A: Good questions! So far we've been very happy with SQLite. It can handle large databases without trouble. It allows Grist documents to be downloaded and read from any SQLite-compatible tool, and there are a lot of them - SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. For scaling Grist, the challenges are more on the spreadsheet side - how do we handle dependency-tracking between cells and keeping them up to date at scale, and how do we distill down what the user needs to see right now so we don't overwhelm their browser. We've got ideas!

Open-source Grist is definitely not cripple-ware. Our hosted service is built from it, combined with business-specific software designed to scale it to many users, handle billing, etc. For personal use open-source Grist should work well; for team work, the main weakness is that we haven't yet written up how to support common login solutions, but that is in our roadmap https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/projects/1#card-64937259 We believe Grist being open source is important for all users of Grist, since for a deep general-purpose spreadsheet-like product, there is a very long tail of features vital to someone somewhere, and open-source products can aggregate those features in a way closed-source products can not, benefiting everyone. Having the source open makes it easier to build extensions to handle crucial-but-unusual needs (or hire someone to do that). Long term, we believe this will be an important differentiator, making storing data in Grist a solid and durable bet. We expect people to host their Grist documents with us not because they are locked in, but because we offer great service at a good price!