Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing (supernotes.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.

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

  > I don't necessarily understand comments like these

You can measure input latency relatively easily, but it's not as useful without a frame of reference. Here are a couple internet posts on doing exactly that:

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

If you're not wanting to go out of your way to measure it, though, there's a pretty straightforward way you can get a feel for it: Pay attention to when the glyph appears on the screen, versus when the click of the keypress happens. For example, in xedit, I press 't', and the appearance of the glyph occurs almost simultaneously with the click. The click and the appearance happen much more noticeably asynchronously with Electron applications, including this one.

[1] https://plausible.io/

From the Source code it suggests the author was exploring sustainability options, however that was last updated in 2019 so it's not clear if that's still the plan.

https://github.com/notable/notable/blob/master/SOURCE_CODE.m...

  - Trillium Notes [0]
  - Joplin [1]
  - others I can't remember
  - Obsidian [2] 
  - Emacs/org-mode
  - Logseq [3]
  - and now back to Obsidian again

Obsidian has come a long way from where it was a year ago in terms of community plugins. There's some crazy stuff you can do with plugins like obsidian-dataview [4], obsidian-itinerary [5], quickadd [6], obsidian-Kanban [7]. It's no Emacs in terms of customizability, but it's pretty damned close. And Obsidian doesn't have the random freezes and random "oops I accidentally deleted a huge chunk of nested notes" that org-mode constantly exposed me to. I'm loving Obsidian (again). As long as you don't mind JavaScript for plugins and closed source core app, it's a super-powerful and performant option worth checking out.

The biggest thing Obsidian lacks right now that SuperNotes 2 seems to offer is good sharing / collaboration between people - for me, I just want to be able to have shared notes with my partner, but sharing with a team would be great, too. I'm not the target audience for SuperNotes 2, but it is good to continue to see competition in this space - the innovation it drives is exciting.

  - [0] https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/
  - [1] https://joplinapp.org/
  - [2] https://obsidian.md/
  - [3] https://logseq.com/
  - [4] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview/
  - [5] https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-itinerary
  - [6] https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd
  - [7] https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

The only reason to not do this is that subscriptions are even more profitable, more rent-seeking, and more extractive

That said, some apps still don't need frequent updates, and those apps should be offered as a traditional purchase.

Security and Bug Fixes? Not indefinitely, but I would expect the minimum generally accepted consumer warranty protections in modern economies: a year? Two? I'm also happy to help out keeping things up to date, if its open source (not everyone can do that, but not everyone has to, that's the magic of software. and this is HackerNews, not Facebook).

Look, here's the reality: software has changed. You don't just get to charge $10/month, fail to get traction, then cry "people don't want to pay for high quality software, its all these hackernews luddite types who think everything should be open source". Office 365 is $5/mo. Apple's suite is ~free-$2/mo, with a device purchase (Apple Notes is probably the most-used note taking app on the planet). Google Workspace is $6/mo; it could literally just be Keep, it'd be 70% as functional as this product, and nearly half the price; oh, and it comes with the global standard of email inboxes, with a custom domain, global standard calendar provider, a terabyte of file upload, global near-standard office suite... Notion is $4/mo. That's your competition!

Sure, none of them do exactly the same thing; but they're pretty close, and people have an inelastic amount they're willing to stretch their monthly spend beyond these high value services to perfectly hone in on a workflow that works. It's the same kind of inelasticity that keeps Excel wildly popular despite tons of more nuanced competitors.

Here's my expectations, above all else: that in ten years, the data I've given this service will still be accessible, no rug pull, no pivot, no dirty acquisition. That's the trade-off you seem to be forgetting. The biggest risk to the users of most products isn't "paying enough to afford the developers necessary to maintain it and build it out"; it's "charging so much that they never gain traction, and disappear overnight". The way toward alleviating that fear, today, is one of extremes; you can either be a huge megacorp with so much tangential revenue & momentum that a rug pull is unlikely, or you can go the Obsidian.md route, not necessarily open-source but at least open, standards-compliant, useful, locally stored data. This product instead goes the 2010s VC-backed "just build a pretty product and charge a subscription people will come lol" route, and that route is destined for failure.

Or, you can keep complaining that people won't pay for software. In an era where more money is spent on software than at any other point in computing history. People pay for software. That's the problem. So, figure it out, or die; but don't blame consumers because you've got a suicide wish to be customers' 22nd subscription service that's marginally different than two others they already pay for.

Also there are lots of SaaS products that have died in that time. A subscription isn't a guarantee that it'll last.