As opposed to what? Free? Getting investors who will pay for development while the service monetizes the users? It's unfortunate that this is what users have come to expect. That we feel should be getting free usage of a service when the developers have bills to pay just like everyone else, in addition to the cloud usage costs.
The people complaining about monthly fee in that three are target users for nobody but Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Evernote: €7/month
Notion: $4/month
Ulysses: $5.49/month
Standard Notes: $9.99/month
OneNote (+ the entire Office 365): $9.99/month
Inkdrop: $4.99/month
Bear: $1.49/month ($14.99 per year!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667492
Why are we talking about Roam rather than those services then? Why don't we just "find and replace Roam with Bear?" (anyone know the Regex for that?)
Getting hard "Dropbox is trivial to implement with FTP, curlftpfs and CVS" vibes from this kind of thinking.
> We don't want fuckin tire kickers who don't take thinking tools seriously.
> You don't think it's worth the money, that's cool - gtfo.
> You're actually poor -- we'll help you out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/ep2vy6/how_mu...
That thread on Reddit really soured me on Roam. I'm glad to see alternatives like Foam pop up because there are some interesting ideas there.
Their core strategy is sound - to develop, at an early stage, for a passionate group of users (even if the group is small).
There _is_ an alternative that isn't free and that is one off payments (rember when we used to buy software?). I happily pay in the order of $50 to $120 for one off payments, often locked to a version.
In many cases this is _more_ than I've ended up paying for subscriptions I've used, then abandoned after 6-12 months.
Customers generally don't mind so long as they can cancel easily if they find they don't need or want the product.
Plus, you can't really buy a "web app" with a one off purchase and much more software is developed as web apps nowadays.
The difference here is, Roam and similar services run on servers that cost money monthly. The service is almost worthless without it. Ultimately someone needs to pay for this.
No software is really finished.
The supposed benefit of my data being hosted is not a benefit to everyone. I already have multiple solutions to backup and sharing, I don't need another silo where my data lives. I don't need another vendor hosting arbitrary data which means I now can't use the product because the megacorp I work for won't let that through their legal.
Key point I was making above was that one off payment is an option and can be successful, we don't need to fall straight into the free vs subscription dichotomy.
that is also a downside though. which side of the coin wins depends on the customer. I rather use icloud/dropbox and apps then an unencrypted web version. Roam decided to implement a web app, the actual use case does not require a server or monthly maintanance costs.