
K-Stash: A search engine for your useful links – for devs and researchers - masc98
https://k-stash.com
======
cik
The problem I find with this entire segment of the industry - is that nothing
seems to work as I grow and change. Everyone is actively trying to achieve
vendor lock in. It's true for Evernote, OneNote, Notion - and all the other
things too.

To make it worse, none of them are better than pen and paper. I want the
ability, from my desktop to clip sections of pages, capture pages, annotate
them, etc. I want to have the same experience on phone and tablet whether iOS,
Android, or a mixture thereof. I want to annotate with notes, that I want to
_remain_ as handwritten notes, but be legitimately OCRed for the purpose of
search. I don't want to click anything to make this happen; on a tablet this
means just write and go. Rocketbook is the closest I've gotten to that, and it
was still unbelievably far away from the goal set.

So now, I'm back to pen, paper, and OneNote. I hate it - but it's currently
(and not two months ago) the best answer for me.

~~~
dhimes
Does Rocketbook have OCR now? I used them when they first came out but the
lack of OCR limited what I would use them for.

I just tried to start the app after reading your comment and apparently I have
to log in or something and I have no idea how to do that. It was such a cool
idea that it's a shame that it never quite got its act together.

~~~
cik
They do - though it no longer solves any of my other needs. I use their
whiteboard sticker things so that I can have pictures immediately go into a
OneDrive, Google Docs, or email destination. That they solidly got right and
it's one of my favourite things.

Admittedly, with the android share button, it's not really that useful, though
I love it.

------
d3nj4l
A recent thread about a similar product:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004588)

Personally, I think just those limits make this a non-starter for me. 30
resources per topic over 250 topics is a total of just 7.5k links, which is
nothing. Charging $19.99 a year for that (and that's introductory pricing!) is
insanity, especially when there's free bookmarking tools, some of which are
even open source or self hosted.

E: Some less similar alternatives:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199419)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346985)

[http://pinboard.in/tour/](http://pinboard.in/tour/)

I'm not affiliated with any of the alternatives I've listed.

~~~
masc98
Thank you for your comment. It may sound a coincidence but I've updated the
pricing and bundle limits (there was a typo in the pro 30 instead of 130..)
just some minutes ago.

Have a good day!

~~~
armatav
Your pricing should be much higher in my opinion, something like $20-25/month,
but then give those customers pretty massive access. (unlimited everything)

Doing the math here, for you to make a starter engineering salary off this
project, you'd need to hit $10,000/month - which would mean around 40,000
paying basic users or 12,000 paying pro users.

If this hits the front page you'd maybe get around 50,000 hits to the site -
which means your conversion needs to be around 80% (for Basic).

Whereas if you had a free plan and a pro plan that was $25/month - you'd only
need 400 people. Which is a conversion of 8% from this particular traffic
source.

Your call, but I think lower prices these days speak to me as the developer
not being all-in on their particular product - even if you are, it's just the
optics of it.

If I really need this, you can bet I'd pay $25/month for it.

The Roam Research guys do a good job at this, even if their product is not yet
at 90% refinement, just the fact that they are willing to charge a higher
price makes me believe they will actually put the work into it to make it
better. There are students and researchers that do NOT want to bother with
storing the files to build that graph, hooking up VSCode with a graph-editor
addon (there are many), all they want is a thing that does what it says it
does. And they pay well for it.

------
szhu
It looks like people are discussing alternatives here, so I wanted to give a
quick pitch for my setup.

I stash my useful links in Asana. For those who haven't used it, Asana is like
a big, organized to-do list. Each link I want to keep becomes an Asana task. I
can organize them the Asana way, using tags or projects (task lists), or I can
just put useful words in the description so I can search for them later.

Asana probably wasn't built for this use case, but it works pretty darn well.
My most important workflow is being able to send the current webpage I'm
reading to Asana using just a few taps, and Asana supports that easily -- the
official Chrome extension is specifically for doing this, and the Asana apps
support the Android and iOS share integrations.

In addition -- and this is important too -- I feel pretty confident that Asana
(and thus my data) will still be around in 5-10 years. I'm not sure if I can
say that about almost all of its competitors.

Note: I'm not affiliated with Asana. I'm familiar with Asana because I used it
at work, but other to-do apps might also work for bookmarking. If you have one
in mind, let me know in the replies!

------
dnpp123
Has anyone a good open source, self hosted alternative of this?

Since I don't know any, I was thinking of starting something like this at some
point.

Something to save interesting bookmarks/lightweight media (gifs, memes, ...)
or even small blog articles. Make it federated, with some full text search
feature ala elastic search but more lightweight, with a reddit like interface.

~~~
Jipazgqmnm
I just use a folder with (text) files. E.g. if you call them

keyword1-...-keywordN

you can `find` for keywords and `grep` for content and put in everything you
want. You could also use subfolders for topics.

I don't see what K-Stash offers more.

