Local-first software (2019)

Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest version again. If its good enough as is - and that's the goal - just keep using it forever.

This is the model I want from 90% of the software out there, just give me a reasonable price to buy it, make the product good, and don't marry it to the cloud so much that its unusable w/out it.

There are also a lot of added benefits to this model in general beyond the data privacy (most are mentioned in the article), but not all the problems are solved here. This is a big space that still needs a lot of tooling to make things really easy going but the tech to do it is there.

Finally, the best part (IMHO) about local-first software is it brings back a much healthier incentive structure - you're not monetizing via ads or tracking users or maxing "engagement" - you're just building a product and getting paid for how good it is. To me it feels like its software that actually serves the user.

> I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work.

AI photo and video generation is impractical to run locally.

ComfyUI and Flux exist, but they serve a tiny sliver of the market with very expensive gamer GPUs. And if you wanted to cater to that market, you'd have to support dozens of different SKUs and deal with Python dependency hell. And even then, proficient ComfyUI users are spending hours experimenting and waiting for renders - it's really only a tool for niche artists with extreme patience, such as the ones who build shows for the Las Vegas Sphere. Not your average graphics designers and filmmakers.

I've been wanting local apps and local compute for a long time, but AI at the edge is just so immature and underpowered that we might see the next category of apps only being available via the cloud. And I suspect that these apps will start taking over and dominating much of software, especially if they save time.

Previously I'd only want to edit photos and videos locally, but the cloud offerings are just too powerful. Local cannot seriously compete.

But who said anything about AI? Lots of local-first apps have nor need any AI whatsoever. And by the way, Topaz Labs has good offerings for editing photos and videos with AI that run locally, works great for many use cases (although it's not fully generative like Veo etc, more like upscaling and denoising, which does use generative AI but not like the former).