
Show HN: The missing filesystem for the web - convergate
https://historysearch.net
======
fliesblackflags
I like the idea, I could really make use of it. But have a concern on how
prices are presented. There's big (font) monthly prices, and the text saying
it's annual is low contrast, and partially obscured by the try it now button.

This is a huge red flag to me. What other fine print can't I see? I don't have
color perception issues, but the background/text combo gives it the appearance
of that light-grey text that's impossible to read.

Also, why not just give the annual price if that's how it's charged?
(Admittedly, I don't know how it's charged. When I clicked the try now button
hoping for an upfront number, I was prompted to sign up. I closed the tab.)

I know these aren't huge issues. But, you are selling a service to track
people. For me to trust a service like this, they can't come out the gate
looking like they're hiding their price.

~~~
fliesblackflags
Re-reading this, I sound fairly negative. I do hope this service does well.
I'll likely end up taking another look at it down the road.

~~~
convergate
Hi! This is Martijn, maker of History Search. I’m glad you like What we’re
doing.

I’m going to review these confusing things. The reason why it says try now is
because we offer 3000 pages free, most recent visited webpages, and offer a 30
day money back garuantee.

We’re not hiding anything, the pricing does say when billed annually. Also our
privacy policy is super clear, also I answered this answer in more depth
below.

On the free plan you can keep using it even when you cross the free search
limit. Because Older records are archived and will become available once you
remove more recent records, or upgrade. Not a lot of services do this.

Keep in mind this price isn’t very steep if you take into account it isn’t
just cloud storage, most cloud solutions charge this or more and don’t include
the entire app, cross-browser extensions and service. Also don’t worry, we’re
far from profitable and don’t drive ferraris in the valley. We work day and
night, and pay server expenses out of our own pocket.

We aren’t Google and don’t show advertising to further ensure user privacy.
Taking this into consideration, we believe users who see the value in History
Search won’t expect us to starve and pay the hosting expenses all on our own.

Our mission is solving how hard it is to retrieve digital information online,
but to keep doing so we need our users’ support, also financially. We have
choosen annual billing as preferred and advertised pricing because its a low
cost subscription, and it would be a waste to spend around 2,9%+$0.29 per
month. Thats a lot a waste of funds, since its not going to solving the
problem or providing you a valuable service but to a transaction fee.

Hope this straightens things out, looking forward to seeing you aboard this
movement.

Kind regards, Martijn

~~~
fliesblackflags
Hi Martijn, I find it encouraging how engaged you are.

I believe you aren't trying to hide anything. The formatting does make it hard
to read though. For me, the button to try a charged price was covering up part
of the notice that it's billed annually. The layout really ought to be
adjusted so that the button cannot cover up the fine print. The font ought to
be a color with more contrast from the background so it's easy to read.

The level of service you offer for a free plan is impressive. Kudos on giving
users a full featured trial, I agree that most services don't do that. For
instance, I skipped over Tutanota because basic features like filters required
a paid subscription. Filters are important to me, I'd like to test them before
I upgrade. On the other end, msgsafe.io offers enough of their features on a
paid account that you can test the service before committing. (Though their
page suffers from the same problems I initially mentioned about yours, I can't
read it at all. I don't have time to screw with the CSS to make it readable,
which is why I've yet to sign up.)

I agree about your prices. Less than $50 annually for the lowest paid tier is
a bargain for what you provide. I really do hope you become profitable enough
to drive Ferraris. The tech sector needs more companies that put their
customers before profits.

I appreciate that you're not Google. I wholeheartedly believe that you and
everyone else working on this should be making good wages. It's only fair. I
intend to try out your service as a way to see my phone's history from my
computer. If it works well for me, I'll upgrade to whatever plan meets my
needs. Your prices are more than fair. (It'll be sometime in the next week or
two. I screwed up my phone by kneecapping some Google packages, I haven't had
time to fix it yet.)

I completely agree with what you're saying about annual billing. Transaction
fees can be outrageous. I would prefer that the price is presented in a way
that clearly communicates what I'll be charged before I get to the checkout
(of course taxes wouldn't be added till then, but that's standard). If you put
something like "$x per year" in big font and "$y per month" as the smaller
print, I'd know ahead of time that the billing is annual.

Personally, I don't do money back guarantees on trials anymore. A few years
back I signed up for a 30 day trial of Amazon Prime while going through the
checkout (I had never had it before). Three days later my credit union's fraud
department called, Amazon had charged for the full year two days into my
trial. The fraud department told me it wasn't an authorization. I went back
and forth with Amazon to cancel Prime, they made it a real pain. Ultimately, I
had to cancel my card, get a new card, and have my credit union place a block
on any transactions from Amazon. That 30 day "trial" wasted at least 40 hours
of my time.

As a suggestion of a great trial experience, look at Mullvad
([https://mullvad.net/en/](https://mullvad.net/en/)). You can get started on a
free trial in less than 60 seconds if you have VPN software installed. I tried
it once, halfway into my free three hours, I signed up for a paid account.
Personally, I would be more comfortable with your service if I could sign up
without giving personal data like I did with Mullvad. You seem trustworthy to
me. However, I think your service has the potential to be huge. Sites like
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook could really benefit from buying a company that
provides a service like yours. I wouldn't want my history to end up in their
hands with my name attached (I don't use any of the three sites). Even if you
don't plan to get bought, it isn't impossible. (After all, Michael Dell went
public.)

I know I sound picky, but I feel feedback should be. Then you can decide which
gripes are worth addressing and which ones are just me being a grumpy SOB.

