> I have mostly found that all app store apps, no matter what app store, are 100% garbage unless they come from a Fortune 500 company and even then, a lot of those are garbage.
Hard disagree. My favorite apps are made by either a solo developer or a small group/company.
I chat with a successful app dev one time long ago. His formula is rather simple. If it takes time to develop the app don't do it. In stead publish 10-20 apps in a day. Hire some people on the cheap to search and organize data. Even after a long time his idea what might be successful and what probably wont be is way off.
Ideas are like, an app that is just a list of some kind. Ill make up an example: An app that has searchable list of cities in Denmark with a typical picture for each. Here you could allow the user to write a note with each entry or allow sorting by distance from- but it is more effective to move on to the next "app". You make 20 country apps like that, non of them get any downloads except from one country that gets 10 per month/120 per year. That makes it a productive day.
So you have seven examples out of nearly 2 million apps, one doesn't exist anymore, one is a wrapper around news.ycombinator.com, and one is the equivalent of a skin app.
You said all apps are garbage unless they come from Fortune 500 companies, I give you examples of apps that are not garbage from solo developers, and you respond with this… I have no clue what to say.
I’m not sure HN is the place for you with that attitude.
Why are you being so rude? You claimed that apps not made by fortune 500 companies are all garbage, they listed some counter examples (not an exhaustive list), and that isn’t good enough? If anyone here is ruining the site, I think it might be you. I had been enjoying reading the comments here until seeing yours.
(Also Octal is one of my favorite apps, even if you think it is nothing but a wrapper around news.ycombinator.com.)
Why can’t you people read? Do you not know what the word mostly means? I don’t enjoy reading your comment either. You’re not contributing anything. Talk about the topic or move on.
His examples are really bad. That’s a matter of opinion. Get over it.
> The reason I chose to make Danish Names a paid app from the beginning was simply that I think it's a lot more honest and upfront to charge a small one-time fee before the download, as opposed to claiming your app is free and then charging a high fee or even a subscription inside the app. There's an honesty and straight-forwardness to paid apps that I like: You pay once, and then you don't get bothered with requests for paid upgrades when you're using the app.
I understand what you are going for here but I have no qualms with "Free, with IAP" as long as when I look at the IAP I see things like:
- Unlock Full Version
- Remove Ads
- 1 Month/1 Year (for certain types of apps where that makes sense)
- Lifetime Unlock
and not:
- 100 Gems
- Pack of Coins
- Subscription for an app that I only plan to use a handful of times
Since Apple doesn't offer trials I have no issue with a dev offering some limited free download with IAP to unlock. The limits need to match the app in some way, like a limit on total queries or a timer.
Subscriptions have to be either something that has recurring costs to the developer (like they depend on a 3rd party API that charges for access) or the dev is upfront that it's an optional opportunity to support them. I'm also fine with some nice-to-have features locked behind a paywall if they are not core to the app functionality.
Apple does not offer trials for paid upfront apps but they do offer trials for subscriptions.
Also I’ve seen developers do things like X searches for free (either one time or per month/week/day) then you have to subscribe or pay a one-time unlock fee.
CallSheet (an IMDB replacement) does this and it’s nice to be able to try out the app a few times before you decide if it’s worth the $12/yr or whatever it costs.
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).
I’ve tested these tools a number of times, and if you were in the meeting, it’s easy to look at the notes and be impressed but reading the notes as someone who’s not in the meeting does not give the full picture as it often makes major/minor mistakes. If you were in the meeting, it’s easy to overlook or shrug off, but would be entirely confusing if you didn’t attend.
We have multiple people across our projects using these and they all fucking suck. They mix things up all the time. Wrong todos, wrong people assigned to todos.
I am skeptical of passkeys. Not of the technology itself exactly, but people’s implementation of it.
Username/password is much easier to grok (for developers and users) and while it absolutely has downsides, as a user, I can fully protect myself with username/password (unique password per site).
Passkeys might allow for fewer _user_ footguns but I worry there more _developer_ footguns. Also as a “power user”, I don’t want to deal with passkeys when I’m trying to automate something or scape my own data out of a website. It’s just another complication and I worry that anything edge-case-y (even approved methods) will break or have complications if you use passkeys (think app-specific-passwords when 2FA rolled out for gmail access).
Because of this I consistently decline passkey usage until such a time that I feel it’s better understood by the people implementing it.
I used PlanetScale or a year or two before switching to Neon. I needed 1 database per tenant and PlanetScale didn't support that (you had to pay $30/mo per database, now it looks like $39/mo). My use-case is weird and I also don't need powerful servers (in fact I'd just as well prefer to run multiple databases on 1 server, I don't have a noisy-neighbor problem in my business). Neon let me do that but I couldn't on PS.
I get it, I'm a small fish trying to pay a little as possible for fully managed postgres (or MySQL before I switched to Postgres when I moved to Neon) to run my small, bootstrapped company with spiky [0] but fairly predictable load.
Best of luck to PlanetScale with this new offering, one day I hope I can use them again. I enjoyed the product and the support was great.
