So it runs everything locally/in web worker, but there's a monthly quota and it requires a paid plan of $9.99 monthly to keep running it on my own machine?
Yes, but you can also deploy it locally, so you can use it for free. May I ask, do you think that programs running locally are not worth paying for if it is open source?
Yes, it requires regular payment, from the SaaS perspective, since the cost is a monthly expense, adopting a subscription model is understandable. This pricing was inspired by https://jsoncrack.com/. May I ask, is there anything on the pricing page that is hard to understand?
Generally, when you download a dev tool to run a tool on your own machine that is not pre-packaged software, it does not have a subscription cost. That is likely the source of confusion.
It’s unclear what service requires the expense on your side that justifies a monthly cost. I think explaining those benefits on the pricing page would help you a great deal.
People have no problem with paying for open source, once. A recurring payment is a different topic, especially if it's unclear for what the payment is good for, what value it has for the customer.
Thank you very much for your feedback! It's very insightful. Are you saying that for local tools, people are more willing to purchase through a one-time buyout rather than a subscription model? Because they feel that a subscription doesn't provide continuous value and thus isn't worth the price?
Yes. For something like Amazon Prime where there's clearly work being done by Amazon every month in the form of shipping and TV shows, it's easier to stomach. For a product that does the job with the current set of features, it's not viewed in a positive light. But the question is do you as the developer on this product care? A lot of people will see the subscription and bounce off. They weren't going to pay you any money anyway. the thing you have to ask yourself is if you offered a $50 one time purchase option, would it generate enough sales to be worth it? or you could come up with a weird per-use scheme like Colin and Tarsnap. The push back you're getting on pricing is good! it means people see value in the product, they just aren't willing to agree to the terms you've set. now it's marketing and sales that needs to take over and figure out how to sell it, which is a totally different skillset. if you build it, they will come and turn decide it's not worth the cost of admission, so you've got to talk them into it before they turn around and go home, possibly by changing your pricing plan. At the end of the day, it isn't your fault they arrived with cash and you want to take credit cards, or they're pissed off because something bad happened in traffic on the drive over, they're your customers and you somehow have to convince some of them to give you money for this thing you've made, or else you've got to go home, hungry. Metaphorically.
Thank you for your support! I'm open to all kinds of feedback and want to understand different perspectives. After gathering enough input, I'll digest and understand it before making any decisions, ensuring not to take any single opinion as the whole truth.
People have not endless money, so they have to calculate the value and final cost of everything. And subscriptions are very, very low on the value-calculation, because it's a recurring cost which will grow over time, which means it's risky.
Additionally, people usually buy something for the value it has now, or a promised value which might materialize in the future and they consider realistic. So, if your tool has a legit reason for a subscription, people might pay for it. This means, server-costs on your side, which are realistic for the demanded price. Or a roadmap of fancy features which are actively worked on.
But paying for something regularly, where there are no ongoing costs on the sellers side, and no foreseeable positive changes in the value of the tool...this makes it really hard to reason about the cost&benefits. I mean, the tool will not change, the value is static, why pay for it again and again and again? This is like Walmart asking for a subscription for silverware..
Thank you for your patient explanation! A very valuable perspective —- people are not willing to continuously pay for something static that doesn't get updated. Actually, I have plans to develop some features that require a server, but as you mentioned, perhaps I should put the blueprint in the README or on the homepage to make users feel it's worth continuously paying for.
Can I conduct a small survey? I previously considered offering a feature to store users' JSON in the cloud, but I didn't see the need since there's GitHub Gist, and you can always use that, so I didn't implement it. From your perspective, would you need such a feature?
> I previously considered offering a feature to store users' JSON in the cloud,
I'm not sure how this would work well with the privacy-aspect and everything running locally, even if you upload them encrypted. And storage is cheap these days.
> From your perspective, would you need such a feature?
Personally, no. As a developer, I have many tools which need access to my data. And I also have many other files outside of JSON. So I need to have centralized place which all my software can equally easy access. So I don't really see the value in one specialized tool with specialized storage for me.
Maybe, people working mobile or in teams might have some value for this, but this is a very specialized group of customers. And I would think they will prefer something like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for sharing files. Maybe integrating this has more value for your customers. But then again, this is probably not an ongoing cost for you which would justify a subscription.
As you have processing as a selling-point, maybe you should try this and offer automatic remote-processing. People use tools like Zapier, IFTTT and Node-red for automating web- and service-related tasks or for business logic. Maybe you can find a special corner in terms of ability, price and/or simplicity, which is not covered well enough by the big tools. Some companies are really crazy with paying for hyper-specialized services just to let some laymen do their stuff.
Good idea. I've received a lot of feedback from the community with people hoping for some AI integration features. I am seriously considering this. Also, in terms of product positioning, if I do offer cloud storage, I don't intend to view JSON For You simply as a place to store files, but rather as a remote configuration management solution. Thank you once again, you're truly a deep thinker.
I have considered adding support for remote version manage and AI features in the future, but I'm not sure if it's a genuine need or just something I've dreamed up. You could give me some input :)
The meaningful part of open web is small, yes. Sadly there's so much junky pages, nowadays also partially generated by AI, previously by just copy-pasting randomly content of other pages, cluttering search results. It somehow needs to be all filtered out, otherwise it'll end up taking place instead of something more useful... So I'd really wonder how much of the open web is some kind of original content and how much is duplicate/auto-generated junk.
True, although only if the link is actually cached, which I find to be the case far more rarely than before. But it does work and it's still helpful...
This is low-key so useless. From the headline I expected some deeper kind of integration, indexing, ability to find old dead pages with useful info more easily.
Nope.
They just throw a generic link in a place hidden so deep that nobody will ever see it. You first need to click the three dots, then find the "More about this page" in the middle, and there it is. I don't know why they bothered announcing it at all, it's so hidden and useless they might as well have not bothered at all. Just copy-paste the website link into the IA search and the end result will be the same but faster.
Nobody ever clicks that among all the useless junk around it. It should be right there after clicking the three dots already, which already shows basic details about the page. It's not a submenu dropdown anymore like it used to be. Nobody's ever gonna even look below the first paragraph where the main buttons are.
If they wanted to make this any useful at all, if it's so hidden already, they should have made it index the particular archived page revisions list, and display direct links to them along with the date they were taken. Just linking to IA search in the generic way is not gonna help anyone, especially that the page might then turn out to not be archived at all to begin with too.
