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463 points 8organicbits | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.453s | source
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al_borland ◴[] No.44308824[source]
I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I want something that I can use for the long term for things like this. This makes my mind go to approachable and easy languages that allow the user to easily throw a GUI on it. I don't think code needs to be completely abstracted away, just made easy and tailored to what people will do. Look at how many people on MySpace were able to learn some CSS. Maybe they copy and paste someone else's stuff at first, but that's the foot in the door before they eventually look at how to tweak it.

I typically end up using basic HTML/CSS/JS for stuff like this today. If I really need backend code, I'll use basic PHP (no frameworks or anything). But this ties me to a browser, which I'm not always a fan of. Some of these fairly scrappy little projects at work (done in the browser like this, and with AutoHotKey) have been going for 10+ years now, with very little maintenance. The AHK script I haven't touched in probably 8 years, since I moved to macOS at work, yet people still use it countless times per day. If AHK decides to stop operating, it's no big deal, the code that exists will still run. The same can't be said for these SaaS solution to this problem. People looking for scrappy solutions aren't looking to remake their solution every time a founder decides to move on to something else more interesting or profitable.

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1. jrcplus ◴[] No.44313560[source]
Scrappy co-creator here. I fully agree that software longevity is important. We designed Scrappy with a local-first architecture, so we have no traditional backend. Our only cloud dependency is a lightweight sync server. (We hurriedly added an FAQ with some more technical details after we discovered that this blew up on HN.) I believe this is an important point of distinction, both technically and financially, from most low-code/no-code tools which are SaaS'es.

One idea we had early on is the ability to save scrapps as single-page self-contained HTML files. We experimented with this but the functionality isn't currently exposed.

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2. al_borland ◴[] No.44314231[source]
Being able to download a self-contained html file would be great. Not only for longevity, but also for situations where internet access may be questionable.