Honestly, it feels like straight up plagiarism. When I saw the title, I thought I knew which website was posted because I had seen it before. When I clicked, I saw an unfamiliar website and was surprised that it was posted 3 days ago rather than a couple months ago.
The contents are so similar, that it cannot be coincidence. It really seems like the author of this blog simply plagiarized the strangestloop post without referring to it at all...
Same thoughts here.
I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thought it might be an adoption for a specific field, or an extension of thought, or maybe a fun twist or something.
This has been a major UX problem for me when building my app [0] (an AI chat client for power user).
On the one hand, I want the UI to be simple and minimal enough so even non savvy users can use it.
But on the other hand, I do need to support more advanced features, with more configuration panels.
I learned that the solution in this case is “progressive disclosure”. By default, the app only show just enough UI elements to get the 90% cases done. For the advanced use cases, it takes more effort. Usually to enable them in Settings, or an Inspector pane etc. Power users can easily tinker around and tweak them. While non savvy users can stick with the default, usual UX flow.
Though even with this technique, choosing what to show by default is still not easy. I learned that I need to be clear about my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and optimize for that profile only.
Shameless plug: I’ve been building a native AI chat client called BoltAI[0] for the last 3 years. It’s native, feature-rich, and supports multiple AI services, including Ollama and LM Studio.
From time to time (like once or twice per month) HN goes to read only mode for a few minutes (while dang is making some weird update?), and the downvote buttons disappear. Can this be the explanation???
Does he manage his own automated browsers? I suppose this could simply be a wrapper for something like Scrapfly (or Scraping Bee or Zen Rows or many others), with some custom JS injected to remove banners.
I signed up on my phone and tested in the playground.
It will fit perfectly into my workflow. I'm building a hyper-local directory site.
Getting good images for businesses is hard, so I'll use this to grab an image of their site as a place holder.
I can also add it to my AI workflow where I pass a website to OpenAI Assistant to extract data. OpenAI s not as robust with URLs as it is with images or PDFs. Often it won't visit then URL.
I can use this to get an image or pdf, pass it on and ask for the data back. OpenAI is better with files than URLs in my experience.
holy crap - our company needs basically exactly this for a crazy feature our PM cooked up and we were gonna build something similar ourselves - this will save us so much time
Well, for some users and uses, it's free. It seems they consider their small amount glue between docker and chrome a to be of commercial value. Still better than the original.
I’ve been running BoltAI[1] and it generates enough revenue for me to work on it full time.
I follow the “perpetual license with one year of support/updates” model. So far it’s working great. My customers love it as they’re in control of the software. Some users can run BoltAI entirely offline.
But I’m adding the subscription soon as this model is not sustainable when I’m adding other cloud features such as cloud sync and other collaboration features.
I think the pricing model should reflect the value and cost of the product. If it’s more on the software side (think winzip or other smaller desktop widget where there is no or low operational cost), it should be one time payment. If it’s more on the service side (cloud sync, collaborative features, fast changing niche where you need to update the product constantly…) then it makes more sense to charge a subscription.
But the tricky part here is that potential customers might not see it that way. Many assume it’s just like another desktop app, therefore it has to be one time payment. So in my experience, I’d start with no cloud feature and offer a perpetual license. Then I’ll add a subscription and with other cloud features. Basically 2 different offerings.
Great app, I actually mentioned you in my other comments as a good example of a one-time payment model and why it works for you, at least until you add the more service oriented features as you mentioned.
I’m sure Msty is a good app. And it might be better for some users while it might be worse for others. For example, it’s not a native app and doesn’t support “inline usage”, which some users may find not appealing.
Yes, it’s just an example. And when you install 10 different tools like this, one might argue that your argument is the same as the famous Dropbox comment.
Look, this is not a contest. I’m just an indie developer trying to build something that my customers want.
They are smart and they use many different tools.
I’m sure many of them, like you, prefer Msty or other products. But some of them are really like my product because it fits them better.
A product doesn’t need to “be the best”, or to “win the entire market”.