~~~
convergate
Haha, that last paragraph made me laugh. I sincerely appreciate candid
feedback, and fully agree there shouldn’t be any confusion regarding pricing.
I’m going to look into this asap.

I do think I realize where the confusion is coming from; you are seeing the
pricing page from mobile? You mentioned being able to search the things from
mobile, this sadly isn’t possible yet. Mobile browser extensions are only
slowly evolving (but we’re on it), so for now History Search is desktop only.

Will look into the examples you provided, thank you, and see how we can use it
to make History Search better.

History Search is not intended for sale. Like I said it’s just our first step,
plus I don’t believe in our current leaders - Apple aside, I’m impressed by
practically everything they do. Also users have complete control over what
History Search indexes and stores. So if a sale would ever happen you can
always export and remove any or all data in History Search-but again a sale
isn’t the goal, we aren’t even funded at moment (well, self funded). Ontop of
our intentions and perspective of what the web should be, privacy regulations
are finally getting better, this gives companies who choose a straightforward
business approach a chance. A better paid Facebook wouldn’t have stood a
chance 10 years ago. Luckily this is changing.

There are over 3 billion internet users. 500 million would be able to benefit
from and can afford History Search. Reaching these numbers is our goal.

I didn’t go into everything you mentioned in this message, but it’s all noted
and I would like to thank you for the kind words and your time to help us
improve.

Kind regards, Martijn

------
hazz99
I like the idea, but does it track me? Can you guarantee that it doesn't?

~~~
anotheryou
[https://worldbrain.io/](https://worldbrain.io/) does something similar and
promises to keep things local with the default settings (and it's open source)

~~~
convergate
We actually started with a local storage approach too during the first 1,5
year we worked on History Search. The reason why this approach failed is due
to the size of the application—it to large have for mainstream devices. If
you're interested I've written about our journey more here:
[https://medium.com/@martijnverbove/moments-before-success-
or...](https://medium.com/@martijnverbove/moments-before-success-or-
failure-d0f50ff148ea)

I like what Worldbrain is doing but their extension is a prototype. As you
will notice they support plain-text search (similar to ctrl-f), and History
Search is full-text search and won't impact your device's CPU load or memory.

On their website they mention their next version will be cloud-based too. This
is not to spy on people but because of the performance demands of a full-text
search engine and the applications—this types of services also require
maintenance. Just to give an impression; our search engine alone is over 3,5
GB, this doesn't include the app or databases.

What I would recommend to try them both out and see which one is best for you.

~~~
anotheryou
Thanks for the reply! Sadly non-local storage is a no-go for me. I'd rather
have a desktop app. But I also understand you'd have a hard time selling
desktop apps.

------
convergate
Hi! I'm Martijn, maker of History Search.

So its simple; It does track you; thats the point. However, you control what
History Search does and where it's active.

Any data you capture using History Search can easily be deleted and is
available for export to csv, for you to do with as you please. Besides that
History Search can also easily be paused, or webpages can be blacklisted.

We also have a very clear policy about privacy and security: it is yours, we
also comply with GDPR regulations. If you're interested you can read more
about these on historysearch.com/security or historysearch.com/privacy

My goal is to turn History Search into a filesystem for the web. Anyone can
use it for free and index/search 3000 pages, most recent. Pages out of the
limit are archived until you upgrade or remove some pages. We believe the
future of internet is trust, and reward: if people like our services they
simply pay us—no ads no selling of personal data—if no one pays we will no
longer be able to improve; this is in my opinion a healthy internet.

What History Search does is revolutionary. Since it will be increasingly
difficult to do all the things we do online without a backbone that makes it
possible to retrieve webpages you've been, using any words you remember on it.
This help you find back articles or gmails, open documents or quickly navigate
web services.

Can you imagine having to remember all the hidden files on your computer or
the places in memory your files reside? Well this is what it's like working
online (more or less, a bit less extreme though haha)

How it works is, History Search uses browser extensions to index the text on
webpages when you visit them. This way any word you remember will be enough to
retrieve it for you. So its both technically and literally an index (you know
those pages in the back of those dusty encyclopaedias).

History Search is a product I'm very passionate about, and have spent the past
3,5 years working on. The vision is even bigger: an entirely new way of
working with decentralised information sources — in a way they are still
connected. The future of History Search is Convergate: Convergence Gateway.
The names speaks for its self.

We value trust, and utility over anything. Companies that need to be free
aren't any good. Have you ever wondered so every successful service which is
"free", is also a waste of time (companies like Wikipedia aren't in this
categorie since they receive donations).

Long story short, History Search is a cloud storage so yes your data is stored
on our (well Amazon's) servers. But our system is solid, and we do everything
we can to make sure our user's privacy is respected.

I launched it this week on Product Hunt if you want to see some more info:
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/history-search
](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/history-search )

