Show HN: Muse 2.0 with local-first sync (museapp.com)

Well, I would hope that purchase of a product or service is a mutually beneficial business transaction. So in this sense how the product is priced is the problem/concern of both parties.

Quoting from https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ :

> You might be used to software from growth-at-all-costs startups: free at the start (funded by venture capital) but eventually your attention in monetized with ads, your personal data is monetized by selling to third parties, or the personal product takes a back seat to the “enterprise” product.

> Muse is following a different path: personal software, made for you and your unique tastes and needs, and funded by direct payment from you and other members. Because our funding comes from you, the customer, rather than investors with their sights on mass-market adoption, our incentives are better aligned with yours.

> By paying for Muse, you help us stay niche, opinionated, and focused on your needs over the long term.

I think it's worth thinking about where the products and services we consume in our daily lives come from and how the incentive models work. And that definitely includes software.

Well yes and no. It is your problem if the only options for the software you want are subscription based. To some extent, Photoshop and Lightroom might be examples of this. If I'm not mistaken, Adobe stopped selling one-off licenses for these products quite a while ago. While there are a number of alternatives both paid and free, Adobe's products still capture a considerable portion of the market. Not because people like recurring payments, but because there's whole industries full of people who know how to use those products to produce and deliver quality work. To put another way, I fully understand that you want one upfront payment, it makes sense and I feel the same way, but what if there's no one willing to sell it to you?

Users: I'm not paying for a subscription!

Those same users in a year: Where's the support for all these new features in the OS release just announced? Why haven't there been any free updates to this app I paid you 5 dollars for a year ago? This app sucks, I'm switching to something else. 1 star.

I also hate the subscription-based model. I see it as a race to the bottom that devs can't avoid, unfortunately. Your competition can go freemium and pick up casual users and then charge for subs, making your product less attractive initially (why pay a fee to try out an app when another one is free to try?). Most people don't want to pay $40 or $100 for an app. Additionally, users expect features that require cloud services and you need to pay your own fees to keep those lights on, so naturally you want to charge users a subscription fee as well.

It's freemium rather than a trial, so you can use it for free for as long as you want. (Assuming I'm understanding your request there.)

It does export a Muse bundle which is a ZIP archive containing a JSON with the position of the cards and, more usefully, flat files for all the media. PNG, TXT, PDF, SVG for the ink, etc. I regularly drop backups of this into Dropbox or iCloud.

Version control would be tricky because one of the big features is realtime streaming sync. Could be an interesting research problem to find a way to combine Figma-style realtime documents with something that can be checked into Git.

Yep, the "incredible journey" with a dump of your data in JSON sucks.

Muse is built local-first; all your data is kept locally on device, with the sync server merely a second-tier backup. If we go out of business, you keep all the data on your local device.

That said, apps in the App Store tend to stop working if they don't get regular maintenance[1]. This problem and the one you name is a big one for our industry to improve on IMO. Mark and I talked about that in depth in our podcast on software longevity[2].

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/24/apple-now-removing-outdated-a...

[2]: https://museapp.com/podcast/49-software-longevity/

Or it goes:

1. I sign up for niche but well-made service

2. I pay $50/year or whatever. I'm fine with that because I'm going to rely on this.

3. Not enough other people do. The service wants to make more money and pivots to enterprise. They don't grandfather old users and the minimum price is now $9.99/mo for a limited feature set, and $14.99/mo (min 3 seats) for the features I used to have

I have to admit it’s not the fee going to Apple that was my immediate concern.

I trust the team more than Apple at this point. I’d rather they had more control over our billing relationship.

Additionally, I consider this a business purchase. I prefer to keep my expenses separate. Most of my spending via my Apple ID is on personal/consumer stuff. Apple don’t make it easy to switch between IDs for different purchases.

Not wanting a subscription does not imply not wanting to pay for software.

I bought Typora, and would buy a paid upgrade for it. Same for Things. When the software needs improvement I’ll pay for that value. I will not pay monthly for the privilege of using the software that isn’t changing.

I absolutely will not even consider paying for a subscription to access my own research. When I don’t pay Typora, I can still access every document I’ve written. It’s unclear to me from the information presented if I will even be able to access my Muse boards if the company goes out of business.

> How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"?

As another commenter suggested, I never said I don't want to pay for software. I would probably pay a lot for software with functionality like Muse, just never on a monthly basis.

Why are you losing your best customers with a subscription model? I can give you two examples.

1. I recently started using a tool called Homechart, and I was pretty excited to use it, replacing Notion and Clubhouse for task management and organization of thoughts. It has other useful features like inventory, chores, budgeting, recipes... But I was mostly in it for task management.

Unfortunately, Homechart has an obnoxious "buy premium" banner that takes up half of the page _every time you refresh or open the app._ I'm sure you can agree this is a bit too frequent. I asked nicely if this reminder could be reduced on the developer's forum, I was just told "Buy premium to get rid of the banner." It's funny, because I was on the fence with Homechart's $99 lifetime subscription. It's something I would have purchased after seeing the app develop and grow more of a user base over 3-6 months. That developer lost out on more than my $99. I was happy to contribute more than just money to the development of the app, but the developer made their impression and that was that.

