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Local-first software (2019)

(www.inkandswitch.com)
863 points gasull | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.227s | source
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DataDaoDe ◴[] No.44474024[source]
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.

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charcircuit ◴[] No.44474277[source]
>you're not monetizing via ads

Yes, you are. You can find tons of purely local apps that monetize themselves with ads.

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thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44474770[source]
> You can find tons of purely local apps tha[t] monetize themselves with a[d]s.

How do they do that without hitting the internet?

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kid64 ◴[] No.44474794[source]
It's "local first", not "local only".
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thaumasiotes ◴[] No.44475163[source]
Sorry, a "purely local app" isn't "local only"?
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1. kid64 ◴[] No.44476384[source]
Well if you're gonna get all accurate on me...