But I don't work on it I was just giving examples. And I'm not against ads, I just don't think they should be the only way to make money on the internet.
Yes open source is a whole different animal, I had a paragraph addressing open source but decided it really needs its own essay, so stay tuned for 'open source is a scam'
That's totally fine, if you want to work on the sun tracking app in your free time and release it, I encourage it. But there's a lot of weird obsessive niches and I don't think you're going to make all of them, so the people who want weird things to exist should probably fund their obsessive niches. Of course, if you aren't interested in that niche, you shouldn't feel any obligation to use it or pay for it.
The cheaper it is then the more people you need to sustain it. If there are only a small number of obsessives who want the sun tracking app, and the sun tracking app is really great and serving their needs, it should probably be more expensive not less. If the sun tracking obsessives want it to exist, they have to pay for it, because nobody else cares.
Can you list any examples of companies that have done this well? The products I have used that tried this either stopped trying it (Ulysses articulated it really well) or devolved into shinier objects. In practice I think it's pretty tough to pull off.
I think broadly your comment is true, and it would be better for the good actors if the bad actors didn't exist. Apple and Google do make it pretty easy to cancel though vs the wild west of the web
In my experience the only genre of HN comments is that subscriptions are evil, so I'm glad to see there are other perspectives. While it's true that software has been around a long time, it's also true that the world changes and building software in 2026 is much different than even in 2012 let alone 1995.
I addressed this in the post. I don't quite understand what people mean when they say they want to own their software. I mean okay you can put the CD on the shelf. Now what? I understand why they don't like paying money. But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.
I asked Claude to check my post for spelling and typos, etc before posting, and it told me not to post it because people on hacker news are the same ones who email you about subscriptions, so it wouldn't be well received. Gotta hand it to the AI there!
I get the post was a little provocative, but I have posted a lot of content on the internet in the past and usually get like 1 comment if that, so I'd rather get feedback tbh and it seems like it resonated with a good number of people
> The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it.
That's not at all what happened, nor did I say that anywhere. I didn't buy a company in order to test a theory. This is just describing one of the things I did after buying it.
You may or may not be surprised to find out I have actually done this, and it did not in fact make the user happier but in fact enraged them that instead of doing what they wanted me to do I had pointed them to a competitor.
People keep talking about how much flack I got but I don't think I've ever written anything that has resonated more with people. I'm not mad I got feedback guys I can take it. As for your comment, the title of the piece includes "what I got wrong" so I think it's pretty clear where the learnings were.
https://www.calai.app/
But I don't work on it I was just giving examples. And I'm not against ads, I just don't think they should be the only way to make money on the internet.