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Comment by ultimoo | Hacker News Reader

"We decided to charge upfront for Narrato Journal because we wanted to make it clear that we have a business model that doesn’t involve advertising or selling your data. You own all of your data and you have full control over it."

I like this. I wonder if they also include an option to export all data in a static HTML page with photos and videos in a directory sitting beside it. I'd love to have something like this.

I stopped sharing and posting on fb a few years ago, but still have a ton of valuable 'content' (photos and the comments on them). I'd use Narrato to purely 'download' and manage my data from fb in such a way that I own and control the data.

Overall, looks very promising. Best of luck folks!

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Export options were my first thought too. The bottom of their website [1] says, "Your data is yours and you have full conrol over it, so you can export or delete it at any time." I'm curious what that actually means though... how can I export it, and to what formats?

[1]: https://www.narrato.co/

JSON, through the web interface. I'm a journaling geek, so I signed up to try Narrato. After you confirm your email address, it takes you to their online account manager, which has an export button. The export looks like a JSON file, plus a directory all of the images that you've uploaded to the app.

That sounds like a terrible option for the average person.

Yep, I agree. This is just the 1.0, export options will improve.

Can you describe a good export experience for the average person? Google takeout service is pretty similar (I think, I have not actually in-archived my files to inspect them).

I am genuinely curious because I use my wife as the average person when it comes to technology and she has absoluy no interest in exporting her stuff from Google. I do it because I have grand ideas of a personalized data store with search tha I can just dump stuff into so my grand children's grandchildren can search for stuff and discover their history through our data.

Charging up front isn't always a great business model though. They could sell a few thousand copies of the app, no one else wants it, and now they have to support a product they will never get revenue from again. With a product like this I'd prefer to see a subscription model assuring me they were getting paid regularly and there's more chance they'd stick around.

I guess we haven't made this clear enough and that's our fault, but we charge upfront for the app and a year's worth of service. After that, it's $4.99 a year. We're not sure that this is the best business model (when compared to Evernote's for example), but we do know that we will not sell data or advertise. With this model, each paid user covers the cost of their usage (and not the usage of the 10s of free users their money has to cover with a freemium service) and it means we're still incentivised to continue to update and improve the service, so people renew their subscription at the end of the year.

Thanks for clarifying.

It's not clear to me how charging upfront tells me anything about their business model. In fact the wording here even make me wonder if they plan to eventually sell my data in ADDITION to charging me money.

The business model may not include selling my data RIGHT NOW, but they don't give me any assurances that the current business model is set in stone.

It's $3.99 up front, and then $4.99 every year after as shown on the AppStore page: https://itunes.apple.com/app/narrato-journal/id668158681/

"You own all of your data and you have full control over it."

Somewhat bullshit. It clearly states on the App Store page that it's a subscription service.

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