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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Um, that's amazing... and it's free?

Thanks! It's a project I did in my spare time and it's made with a lot of MIT licensed JS libraries, so it's natural to make this MIT licensed as well. I don't know even know how anybody would start to monetise something local-first like this in this day and age.

Did you chew on monetization at all? I'm building something similar but for bio-imaging scientists, where I've packed everything I can into a single HTML (and even some modern segmentation models like Cellpose3 and StarDist that fit under Cloudflare's 25MB free tier limit haha.

Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead but I'm hoping maybe I can cover the (future?) compute costs by charging for the heavy duty ML that would have to be run non-locally but IDK. This isn't critical yet but would love to hear your musings.

If you have a backend that does processing, I'm sure you can monetise it. But for Bento, the whole idea is to forgo the backend, so I didn't really think about it that much. If an enterprise version comes, I'm sure there is a way to integrate stuff like SSO that you can charge for.

Yeah, i think that is the right direction. I have built free local pdf/image tools but had to cover the compute cost (which is too much these days to afford as a solo dev) so I HAD to build paid workflows as well. https://pixlpdf.com/tools

Nice. Did it end up working out?

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