Well, I would hope that purchase of a product or service is a mutually beneficial business transaction. So in this sense how the product is priced is the problem/concern of both parties.
> You might be used to software from growth-at-all-costs startups: free at the start (funded by venture capital) but eventually your attention in monetized with ads, your personal data is monetized by selling to third parties, or the personal product takes a back seat to the “enterprise” product.
> Muse is following a different path: personal software, made for you and your unique tastes and needs, and funded by direct payment from you and other members. Because our funding comes from you, the customer, rather than investors with their sights on mass-market adoption, our incentives are better aligned with yours.
> By paying for Muse, you help us stay niche, opinionated, and focused on your needs over the long term.
I think it's worth thinking about where the products and services we consume in our daily lives come from and how the incentive models work. And that definitely includes software.
What if mine and Muse’a opinions diverge along the way? Then I can’t keep the old version I like. But I either loose access to what I don’t like anymore. Or pay what Forcwhat I don’t like and hope in future I’ll like it again.
Yes, good point. I'd certainly like software where it's easy to run any version you like.
In the Apple ecosystem that's tough because they roll out breaking API changes in the OS every few years. So if you buy a new computer, upgrade your OS, or otherwise try to keep up with a changing world your software will stop working.
I’m ex-iOS dev so maybe things changed in the last couple years. But Apple was pretty good at keeping old APIs around for a loooong time. Deprecated apis would stay around for quite a while.
New architectures do break old apps once in a while. But even then apps do survive several years without touching. And if someone wants to keep using apps after that… IMO it’s fair to put some burden on user - they have to stick to old OS too.
But if app is subscription, then Even sticking to old OS won’t help…
These are perfectly good arguments, I think somewhat undermined by the usage rather than feature based price segmentation. It ends up feeling artificially nickel-and-dimey, in a local-sync tool.
Yeah, pricing is really tough. I've experimented heavily with feature-based pricing, most notably in Heroku, and people absolutely hate it. When you put your best features behind a paid upgrade, you're preventing people from evaluating the most important part of the software.
Free trials are another solution, but time also ends up being a bit arbitrary.
In the end, storage is a good metric that doesn't require complex feature gates. We borrowed this model from Notion: they had 1000 blocks free in their original product, but once they started getting those sweet enterprise dollars they were able to give more away for free to individuals. Dropbox and GitHub are two other examples.
Our service still does a lot of work proportionate to data size, so in that sense it's still SaaS and has the same cost dynamics at work. But in the end the real cost of software is engineering salaries, not infrastructure, so that whole discussion is sort of a red herring.
Obviously it remains a problem to solve that our industry can't find a pricing model that is both (1) healthy and sustainable for the business and (2) people find amenable.
It's definitely tough and you're right, it's also easy to make feature-based segmentation infuriating. But (as you know and as this thread amply demonstrates) for pro-sumerish apps, it's as much (if not more) about vibes as it is about price. The 'we're simple software artisans asking an honest price for a quality product' vibe just clashes with the nickel-and-dime vibe of that pricing structure, that's all.
Yeah, truly an unsolved problem. Obsidian seems to have found a good path--free for the core product, $10/mo (standard price for prosumer apps) for sync.
But we felt like sync is a core feature and we really want to give it away for free so that people can experience it. Time will tell if that was a good call.
A core concept is the idea that creative professionals live a multi-device life. Desktop computer for focused productivity, tablet for relaxed reading and thinking, phone for capture and lookup on the go.
Those same users in a year: Where's the support for all these new features in the OS release just announced? Why haven't there been any free updates to this app I paid you 5 dollars for a year ago? This app sucks, I'm switching to something else. 1 star.
These need not be the only two options. App developers could charge money for updates made i.e. new versions while the old versions keep working as advertised.
Instead of "cloud storage" which might incur ongoing charges, apps can very well hook onto my GDrive/OneDrive to persist data. Also, games have done this "free updates to this app I paid" for years now.
Yes, "pay for a major new version" was the industry model for many years. Office, Photoshop, etc. In the end you're sort of forced to upgrade by file compatibility every two or three years, so it's a subscription with a slightly uneven payment schedule.
