want you just download the source + data and run on your own servers. Or there should be a buy-out for the software, maybe depending on the number of average monthly API requests you did until that time with some kind of minimum. For stuff this low-level I think a (restricted) open source model is the only way to go to prevent lock-in to be honest.
