New version of Monica, codename Chandler, is available in beta | Hacker News Reader

New version of Monica, codename Chandler, is available in beta

monicahq.com

81 pointsrobinhood70 comments

Author here. Super happy with this release. It took us 18 months of working on it "side project style". Almost every night and weekends actually. It's a full rewrite of the current project, with its own advantages and disadvantages of a rewrite. I hope people who used it before and didn't like it, will give it another try this time. I hope that current users who love Monica, will love this new version even more.

co-author here. Very happy about this new release, thank you for all beta-testing!

I just recommended this to a friend who uses a conventional CRM (Salesforce I think) as a personal CRM -- a PRM? (The "C" is no longer relevant)

Question about:

> the feature I’m most proud of is the ability to customize almost everything in Chandler: from the layout, to the modules you can enable, to the data you can enter about your life.

Was this a customer-driven product decision? Based purely on past experience, this seems like the kind of thing that PMs sometimes get very excited about, but then ends up adding a lot of complexity for both developers and users... so I am curious to hear how you thought about the tradeoff :)

This is based on the feedback we've received over the years. Basically, people want so many different things, and the only way we've found to achieve this is to let people use the software the way they want.

As a former PM I know that we should 1) avoid settings, and 2) avoid customization as much as possible because of the additional complexity, but this time, in the context of mapping your life, it should be entirely customizable.

Congratulations on the Beta and thank you for creating Monica.

It states it(Chandler) does not have Import from existing Monica yet. Just wanted to get clarity on: will it get the Import option in future?

Yes we are working on it already. But it's no trivial task so it'll take a bit of time.

My wife and I tried to use Monica for many months in the past but had to give up because of the incredibly buggy CardDAV implementation when using iOS. Now that this has come out it seems the issue (https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/6175) was ignored likely because of all this work.

Have improvements been made with this in the new version?

I also switched from Monica because of this. I love the features, but no iOS syncing was too painful of a gap.

I considered paying for Monica because to get this feature. Glad I didn't, I suppose. No word from the authors that this is being addressed, and I can't seem to find any mention of CardDAV in the UI...

Congratz! As someone who installed Monica several times, and always said "I’ll fill it with data eventually" (and often thinks how useful it would be to have it filled…), I want to use this as an opportunity to try once again. What will the upgrade path be for selfhoster for the later versions? Will there be automatic migrations until 1.0?

Congrats!

Also the name gave me a genuine chuckle

Want to say thanks! I really like Monica. I haven't upgraded to 4.0.0 yet (waiting for Debian bookworm to release so I can have PHP 8.1 supported).

When is the current hosted monicahq going to upgrade to chandler?

I get the rationale for the new naming, but I find it really funny. It’s not the first personal information software to be named “Chandler”. I’m not going to say the name is cursed, but if you were around for this, you’ll chuckle at the new name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

https://www.chandlerproject.org/ (2009)

If you want a great story about a software project, open source, and how to not ship, there is also a really good book about this project called “Dreaming in Code”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code

I’ve had “personal CRM” in my ideas file since 2003. In fact, I failed to convince a buddy to apply to the very first YC batch with it.

Love the concept. But I’d love the landing page at beta.monicahq.com to describe what Monica (or in this case Chandler) actually does. A short video, some screenshots, anything… right now it’s not clear to me why I’d click “signup”.

I think it's just because that's their "app" login page, where you already know what it does and you already have an account. When I go to login to AWS or Datadog or whatever, the login page doesn't tell me what it does, either.

Like you, though, I've also had "personal CRM" as a potential project for a very long time. Monica is a great step in that direction, and I've happily used it for many years, but it's not all the way there, and I still hope to one day have the resources and time to actually build something truly great.

Agreed. But I go to https://beta.monicahq.com I get redirected back to the login page. They're missing an opp to communicate what the product actually does beyond "personal CRM that's broadly different from our old one".

I want the Taskwarrior of personal crm.

https://www.monicahq.com/features like that perhaps?

The login page makes it clear Chandler is different from Monica so presumably Monica's feature page doesn't accurately describe Chandler.

About that beta page, Man! what the hell is with the light gray text over pale cream color background.

in the meantime checkout covve.com

I genuinely appreciate Monica, and congrats to the team. However, I've been searching for a native Android app and haven't come across a suitable alternative, as the Monica app has been discontinued.

