Local-first software (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#221

Post by trinsic2 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

danjl wrote: post #64

tikhonj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing somebody summarize this as "SaaS is a pricing model" or "SaaS is financialization" and it totally rings true. Compared to normal software pricing, a subscription gives you predictable recurring revenue and a natural sort of price discrimination (people who use your system more, pay more). It's also a psychological thing: folks got anchored on really low up-front prices for software, so paying $2000…

Correct. SaaS is a business model, not a technical concept. But the real problem is that there is no equivalent business model for selling local first software. Traditional desktop apps were single purchase items. Local first is not because you just navigate to a website in your browser and blammo you get the software. What we need is a way to make money off of local first software.

I'm not understanding why we have to have a model that replicates SaaS pricing for local-first software?

Obsidian is doing a pretty good job selling sync functionality to their free client. Because the have a really good markdown editor implementation IMHO with community plug-in support that IMHO beats every PKM cloud tool out there that competes with them.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#222

Post by arendtio » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

samtho wrote: post #139

arendtio wrote: post #128

Regarding the no-spinners: I think it is the wrong approach to argue that just because you have data locally, you don't need any spinners. Whether you need a spinner or not should be decided by the User Experience (e.g., when the user has to wait for more than 100ms, show a spinner), and not by the location of the data. I am a big fan of local-first apps and enjoy building them myself. However, sometimes your app tak…

I didn’t get the impression that the author is advocating for removing spinners as a UI concept, rather it’s just being used a shorthand for, “you should not need to send and load the data to and from elsewhere while you are working.”

Agreed, my comment was meant to provoke exactly that conclusion ;-)

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#223

Post by earthnail » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 6:58 AM UTC

nofunsir wrote: post #91

criddell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to say you wouldn’t do that, but if it gets to the point where you have an employee helping you out and in a downturn you have to choose between laying them off or pushing an ad to keep paying them one more quarter, you might reconsider.

No, ads aren't the solution for everything, and in my opinion anything.

You will reconsider this argument when you start publishing your own ads to make people aware of your software.

there are different kinds of ads, but lets be clear that even a Show HN is a form of ad. Some forms of ads are just more appreciated than others.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#224

Post by arendtio » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

JFingleton wrote: post #136

arendtio wrote: post #128

Regarding the no-spinners: I think it is the wrong approach to argue that just because you have data locally, you don't need any spinners. Whether you need a spinner or not should be decided by the User Experience (e.g., when the user has to wait for more than 100ms, show a spinner), and not by the location of the data. I am a big fan of local-first apps and enjoy building them myself. However, sometimes your app tak…

A properly designed app would leverage multi threading to place any long running jobs in the background, allowing the user to carry on with other tasks. Spinners should not exist in a local first app.

You are aware that 'local-first' does not mean 'no-network'. Having a sync mechanism that runs in the background without user notification can be quite disconcerting.

I mean, I did it, I built an app with a transparent background sync. Then I added a special page, 'sync center'.

In reality, mobile devices don't always have perfect network connections. Therefore, when the user is unsure whether the device is in sync or if the sync is in progress but encounters an obstacle, they might perceive the app as unreliable.

Banning spinners is dogmatic, not user-centric.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#225

Post by senko » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

kid64 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "local first", not "local only".

Sorry, a "purely local app" isn't "local only"?

Not OP, but no.

IMHO, a fully local app is an app that can run locally with all the functionality, not that it's isolated from everything else.

Browser, email client (running locally on your device such as Mail.app, mutt, Outlook,...), Zed (text editor, runs locally but can check for updates... as can many other modern apps)...

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#226

Post by alun » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 7:38 AM UTC

I love this idea of local-first software, but from a business point of view there's unfortunately no current incentive to adopt it since it's nowhere near as profitable compared to SaaS. That, in my opinion, is the biggest bottleneck right now to this getting worldwide adoption

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#227

Post by Timwi » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

danjl wrote: post #64

tikhonj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing somebody summarize this as "SaaS is a pricing model" or "SaaS is financialization" and it totally rings true. Compared to normal software pricing, a subscription gives you predictable recurring revenue and a natural sort of price discrimination (people who use your system more, pay more). It's also a psychological thing: folks got anchored on really low up-front prices for software, so paying $2000…

Correct. SaaS is a business model, not a technical concept. But the real problem is that there is no equivalent business model for selling local first software. Traditional desktop apps were single purchase items. Local first is not because you just navigate to a website in your browser and blammo you get the software. What we need is a way to make money off of local first software.

> What we need is a way to make money off of local first software.

No, what we need is a way for people to not starve so that they don't have to make money at all and can focus instead on their passion project(s). Cough UBI cough

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#228

Post by crossroadsguy » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 7:49 AM UTC

patmorgan23 wrote: post #156

DataDaoDe wrote: post #29

Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest…

Obsidian the note taking app is a great model to follow as well. The client is completely free and they sell an optional syncing service. The notes are all on markdown files so the client is completely optional.

This is the reason I have always refused to use Bear note taking app irrespective of how good and snappy that app is. Because they keep their notes in a SQLite db now and even though that file can be backed up and handled locally my notes are not easily accessible to me. I can't easily edit my notes in other editors (which I often like to do on my mac), I can't version controlled backup and sync those files the way I want outside of iCloud (which is what Bear uses).

What is sad is that they used to be local files first note app and then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#229

Post by necovek » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 8:01 AM UTC

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #42

GMoromisato wrote: post #24

Personally, I disagree with this approach. This is trying to solve a business problem (I can't trust cloud-providers) with a technical trade-off (avoid centralized architecture). The problems with closed-source software (lack of control, lack of reliability) were solved with a new business model: open source development, which came with new licenses and new ways of getting revenue (maintenance contracts instead of li…

> End-of-life contracts: cloud-vendors should contractually spell out what happens if they can't afford to keep the servers running. I'm trying to imagine how this would be enforced when a company shutters and it's principals walk away.

Putting stuff in escrow is usually the way to go: escrow service is paid upfront (say, always for the next 3 months), and that's the time you've got to pull out your data.

My company does that with a few small vendors we've got for the source code we depend on.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#230

Post by pastaheld » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 8:06 AM UTC

ibizaman wrote: post #138

pastaheld wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love it! I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's crazy how many great FOSS alternatives are out there to everything – and while they might be relatively easy to install for tech-people ("docker compose up"), they are still out of reach for non-tech people. Also, so many of these selfhostable apps are web applications with a db, server and frontend, but for a lot of use cases (at least for me personally) you…

My guess as to why most apps are now a web UI on top of a DB is because it’s easy to “install”. SelfHostBlocks is admittedly geared towards a central server serving web apps. Or at least apps with a desktop or mobile component but geared towards synching to a central server. Feel free to give it a try though, I’d love that! Also feel free to join the matrix channel UF you have any questions or just to get some update…

> My guess as to why most apps are now a web UI on top of a DB is because it’s easy to “install”.

That plus web dev is trendy and everybody is learning it. I wouldn't know how to code a proper desktop app right now, I've not done it in years. I don't want to criticize that or the centralization aspect – there will still be ways to put these centralized things on a PC for example.