There are still some apps that do this, Things is a good example. But that creates all kinds of other challenges when a big part of the product is a service (like ours) if you want to support all versions of the client in perpetuity.
It's a service, so there's a substantial maintenance cost to maintaining multiple versions. Curious if you also feel this way about Figma or Notion? Or for that matter, auto-updating software like Chrome or iOS?
Why not use iCloud and structure schema to let old versions survive? Solves both issues.
I don’t know what Figma or Notion is. But I dropped beloved Tower git client when they went subscription-only. I still sometimes use their last purchasable version though.
Regarding iOS, It’s possible to refuse updates. I also used iPhone 6 for a looong time and went several years without upgrading OS. I also still use old iPad 4 that receives no updates for years. What can I say… it was a good stable ride!
I don’t care about novelty for the sake of novelty. Once I find a tool I like, I’ll use it as long as possible.
And I’m happy to pay through the nose for quality tools. Be it kitchen utensils or gardening tools or electronics.
You might want to read the original post--a core feature you're paying for is local-first sync, which is explicitly designed to solve a lot of the problems with iCloud.
I do want to see a world where there is a generic syncing service (maybe AWS can run one, but open standards / open source) similar to Dropbox or iCloud. I can pay one lump sum for all my storage and all my apps will connect through it. But so far no such thing exists outside of the crude file-based syncing of Dropbox, and that's not suitable for building realtime apps on top of.
Okay, then maybe that local-first sync can easily support multiple schemes and let old versions run without overhead to devs?
Personally I'm fed up with syncing both as a user and as a developer.
As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.
As a user, I don't want to worry who is going to sell my data after going bankrupt. And I'd prefer small dev shops don't waste their time on keeping network infrastructure up and running with security patches.
> local-first sync can easily support multiple schemes and let old versions run without overhead to devs
I'd love that. Ink & Switch has done extensive research on how to enable this with p2p technology etc. Our industry isn't there yet... but lots of good folks are working on it. The Muse sync setup is a step in that direction.
> As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.
Oh yes. I spent many years carrying a pager for Heroku's infrastructure. Part of the appeal of local-first is the sync infrastructure is necessary to transmit data between devices, not for every single keystroke or gesture the user makes.
Well yes and no. It is your problem if the only options for the software you want are subscription based. To some extent, Photoshop and Lightroom might be examples of this. If I'm not mistaken, Adobe stopped selling one-off licenses for these products quite a while ago. While there are a number of alternatives both paid and free, Adobe's products still capture a considerable portion of the market. Not because people like recurring payments, but because there's whole industries full of people who know how to use those products to produce and deliver quality work. To put another way, I fully understand that you want one upfront payment, it makes sense and I feel the same way, but what if there's no one willing to sell it to you?
I also hate the subscription-based model. I see it as a race to the bottom that devs can't avoid, unfortunately. Your competition can go freemium and pick up casual users and then charge for subs, making your product less attractive initially (why pay a fee to try out an app when another one is free to try?). Most people don't want to pay $40 or $100 for an app. Additionally, users expect features that require cloud services and you need to pay your own fees to keep those lights on, so naturally you want to charge users a subscription fee as well.
Right. Particularly because I know exactly where it's going:
1. I sign up for niche but well-made service
2. I pay $50/year or whatever. I'm fine with that because I'm going to rely on this.
3. Not enough other people do. The service shuts down in 2 years with 30 days notice and I have to find a way to get my data out and into a sustainable format
Yep, the "incredible journey" with a dump of your data in JSON sucks.
Muse is built local-first; all your data is kept locally on device, with the sync server merely a second-tier backup. If we go out of business, you keep all the data on your local device.
That said, apps in the App Store tend to stop working if they don't get regular maintenance[1]. This problem and the one you name is a big one for our industry to improve on IMO. Mark and I talked about that in depth in our podcast on software longevity[2].
2. I pay $50/year or whatever. I'm fine with that because I'm going to rely on this.
3. Not enough other people do. The service wants to make more money and pivots to enterprise. They don't grandfather old users and the minimum price is now $9.99/mo for a limited feature set, and $14.99/mo (min 3 seats) for the features I used to have
It's freemium rather than a trial, so you can use it for free for as long as you want. (Assuming I'm understanding your request there.)