I'm looking for an app that helps me remember significant dates and details about my acquaintances, provides birthday reminders, and allows me to take notes on them. Does anyone have any recommendations?

At least on iOS you can do all of that with the native contacts app

Yeah, I assumed most such tools do. Is that not the case?

(Amusingly, though, my own "how to keep track of birthdays" solution predates the addition of such fields to address books. When I learned your birthday, I would just put it in my (paper!) calendar, and transfer it annually.

Then when digital calendars happened, I just entered them there. To this day I have a calendar called "Annual Dates" that is comprised entirely of birthdays and other milestones worth keeping up with. Consequently and ironically, I don't use the in-address-book fields. Still.)

i tried an app called fabriq, it is unpolished but definitely works well.

Thanks, I use Monica and it is very helpful.

Q1: Will you be able to upgrade from Monica once this is out of beta? I have a lot of data in a self hosted Monica instance, and can't imagine starting from scratch.

Q2: Are there any plans to make a multi user Monica? I would like to use it with my family, so that some users (such as family members) will be shared and editable by all, and others are private.

Q3: you have had that "Office Life" banner since forever. Is that abandoned? Is it advancing?

So when is Ross, Joey and Phoebe?

* Rachel has left the chat *

OMG I forgot her.

They were on a BREAK!

We already have it

Ross is for an app that pretends to love you then constantly cheats on you, kinda like Facebook.

Phoebe: App to feel holier/superior than everyone (TikTok).

Joey: Tinder, don't need descriptions at all.

Rachael: App to show off, Instagram

Definitely interesting, albeit a bit too green to be a beta version imho (I can't select a contact when adding a relationship, added two pets by accident because there was no feedback... e.g).

However, it looks really promising and more feature rich than the current version of Monica.

I do have a question thought. Will this version support WebDav/Cal? Syncing contacts to my mobile phone is the main reason why I use monica on a daily base.

Is this a fork of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) ? (If not, pretty confusing to have two apps that do similar things with the same name.)

Chandler is a codename. We'll keep Monica for as long as people will want the tool.

It is a temp name. It will become Monica ones ready for prod.

Funny, I just checked up on the status of this project yesterday! I've been on the lookout for a personal CRM for a long time and have had my eye on Monica for months.

It looks really promising but I could not for the life of me get it to run in the Docker container last time I tried. I have a dozen or so other Docker containers running without issue, so I don't think it's my setup. Are people reporting better success with Chandler when it comes to containerization? I'd love to use it but have spent too many hours trying to get it to work.

I was just trying this beta out with "docker run -p 8080:80 ghcr.io/monicahq/monica-next:main" and ran it without issue.

What problems did you have?

People often resort to containerization when they've lost control of their dependencies. Containerization is only completely effective when you control your dependencies and if you control your dependencies... You don't need the container.

I use docker because it's very easy to deploy home-server style. I don't care about dependencies.

Back when I had very slow DSL (as opposed to just slow DSL) I found it was almost impossible to install complex container layouts because the Docker client was not at all smart about caching and failed downloads.

Later on I worked at a place that had gigabit Ethernet and got into an argument with the CTO who couldn't believe the build process (which built software packed it into containers and ran a system based on containers) took 20 minutes. I set my stopwatch and it was 18 minutes and 27 seconds and a lot of that time was Docker doing ultimately meaningless I/O.

People think Docker is doing something positive for them when it is really killing their productivity, making their projects late, giving them time to go get coffee, etc.

Docker is for teams, not individuals

Like taliwindcss

and other stuff that gets a team to be -standarised- in how to do things

I've been interested in software like this, even set up an instance on Heroku the one time (the free tier should be adequate), but it would be a lot of work to import all of your contacts and keep it up to date with e.g. every interaction you have with these people; it's another extra load on top of your life. Great if you're a people person that wants to min/max your social life (e.g. a recruiter, HR, marketeer), but maybe Facebook would be better for the average person.

