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Comment by arielm | Hacker News Reader

I think there's still a need for a simple/practical notes app. Apple's built in app has improved tremendously since so it's hard to judge but IMO there's still a big enough market that extends beyond John's followers.

But... an app that has monthly expenses but only charges a one time fee can't really be sustainable. It's completely misaligned, and that's why it failed.

I blogged about it here https://arielmichaeli.com/my-thoughts-on-vespers-unfortunate...

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I don't think the monthly expenses should be much of an issue for an actually successful app, I think Instapaper proved that, it was (and still is?) a good business that did not require subscriptions.

I think Apple Notes is fine for the majority of uses, Simplenote is great otherwise, Evernote is popular... I'm not sure there's a need for another, unless you're the kind of person who cares about the particular class of UX problems that John Gruber cares about.

I believe Instapaper also had a developer product they charged for, though I'm not sure how big of a share that had of revenue.

Instapaper did not have a developer product that I'm aware of. It was a one-man product run by Marco Arment, and as I understand it, a successful one, but not successful enough to start employing a team of any real size.

It made most of its money through app purchases as the app was never free, and a small amount through subscriptions for a full text search feature that sold to a small group of the most active users.

I may be wrong on this, happy to be corrected. I'm going mostly off what Marco has said on his podcasts "Build & Analyze" and now "The Accidental Tech Podcast", which I have listened to on and off for a number of years.

Yup, they certainly did. Marco made Instapaper but eventually sold it to a different company (Beta Works) which built a team around it and monetized it via the developer api (https://www.instapaper.com/api). It was recently sold to Pinterest so that developer product is being sunset, but that's irrelevant in this example.

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