Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's £6 per month if you pay yearly. Also if you are a student you can get a 50% discount. Honestly it costs a negligible amount, that's less than a single day's worth of travel on the tube.
I don't travel on the tube though, or pay for Starbucks, or whatever analogy you're trying to come up with. My current note taking solution - a folder with .md files - is free. What's the compelling argument for this app? Granted, it's really difficult to compete with free, and the note taking space is probably one of the most saturated software markets there is.
Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
71–80 of 173 posts
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#72This looks great, but I'm getting very sick of software with recurring monthly fees. I get that it's more profitable for companies, and maybe I'm being a curmudgeon, but what happened to software you could actually buy once and then use forever?
It depends on your expectations - do you assume that the software will be maintained indefinitely with security fixes, bug fixes, features, etc?
Security and Bug Fixes? Not indefinitely, but I would expect the minimum generally accepted consumer warranty protections in modern economies: a year? Two? I'm also happy to help out keeping things up to date, if its open source (not everyone can do that, but not everyone has to, that's the magic of software. and this is HackerNews, not Facebook).
Look, here's the reality: software has changed. You don't just get to charge $10/month, fail to get traction, then cry "people don't want to pay for high quality software, its all these hackernews luddite types who think everything should be open source". Office 365 is $5/mo. Apple's suite is ~free-$2/mo, with a device purchase (Apple Notes is probably the most-used note taking app on the planet). Google Workspace is $6/mo; it could literally just be Keep, it'd be 70% as functional as this product, and nearly half the price; oh, and it comes with the global standard of email inboxes, with a custom domain, global standard calendar provider, a terabyte of file upload, global near-standard office suite... Notion is $4/mo. That's your competition!
Sure, none of them do exactly the same thing; but they're pretty close, and people have an inelastic amount they're willing to stretch their monthly spend beyond these high value services to perfectly hone in on a workflow that works. It's the same kind of inelasticity that keeps Excel wildly popular despite tons of more nuanced competitors.
Here's my expectations, above all else: that in ten years, the data I've given this service will still be accessible, no rug pull, no pivot, no dirty acquisition. That's the trade-off you seem to be forgetting. The biggest risk to the users of most products isn't "paying enough to afford the developers necessary to maintain it and build it out"; it's "charging so much that they never gain traction, and disappear overnight". The way toward alleviating that fear, today, is one of extremes; you can either be a huge megacorp with so much tangential revenue & momentum that a rug pull is unlikely, or you can go the Obsidian.md route, not necessarily open-source but at least open, standards-compliant, useful, locally stored data. This product instead goes the 2010s VC-backed "just build a pretty product and charge a subscription people will come lol" route, and that route is destined for failure.
Or, you can keep complaining that people won't pay for software. In an era where more money is spent on software than at any other point in computing history. People pay for software. That's the problem. So, figure it out, or die; but don't blame consumers because you've got a suicide wish to be customers' 22nd subscription service that's marginally different than two others they already pay for.
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's £6 per month if you pay yearly. Also if you are a student you can get a 50% discount. Honestly it costs a negligible amount, that's less than a single day's worth of travel on the tube.
I just wanted to say that you could try a bit harder to justify the price rather than just saying it's "negligible". I think that's very subjective and I personally don't think it's a reasonable price to pay for just storing markdown files in the cloud.
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#74Sorry to highjack this thread, but I've been looking for an open-source alternative that can edit .md files, and sync them to a Github repo. I know my IDE can do this - but just wondered if a writing-specific app existed that was also open source? (if it's relevant: its for private thoughts that I'd like to just keep in a Github repo because its 1. Free and 2. Not going away anytime soon)
You can use obsidian.md with a plug-in for that.
Obsidian is not open-source tho.
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#75Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#76Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#77Sorry to highjack this thread, but I've been looking for an open-source alternative that can edit .md files, and sync them to a Github repo. I know my IDE can do this - but just wondered if a writing-specific app existed that was also open source? (if it's relevant: its for private thoughts that I'd like to just keep in a Github repo because its 1. Free and 2. Not going away anytime soon)
On desktop, I just use VS Code.
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#78> On Supernotes your data is always encrypted in transit (forced SSL) and encrypted at rest (AES-256). Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction.
Sorry, but the fact that you can read it makes this a no-go for me. Unless a note-taking solution offers end-to-end encryption, I don't consider it a safe place for storing private information.
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#79Sorry to highjack this thread, but I've been looking for an open-source alternative that can edit .md files, and sync them to a Github repo. I know my IDE can do this - but just wondered if a writing-specific app existed that was also open source? (if it's relevant: its for private thoughts that I'd like to just keep in a Github repo because its 1. Free and 2. Not going away anytime soon)
My only issues are: they are focusing more on the desktop and (now) mobile apps, instead of the web app. You can't quickly share items to the app or web version to quickly save links, etc. They did have github integration built into the web version but are abandoning that to work on their own paid sync solution that isn't out yet. But you can manually sync the files as I mentioned.
For now I'm mainly sticking with a wiki but keeping an eye on developments to logseq and similar open source apps like Athens Research, Bangle, etc. See this twitter list of different knowledge management tools: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1396562498002825240
Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
#80This app looks very nice, and I love markdown. But I am not prepared to pay £8+ per month for a Markdown notes app that works on all my devices, especially if it exerts control over what I can do with my own files. I can sync my Markdown directory via Dropbox, iCloud, Nextcloud, etc and edit the files with things like Obsidian, 1Writer, VSCode or any one of hundreds of Markdown editors.
If you'd like to sync it yourself, then by all means do so. I don't necessarily understand comments like these, if the user doesn't like it, no one is forcing them to buy it, especially if there are other solutions as you've stated.
But what do I know, I never launched a product.