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Local-first software (2019)

(www.inkandswitch.com)
863 points gasull | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.419s | 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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maxhille ◴[] No.44475069[source]
How do you plan to do the syncing without some sort of cloud infrastructure?
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1. pvh ◴[] No.44477595[source]
Ideally, you would use existing commodity infrastructure but we have found none of it is really super fit for our purposes. Failing that, we have been developing an approach to low-maintenance reusable infrastructure. For now, I would advise running your own but positioning yourself to take advantage of commodity systems as they emerge.