I've been a long term Monica user, and great to hear this project will continue and grow... I'd love to request a few features

Do you have integrations? Pulling in contacts from CRMs, database, Google sheets, or pushing out to marketing tools would be interesting additions (I guess more geared towards your OfficeLife product rather than a PRM)

Is this name collision, or is Monica somehow related to the previous Chandler?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_%28software%29

Both are characters from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends

Do you plan to provide Bing integration?

Why does it cost 9 USD per month? (Unless you self host)

How much do you think it should cost? More or less per month? Or maybe annual? Multi currency support?

It is a genuine question.

They should just do what everyone else does and finance themselves by selling your data to the highest bidder! There are lots of advertisers who would pay a fair amount to know this much about your social graph and what you think of them.

> They should just do what everyone else does and finance themselves by selling your data to the highest bidder!

You say that as if they won't anyway.

Their privacy policy[1] states:

>The site does not currently and will never show ads. It also does not, and don't intend to, sell data to a third party, with or without your consent. We are just against this. Fuck ads.

[1] https://www.monicahq.com/privacy

Why would we do that? This is not something we want to do. We don't even have tracking. And also, we advocate everywhere that users should host their own instance.

I think it was a joke.

A bit less. It just seems like a service that is "easy" to host, as in does not need much maintenance or ressources, thus allowing you to host tens of instances on a cheap VPS.

But maybe I'm overlooking something. Hence me asking.

I am sure part of the money goes towards development.

Cost of something just has to be higher than the cost to deliver. It should be much closer to the value provided than the cost to deliver, however, or your business will fail.

Well, basic Google suite for a small business user costs around that much per month. It is not a bad alternative to your product, no? As the search over the documents, photos, contacts and emails works rather well there. And integrations with the 3rd party software and apps is great. I’m not sure Google sells the data of their business suite subscribers. I doubt they do.

A comparable personal product would normally be freemium, but very limited in storage space and events number. And then, for US/European markets you’d have a $0.x per month subscription, to lift that limit. Asking early adopters to pitch in more (maybe for some token appreciation or special treatment/logo) also makes a lot of sense.

(Take this with a lot of salt, I easily can be very wrong in any of the above).

Why does Google and Facebook cost $0 USD per month?

Because they sell your data. I'm not asking why this cost money, I understand that. I'm asking why it cost 9 USD per month.

> I'm asking why it cost 9 USD per month.

If you think it should cost less because of N reasons -- self host it. There's an option for that vs. other solutions.

They don't need to justify their cost to you, ever, but especially when it's open sourced with an option to self host.

> They don't need to justify their cost to you, ever,

Correct. I'm just *wondering* why they choose that price. I don't want them to change it and they have every right to not talk about it.

I selfhost a lot of stuff. I don't understand why people think this is an attack.

Perhaps the author wants to eat and have a beer sometime?

Yes, I get that. It just seems to me that the people who know what a "Personal CSM" is, don't want to self host and have 90 USD/year for a contact management and journal are rather small.

It was a genuine questions from me.

I assume they did some research, a/b testing etc. and found out that this is a price people are willing to pay. Also, this is 2 beers. 1 if you have to pay US service fees and a tip

Could be. My first idea was they want to encourage people to self host.

The initial idea was for us to be able to work full time on it. Here was the rational.

I'm in Montreal, Alexis is in Paris. The cost of living in these cities is pretty high. We have families. So let's say we need to bring in $100 000 CAD per year.

9$ per month ~= 8$ after Stripe taxes. Then 35% off from the government. If I'm extra generous and lucky from the taxes, we get 5$ per subscription.

Then we need to substract the costs of hosting on a PAAS for 40 000 users. Let's say it's an extra $. So we have 4$ per subscription.

If we need to bring 200 000 $ CAD at least to live decently with our families, we would need 50 000 paying users. That is without the churn, right, which is pretty high currently at 8%.

7 years later: we don't even have 500 paying users

The dream of working full time on Monica is still there, but without VC money, I don't know how we could achieve this.

You may want to consider good old approach of trying to grow exponentially in a sustainable way. It seems that you have no pressure from VCs, you do have a user base and a runway.

You can try setting the thing up, so the costs are essentially static and do not depend on the number of users. This seem possible, since it doesn’t look like you store images or do anything heavy. You also do not need moderation, it seems.

Could you BE any more parsimonious?

(/s)

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