

Show HN: AhhLife, a free replacement for OhLife - obiefernandez
http://ahhlife.com

======
obiefernandez
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.

~~~
r00k
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](https://www.trailmix.life)

The code:
[https://github.com/codecation/trailmix](https://github.com/codecation/trailmix)

~~~
obiefernandez
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.

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electrcboogaloo
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.

~~~
obiefernandez
Thanks, that's actually a great idea.

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hegivor
Login button is cut off in Firefox 32.03 under Windows 7.

[http://i.imgur.com/pko6hod.png](http://i.imgur.com/pko6hod.png)

~~~
obiefernandez
Thx

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gopi
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?

~~~
r00k
"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."

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