[0] I write software for food festivals, 9 months out of the year there is no traffic, ~2 months of the year there is a tiny trickle, ~3 weeks seeing high (but not "high" by any definition) and then 1-5 days (depending on how long the event is) there is a good deal of load but still not more than the lowest tier can handle most of the time. Like I said, I'm a _small_ fish and I don't expect them to cater to me, I just know what I want and almost no one provides it directly.
Is there some compliance reason or otherwise that you need one physical database per tenant, and can't just colocate multiple logical databases/schemas on one PlanetScale database?
That's kind of hard to do with the PlanetScale schema migration concept (branching). Doing something like prefixed tables doesn't work and you can't create multiple databases on 1 server (or at least you couldn't and I did ask support about it).
I could make my application multi-tenant in the application code but that would require a lot of refactoring and testing. It's possible but it's a big lift to do that. If I could do that, I'd have much more flexibility. I don't think compliance will ever be an issue for me so that isn't holding me back.
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I don't know the ecosystem, but seemingly Stripe themselves lists some projects/products/organizations that themselves have "Stripe" in their name, as part of the "Stripe Partner Ecosystem": https://stripe.partners/?search=stripe&sort=relevance
Still, risky to use someone else's trademark regardless, if they suddenly don't like you anymore they'll start to enforce it at the worst moment.
>I don't know the ecosystem, but seemingly Stripe themselves lists some projects/products/organizations that themselves have "Stripe" in their name, as part of the "Stripe Partner Ecosystem": https://stripe.partners/?search=stripe&sort=relevance
The issue isn't having "Stripe" in the product name, it's having it in a way that implies it's by Stripe, mostly by putting it first. The top 3 hits from your linked search don't really have that issue. "Stripe Move" makes it sound like it's a product from stripe, "Move for Stripe" would not.
We went with it because the other services I mentioned also had Stripe in their names and have been operating for a few years. At the moment our product is so connected to Stripe that we felt having Stripe in the name was necessary to make its purpose clear. We added to our content that we are not affiliated to them, if we have to change the name in the future that is something we will have to deal with.
Total layman here and I don't know what you've seen, but generally the thing I've seen companies avoid is starting their names with someone else's trademark. (So "Move for Stripe" rather than "Stripe Move", for example.)
Was wondering about this as well. Might fly under the radar for a while but if your project grows you might draw attention from Stripe and having to rebrand later on will become difficult.
Also, what if you want to support this type of migration for other payment processors in the future? This name ties to just Stripe.
Also, tiny grammatical nitpick: the subheading should use the word seamlessly, not seamless there I think.
> We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
For a long time now I've wanted to build a donation subscription management service. A sort of "Set how much you want to donate a month and allocate it to charities of your choice". Tools to let you do %, flat $, "whatever isn't allocated, allocate to this charity", etc. And things like an easy way to re-route your giving to a crisis for a period of time (one-time, x-months, ongoing).
Most non-profits have really rough donation portals (UI/UX) and having to log into 5-10+ portals to manage your giving is annoying. Also, I think a number of people are overwhelmed by giving, as in they don't know where to start. Giving them an easy way to manage it in 1 place and protecting them from getting spammed (unless they opt-in to get "updates") seems like a win.
Why only for donations? What about for all subscription services?
For this I use privacy.com, to give each 'vendor' its own unique credit card number, with a monthly/annual/lifetime limit. I can review all my recent expenses and open cards, and close or pause them whenever I like. This system just caught an 8% price increase by my ISP, which meant it was rejected before I was charged, and I was able to call and negotiate it down (20%!).
Not affiliated with privacy.com, just a happy customer. I give up my credit card points on subscriptions, in exchange for peace of mind and finer-grained control over my finances.
Well, managing subscriptions for other services requires something like privacy.com (personally not for me, not saying it can't work for others but I'm not a fan of that style) whereas charitable donations can be "proxied" without needing (research needed) needing each organizations approval/integration.
I always imagined non-profits would be easier since they just want the money, they don't /need/ to know who gave it for purposes of providing services. Maybe they want it for records/marketing but some of that I'm not a fan of. Just because I gave/give you $5/mo you don't have a right to sell my info or spam me with other things. This service (that I'm imagining in my head) would not hand over more info than needed, giving you a firewall between you and the charity. Easy to give, easy to stop giving, no spam, no guilt trip, no selling of your info. At least that would be the goal.
I’ve started to experience/see this and it makes me want to scream.
You can’t dismiss it out of hand (especially with it coming from up the chain) but it takes no time at all to generate by someone who knows nothing about the problem space (or worse, just enough to be dangerous) and it could take hours or more to debunk/disprove the suggestion.
I don’t know what to call this? Cognitive DDOS? Amplified Plausibility Attack? There should be a name for it and it should be ridiculed.
Hard disagree. My favorite apps are made by either a solo developer or a small group/company.
Some examples:
- Overcast (Podcast Player)
- Prologue (Audiobook App)
- Octal (HN Client)
- Apollo (RIP, Reddit)
- Drafts (Notes app)
- Any Zach Gage game
- Widgetsmith (Widgets)
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