2. I really appreciate your enthusiasm in helping to develop this app, but you come off closed-minded when you talk about the economics of the subscription model, or reference your own blogs in response to feedback from would-be customers. I get the need to defend your choices, you just seem not very eager to understand the blind spots that may exist within those choices. Ultimately, subscription models are lazy monetization, especially so when the product is static software. I want what Muse can offer me today, not a promise of what it could be tomorrow (next month) in exchange for more of my money. That's essentially what you're asking for with a perpetual subscription model, and it's why Goodnotes was easy for me to buy. I would go so far to say that subscription models are not transparent and frankly, not consumer centric at all.

I have empathy for your situation. The subscription model is only tired because everyone and their mother is doing it. Netflix was supposed to replace cable, now every cable station has its own Netflix. It's entirely out of your control that people are fed up with adding another line item. You are missing critical feedback from the type of user who doesn't want to make a knee-jerk decision and forget about their subscription for months at a time. Users like that, who know what they want, are pretty valuable in my experience.

I hear what you're saying, but really this is up to the end user to decide.

For some, the best "tool for thought" is something that tries to replace paper as directly as it can, because writing/drawing on paper is how some people think best.

So I don't think it's quite fair to say this is unrelated. Perhaps the feature sets are different, but the underlying goal of the end user might not be.

Be curious. It's not a sketching app. It's literally endless paper w/ endless zoom levels, which is pretty sick to use in practice. Basically instead of creating "nested" board, you just zoom into the area/letter/shape and start whole new spatial universe there.

Plus it supports images, and drag-n-dropping them directly from other apps in a iPad split mode makes it a joy to use often.

Do you have any plans to handle schema changes for the content stored within the CRDTs as the clients evolve?

(I've been puzzling over that question during some local-first dabbling; I have a feeling that lenses[1] -- or something like them -- may provide a route towards schema version upgrades without any peer synchronization guarantees)

[1] - https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/lenses-etapsslide...

Awesome. Hope there's at least a very basic commenting feature as well.

Exactly.

I have documents I wrote 30 years ago. Looks like this allows export as PDF, at least, but there is no planet on which I will voluntarily rent access to my own documents.

I get your metaphor, but I think it falls down because "write once, deploy anywhere" was a slogan for Java and it never really fulfilled that promise.

And yes, like anything in life there are top-quality options which tend to be more expensive and lower-quality options which fit a smaller budget. MindNode is a lovely app and worth paying for IMO.

Is that how most app subscriptions work? People usually call it “freemium”.

With Obsidian, if I stop paying for sync, I still have my notes and a fully functional product.

I can load my notes in vim and keep going should Obsidian disappear.

I can also bring my own sync, via Dropbox or Syncthing or what have you.

That's a little disingenuous to compare yourselves to obsidian price structure. With Obsidian I can connect it and sync via github/Dropbox/etc, and there are no feature limitations with the free product at all, whereas yours prevents the creation of new notes if you exceed the free note limit.

Not the same at all.

I skimmed the article, but what makes Android not sufficient to interact with Muse? I haven’t tried Muse, but I’ve thought plenty about building a local-first notebook app for thinking. Something about pen input or UI jank? Muse seems less general than I was thinking of it as being if only Apple hardware can run its core feature set…

I think decay is an excellent word to describe Evernote’s journey, or at least the bits where I was involved. The UIs became progressively less usable, and somehow felt more fragile. My own use of it was experiment-> embrace -> decay. I can’t just blame the tool, that pattern of changing productivity tools is more of a me problem it turns out.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about an ideal tool for capturing and organizing thought and Muse appears to have addressed my own ambitions and those of experts in the field. Congrats on the great work. With this release I won’t need to get an iPad to try it, but after reading this post I sure want one.

To that end, I’m curious about user stories from desktop-first, and/or desktop-only Muse users.

Yeah, I get that you guys got your hands full. I'm curious enough to give this a spin.

Not necessarily a self-hosted sync service so much as an always-on device running this app in the background that accepts changes and stores it locally. That way, if I lose my phone, I have the data backed up on that device, and I should be able to just connect to the sync service and restore from backup. The sync service could still be hosted elsewhere.

I've recently read the local-first article and thought this could a good solution for many apps to avoid database servers. This in turn would enable more business models using licenses (e.g. Sublime Text) instead of subscriptions.

I also believe that in the future we'll have these generic sync services you're talking about, just like today we have file syncing services. I actually believe we could start having them today and get most of the benefits of having a local-first sync service. I think we could have a relational database server (something which most devs are used to) running somewhere, paid/hosted directly by a user/company, together with a protocol implemented by a local daemon that allows apps to find that database server. This local daemon could be provided by a service (e.g. Apple Business, Syncthing) that provides group membership, so a set of users and devices could access the same database server (and corresponding database). This solution would always require internet access to be able to use the app, but that's already the normal today, and looking at how the technology is advancing (thinking Starlink, 5G), I can only see that becoming less of a problem.

For completeness, I also don't think a local-first sync service can be implemented with file syncing services + SQLite today, even if you only allow changes when online. First there are still chances of multiple people changing the database at the same time, which is not ok because file syncing services only see conflicts at the file-level and they would not be able to recover from them automatically. Finally, it'd probably also be weird to see a SQLite file in a folder somewhere in the file syncing service which could be accessed by any app that used this protocol. I would love to see SQLite being part of a local-first sync solution though.