~~~
dnpp123
I mean the whole point of this is to have a crawler who look for the texts in
your links, index them, then you can search a link when you just vaguely
remember something the page in question mentioned.

------
ClearAndPresent
I mean this kindly: I highly recommend you hire a copywriter to go over your
site. The spelling errors and grammar issues undermine confidence.

------
KoenDG
Personally, I have a github private repo where I put everything in named
directories.

Small cleanup every now and then.

Can't recall where something is? Grep it.

------
andybak
The tiers are a bit strange.

Free/Basic/Pro gives you 15/40/130 resources per topic.

I would routinely use the maximum for even simple pieces of research and 130
feels like way too small a limit.

I would honestly expect to see those limits tripled at least.

------
black_puppydog
I love the idea of this, but frankly, this seems like a system that becomes
more useful if you use it for a long long time. And for systems like this, I
need a guarantee that there won't be "exciting news, we got acquired, and
tomorrow all our services are shutting down."

I know that's a bit of a downer take, and maybe I should just not hang out on
HN with this attitude, but I really wonder if I'm that alone with this
opinion...? It's the same issue I have with roam research, the same issue I
had with Mendeley.

~~~
reportgunner
You are not alone. The first thing I went to look for was an export feature.
No mention of it on the landing page.

~~~
mlang23
The Pro and Premium plans seem to have a JSON export. "We allow you to export
your data only if you pay enough." Hmm.

~~~
reportgunner
I see that it was now added to free tier too. Nice !

------
mendeza
Love the concept. I have been in need for a tool/service like this for a
while. I now resort to creating my own slack workspace and using channels as a
way to save links. Using chrome plugins is a crappy alternative. I don’t know
if I would pay for it though. I would be amazing if after all the links you
add, the system “predicts” or “recommends” what other links would be a good
fit in this category, or help you auto organize better.

------
rawoke083600
Best way to save important stuff for me is to just email it to myself :/ Crude
but effective, even with GMail's less than optimal search.

~~~
xenihn
I haven't used it in a very long time, but pushover.net was my go-to for many
years. I just use iOS Notes now. I would suggest checking pushover out as a
replacement for email.

------
pk78
Not exactly a dev-specific tool, but I created a mind map for storing all the
interesting stuff I've read/want to read in different formats than just plain
text:

[https://mapsofmind.com](https://mapsofmind.com)

No restriction on "topics" or "maps" or anything. Fully free to use.

------
kristopolous
Vannevar Bush should've followed up his article with "As we may organize".

It's a pretty unsolved aspect

------
jamesrr39
Looks nice!

I wrote a chrome extension for natural language searching of bookmarks a while
ago ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
search/fc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
search/fcjphnojgeikgjajhlihdjnljnbpfhmi)), I like your grouping of topics
though (so you can see everything in the topic, not just the search results).

I don't really understand the comments complaining about the pricing; there's
a free version, or the paid versions are really not that expensive. If I find
myself wanting something more than bookmarks for links, $3/$10 a year seems
fine to me for the productivity gain.

------
IncRnd
Why would I pay for a beta with extremely low topic-limits, especially when
there are great tools that do this for free? I'm sure this is a fine tool, but
this honestly needs to be very compelling in order for me to pay in order to
change my workflow.

------
anigbrowl
Good concept. Interface a bit clunky still. Needs a browser extension or
something or it's gonna involve a lot of cutting and pasting. No obvious way
to jump-start collections from existing data or broad searches. Has potential
though.

------
mynegation
I think you misspelled “retrieval” on your homepage

~~~
HerrMonnezza
Twice...

------
Jipazgqmnm
Functionally I do not see any additional value compared to a simple 'grep' or
'find' on a folder with notes.

------
etherio
This is kind of similar to an open source knowledge base project [0] I am
working except instead of just for webpages it allows you to pretty much index
anything you want (including links and their contents)

[0]: [https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy](https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy)

------
lonelyasacloud
fwiw Diigo [https://www.diigo.com/](https://www.diigo.com/) was the tool I
ended with last time I was looking for something like this. It's already got
things like bookmarking plugins, page archiving, outlining, tagging, in-page
annotation, highlighting, sharing, search, exports etc.

I've now been using Diigo for over three years now; it's been reliable, its
feature set feels very complete, works well, and they seem to have a
sustainable business model based on subscription plans e.g. I consider the $40
p/a I pay for standard somewhat of a bargain.

Always interested in new shineys, but what is K-Stash's unique value
proposition vs Diigo?

------
masc98
Thank you for your support guys! 5 of you have already bought the premium
plan.. this is insane! I'll do my best.

