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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

This app looks very nice, and I love markdown. But I am not prepared to pay £8+ per month for a Markdown notes app that works on all my devices, especially if it exerts control over what I can do with my own files. I can sync my Markdown directory via Dropbox, iCloud, Nextcloud, etc and edit the files with things like Obsidian, 1Writer, VSCode or any one of hundreds of Markdown editors.

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If you'd like to sync it yourself, then by all means do so. I don't necessarily understand comments like these, if the user doesn't like it, no one is forcing them to buy it, especially if there are other solutions as you've stated.

I guess it is a way to say that the business model is probably not right and they won't last long.

But what do I know, I never launched a product.

  > I don't necessarily understand comments like these

It's called constructive criticism. The application dev is reading this forum, and will be able to see what people like and dislike about the app and the business.

Well yeah, but OP presumably posted this on HN for feedback. I don't comments like these which criticize people... criticizing things.

It's £6 per month if you pay yearly. Also if you are a student you can get a 50% discount. Honestly it costs a negligible amount, that's less than a single day's worth of travel on the tube.

I just wanted to say that you could try a bit harder to justify the price rather than just saying it's "negligible". I think that's very subjective and I personally don't think it's a reasonable price to pay for just storing markdown files in the cloud.

"just storing markdown files"

Ironically you could do the same with your replies.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It's rather tonedeaf to criticise that commenter for diminishing the cost, and then diminish in exactly the same way the work involved in creating this.

And I'm so tired of the game of "describe a successful tech product in a way that makes it sound silly". Yeah, Twitter is just storing a load of VARCHAR(240)s, and Facebook is just an undirected graph, and Jackson Pollock's paintings are just splatters, etc. I could build it myself! Except... I don't, because it's not that easy, and I know it isn't when I think about it for more than 1.7 seconds.

Storing, updating and deleting varchars is what most of enterprise and startup developers do for living. It can't be that hard.

Sure, in which case you're welcome to build every tool yourself. Me, I'll carry on doing what I specialise in for a living, and use a trivial crumb of my earnings to pay someone else for lovingly-made readymade products. Same way I do for my WiFi router, for my readymade mac & cheese, etc.

viz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Sure I can but I didn't think it was necessary. I used to hand-write my notes, filling a £10 moleskine journal every month or so. Supernotes saves me £4 per month and I get the benefits of all of it's features.

Supernotes is competing with more than just pen/paper

Many neglible amounts are a large amount.

I don't travel on the tube though, or pay for Starbucks, or whatever analogy you're trying to come up with. My current note taking solution - a folder with .md files - is free. What's the compelling argument for this app?

Granted, it's really difficult to compete with free, and the note taking space is probably one of the most saturated software markets there is.

You have no outgoings? Then sure, it's hard for me to suggest a comparison to you. I'm not sure it's up to me to suggest an analogy that works for every user on the internet however, pick something that you spend money on regularly.

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