It does export a Muse bundle which is a ZIP archive containing a JSON with the position of the cards and, more usefully, flat files for all the media. PNG, TXT, PDF, SVG for the ink, etc. I regularly drop backups of this into Dropbox or iCloud.
Version control would be tricky because one of the big features is realtime streaming sync. Could be an interesting research problem to find a way to combine Figma-style realtime documents with something that can be checked into Git.
The redirect is for the humans.
The page that does the redirect is for the applications, like Slack and Twitter. They will use the meta tags on that page to show a "social media preview".
Would have been helpful for OP to mention that in the summary. I also couldn't figure out what it did. I just clicked the links and they redirected. No clue what a "fancy social preview" is.
I don't even understand what's going on with this one. Transcribing the blurb from the clip, from interviewing the residents of the house:
"[The people who live in the house] have a friend who has a contract with an Amazon warehouse in China. They say whenever that friend's contract expires, she will send the packages to their house for the family to sort and then send back to Amazon for the company to sell."
From what I understand, it's a play around the Amazon Inventory Storage fees ([1], [2]), which normally are $0.75 per cubic foot monthly, but grow to $6.90 per cubic foot, if stored for more than a year and not sold.
It's possible to ask Amazon to remove selected items from their warehouse and send to any US address for a somewhat reasonable fee of around $0.32/item ([3]).
What happens here is the Chinese sellers send packages to the residents of the house, and then relist items under a different account, so that the counter is reset and the Amazon storage fees are low again.
That said, the residents of the house run a subpar operation.
That would pretty much explain it. Thanks for taking the time to link it together. Suppose this is a situation of "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
Right? I seriously cannot come up with any scenario where this might make sense, not even anything remotely plausible. And they're "storing" the packages, all sorts of different shapes/sizes, out in the elements?! What the heck? My curiosity is running wild & unsatisfied. =D
For some replacement computer parts and other such items shipped via FedEx to a certain remote location, all packages came with a coating of dust. Like wash your hands after receiving harddrive box, and then wash again after cutting the box open to keep the anti static bag clean. I guess if a shipping company can get away with it they will? Roofs and floors cost money.
I doubt China's official figures include the so called "educational schools". If they did they'd easily top the chart. I mean, official USA figures probably don't include Guantanamo and black sites either but that's not the same magnitude.
Although anything is possible, this is no evidence, and I hardly believe it.
People lives are worthing much more than their organs when they are used for labor so I don't see any reasonable benefit from doing that. Plus, Falun Gong has a long history of fighting this, still without any evidences brought to the table, so I have some doubts about their assumptions.
The issue in Xinjiang is already serious enough, no need to add some unconfirmed facts which may just make us lose credibility if they're proved fake.
> People lives are worthing much more than their organs when they are used for labor
I absolutely disagree with this claim. Forced labor is inherently inefficient and barely cost-effective, especially in the modern age of mechanisation and the lessons of soviet GULAGs proved just as much. Especially so in China, which in no way suffers from a shortage of labor force.
It's true that China doesn't suffer from a shortage of labor force. However, wages raised a lot, and almost-free labor is more interesting financially.
After second thoughts, I think it may be possible that on a regional scale, local officials would find such practice highly profitable.
The party goal is not to be highly profitable (they are already), it's to stay in power as long as they can. Of course money can help in that goal, but such practices, if they leak and are confirmed, would just erode the stability of the state.
I feel the cons are too high and pros too low, politically, to do such atrocities on a country scale.
The US sent 3 carriers towards Asia last week to deter China and other countries from thinking that the corona pandemic and US riots was a good time to escalate.
Side note:
gun violence would average number 3 or 4, if not for the tireless lobbying from the NRA to block health impact research.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
What we’ve learned from this Corona scare is the best way to protect people is to incarcerate them in their own homes. Take guns and hard instruments from people. Isolate everyone into their own cell would reduce the murder rate to zero. All communication would go through the Internet. No chance for physical abuse any more. No more transmission of disease since we’ve shutdown direct human interactions. It would be the perfectly safe world. Of course agency gets thrown out the window.
Yes, wine is an Windows binary executor with library translation.
https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_Wine_an_emulator.3F_There_see...