Ask HN: Which web apps you pay for suck? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which web apps you pay for suck?

19 pointsKishoreKumar9 comments

I'm talking about those web apps you are paying for yet not satisfied. May be you didn't like the UI or you think it is overpriced or you aren't getting enough out of it?

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I purchased a year subscription to RescueTime but now think it was a total waste of money and configuration. It is a minor curiosity to see where I spend my time, but gimmicks to keep me from doing things I am otherwise inclined to do (like spending an hour or so on HN a day), are not good long-term solutions -- often ultimately creating a backlash as they are perceived as solutions.

For example, I know someone who created a weight-losing app in which you bid against yourself to meet certain goals for losing weight. It is sort of a perverse incentive and it is much better to encourage healthy habits (e.g. exercising, eating better) than try to stop people from doing things that they have an inclination to do. As an example, it is better to give someone who only knows McDonalds a good burger so that they go out of their way to eat a good burger (presumably less frequently) rather than creating a system that gives them a minor electric shock every time they show up at McDonalds.

I suppose you could make a case for RescueTime on the basis of monitoring your employees, but I'm also generally opposed to this also. You should basically only hire employees that want to do their job, rather than hiring people or tools to monitor and "enforce" productivity.

Which is to say, peak productivity comes from within and from being engaged in the project one is doing, rather than any quantity of external stimuli. I stopped perceiving a need for RescueTime as soon as I left behind crappy consulting gigs and started doing things I enjoyed again.

If you have 1.00+ scores, the positive feeling from being way up in the blue is nice. Also, I have a max distraction goal and I get some reinforcement from not seeing it until late in the day if at all. However, I agree I'm paying for little more than to support the free service.

Yeah, the being way up in the blue is nice, but it all depends on how you weight the programs.

Do you change many settings? I rate what's not categorized (mostly netflix -2 and my project sites as +2) but leave default settings almost whenever I can. Its ability to give useful reports immediately is what I like about it.

A bit, but so much for me ended up being generic browser usage (I also use a web-based browser) that not all that much was useful. I think it might have been a bug in RescueTime that didn't always capture the information on the site visited in the browser.

Anyways, I don't think about it much, I don't use it, and I don't miss it.

It doesn't "suck" at all, but I wish Freshbooks did a whole lot more. I've sent in at least 5 feature requests that seem relatively simple, but are dismissed (as far as I know).

I'm happy with the service and pay the $30 bucks without cringing, but it could be much better.

Tried Invoice Machine?

Nope, I'm pretty committed with Freshbooks at this point. Here are some of the features I'd love though: 1) Ability to upload files to my invoices 2) Ability to send as a PDF 3) Ability to use my customers address data in ways that lets me analyze it (i.e. geographic distribution, avg. invoice price per city, etc) 4) Ability to discount specific line items rather than global 5) Sending HTML emails 6) Default payment methods (per customer or globably) 7) Custom payment methods (i.e. marking payments as "email money transfers - this one they said they will put in for a next release)

Anyway, I'm just telling them anything I can think of as I can see on their forum that they have a lot of user feedback. If enough people want something I'm sure it will come aometime)

The coolest and most useful thing would be analytics with the data they have... I'm sure it wouldn't be horribly difficult either, if I can export the customer data I'm sure I could do it myself (oh there is another one, I don't think I can export my data easily)

I guess you could consider Safari a "web app", of sorts. I like access to the content including from any machine having a web connection -- but the interface has remained an uncooperative, buggy PITA for some time, now.

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