Love the app, hate IAP / subs model
That's the only sustainable model these days, speaking as a mobile dev myself.
Sell me a major version every couple of years, would far prefer that. IAP and subs just feels scammy and lazy.
Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#32Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
What changed that made selling software (as opposed to renting) work before that prevents it from working now?
There used to be a lot less expectation of post-sale maintenance of consumer software in the era where sales rather than subscriptions were the norm. There was also tolerance for higher up-front prices, and for much of that period sales depended on marketing through and validation by a narrow set of relatively trusted discovery channels, which customer the perceived risk to buyers. Now everything is untrusted, no one…
fwiw the expectation of post-sale maintenance would not be nearly as egregious if companies were not regularly pushing new updates that cause new issues
it is a problem of ones own making
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the guy enjoys some food every now and then
I’m with the parent on this. I don’t mind subscriptions if a service is provided that justifies the recurring cost. If it’s a local offline app then I don’t see it justified. Price it accordingly or at least give an option for one-time. But yes, sub vs non-sub model is a very divisive topic. Personally would never subscribe to something like a offline local todo list
there are a lot of apps that do this though… eg. git tower. Sketch. Etc. Not saying that I like it or anything. Maybe its the combination of local first + an app that seems to be trivial (I am sure it was not but if you hear "daily planner" I think its reasonable to assume that its less complex than a git client and/or an app like Sketch).
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the only sustainable model these days, speaking as a mobile dev myself.
What changed that made selling software (as opposed to renting) work before that prevents it from working now?
It's a bunch of things. In the old days, if you bought software in a box for your OS (let's say DOS), you didn't expect it to need to be updated. It also continued to work just fine and maybe you didn't update your OS that frequently or had security issues to worry about. Nowadays, iOS gets updated every year and APIs get deprecated, and users update, so you have to maintain the app after initially shipping it.
A lot of people also expect the software to add features over time. In the old days, you'd ship a brand new major version and charge people for that and stop working on the old one. With the App Store, I suppose you could technically abandon the old version and sell a whole new version, but then all your old users will be annoyed if the app is removed from the store or no longer works when they update their OS. You could gate new features behind a paywall, and I know some apps do this, but then it adds to the complexity of the app as you have to worry about features that work for some users but not others.
I think people also expect software nowadays to be cheap or free, I think due to large corporations being able to fund free stuff (say gmail) by other means (say ads or tracking users). That means users would balk if you asked them to pay $50 for your little calendar app, so if you did ask for a one-time payment, it would be $5-$10, which is nowhere near enough to recoup whatever time you spent, unless you hit it big. Hitting it big nowadays with an app is difficult since there's so much competition in the App Stores and everyone has raced to the bottom to sell apps for pennies.
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#36It looks well done. It is a shame that people posting reviews can be such dickheads. Out of the 4 public reviews, 3 are 1 star and only one of those is because of an actual issue. One is because the app isn’t right for them. The other because they wanted dark mode (really? You like the app enough to care that it doesn’t have dark mode but still gave it a 1 star?)
For 20 bucks a year without any sort of cloud servers to pay for, I'd expect dark mode at the very least. The app looks nice of course, but it's priced quite steeply.
If you charge a premium, customers will have high expectations.
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#37I don't have an iPhone to try this, but I've been a long time time user of Tasks.org on Android and particularly because it supports CalDAV and works so well offline. However, while we are on the topic of planning apps, you should know the Todoist added the best use of AI I've ever seen. It's called Ramble mode and you can just talk and instantly it'll start showing a list of tasks that update as you go. It is extrao…
That’s cool! Slight fear of replicating the Dropbox comment here, but all you really need to do is run whisper (or some other speech2text), then once the user stops talking jam the transcript through a LLM to force it into JSON or some other sensible structure.
"once the user stops talking" is a key insight here for me. When using this I wasn't intentionally pausing to let it figure out an answer. It seemed to just pop up while I was talking. But upon experimenting some more it does seem to wait until here's a bit of a pause most of the time.
However it's still wild to me how fast and responsive it is. I can talk for 10 seconds and then in ~500ms I see the updates. Perhaps it doesn't even transcribe and rather feeds the audio to a multimodal llm along with whatever tasks it already knows about? Or maybe it's transcribing live as you talk and when you stop it sends it to the llm.
Anyone have a sense of what model they might be using?
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#38I'm sorry, I like the look and the idea but... why is a subscription necessary for a local-first app?
Everything will cost you, in Apple's ecosystem. This is just another line on the tab.
Re: Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s cool! Slight fear of replicating the Dropbox comment here, but all you really need to do is run whisper (or some other speech2text), then once the user stops talking jam the transcript through a LLM to force it into JSON or some other sensible structure.
"once the user stops talking" is a key insight here for me. When using this I wasn't intentionally pausing to let it figure out an answer. It seemed to just pop up while I was talking. But upon experimenting some more it does seem to wait until here's a bit of a pause most of the time. However it's still wild to me how fast and responsive it is. I can talk for 10 seconds and then in ~500ms I see the updates. Perhaps…
I cannot remember off the top of my head the exact number and am clearly too lazy to google it but there is a specific length of time in which, if no new noises pass through, the human brain processes it as a pause/silence.
I want to say 300ms which would coincide with your 500ms example