Show HN: AhhLife, a free replacement for OhLife | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AhhLife, a free replacement for OhLife

ahhlife.com

20 pointsobiefernandez13 comments

A little bit of context... I overheard my 17-yo daughter lamenting the closing of OhLife last week and it dawned on me that there might be many, many others in her position. Did some quick googling and didn't find any replacements that were exactly the same as the original. Opportunity?

Lately I've been obsessing over the FAN stack: Firebase, Angular, and Node.js. And I happened to have a full 3 days available last week, so I hunkered down and cranked this out. And I have every intention of setting it up as a sustainable little passive income project and FAN playground. I can't really imagine why OhLife guys felt the need to shut down. I could be way off but back of the napkin calculations for me show this costing less than $100/month to host, even with massive uptake.

Now once I went out there and started doing a little promotion, realized that it turns out that there are indeed a couple of other contenders wanting to take OhLife's place. One is an open source program that you can run yourself. That's only going to appeal to the tech crowd (I think.) And there's one called Trailmix written by some guys from Thoughtbot which is charging $3.99/month. (My gut says that won't fly.)

Cool thing is that the source for Trailmix is open. It's a Rails 4 app so I got to see what the same app looks like written in Rails.

Hey Obie!

I'm one of the aforementioned creators of Trailmix. I am indeed a thoughtbotter, but Chris is actually a GitHubber.

So far, our $3.99/month price seems to be working out well. We get the occasional comment that the price is too high, but people are still signing up at a steady clip (~5/day).

I'm glad to hear that you (eventually?) plan on charging for your site. While it doesn't cost much to host something like this, the opportunity cost of time spent on support and maintenance is real. I'd be uncomfortable using a free, freemium, or "pay what you want" model given that. It's probably fine for your first year, but as your free user-base grows and your passion fades, I imagine it's tempting to shut it down. After all, the OhLife guys used a freemium model too.

Anyway, best of luck to all of us!

Our site: https://www.trailmix.life

The code: https://github.com/codecation/trailmix

Thanks for sharing your numbers. At the moment I'm not too worried about the business model although it's good to hear some people are ponying up. I'm not open sourcing the app code but I am planning to use a lot of it in other projects and as examples in my upcoming book on the FAN stack.

The open source option you mention is at https://dabble.me and has a free hosted option as well. I open sourced the project in hopes that devs would contribute as I was a big OhLife user myself, but instead we all just started competing.

I've also reached out to the OhLife guys about 1) open sourcing their code, and 2) letting their users know alternatives exist. After a pretty late reply, all I got back was a 1 liner saying they weren't interested.

Sidetrack: Does your 17yo daughter really want to have her journal on a service her dad runs?

How are you planning to monetize it?

Have you gotten in touch with the folks over at OhLife? It would be awesome if they'd throw a link to your project up under FAQ so disappointed users have a place to go.

Thanks, that's actually a great idea.

http://i.imgur.com/pko6hod.png

Thx

A mobile app version would be better. Instead of email send push notification. Also restricting the number of characters to type (twitter style) can encourage entries?

This is how I use DayOne (http://dayoneapp.com/). All backed up in Dropbox, and it alerts me once a day to write things down.

"A mobile app version would be better."

Do you know that for a fact? You probably meant "I think a mobile app might be better."

I might have thought that as well at some point but after using ohlife I think email is the way to go

Reply on news.ycombinator.com