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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for a premium, but $15/month is a bit too much. Almost all their competitors are half the price. Here's the pricing of their competitors I can think of on top of my head:

Evernote: €7/month

Notion: $4/month

Ulysses: $5.49/month

Standard Notes: $9.99/month

OneNote (+ the entire Office 365): $9.99/month

Inkdrop: $4.99/month

Bear: $1.49/month ($14.99 per year!)

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You're not the type of user they want:

> We don't want fuckin tire kickers who don't take thinking tools seriously.

> You don't think it's worth the money, that's cool - gtfo.

> You're actually poor -- we'll help you out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/ep2vy6/how_mu...

That thread on Reddit really soured me on Roam. I'm glad to see alternatives like Foam pop up because there are some interesting ideas there.

Their big mistake was so abrasively describing their product development strategy.

Their core strategy is sound - to develop, at an early stage, for a passionate group of users (even if the group is small).

If you do not get a value of $15/month from using Roam then it simply is not the right tool for you. Roam makes it easy for me to explore connections between ideas. It has a user interface that fits my way of thinking. I'm also a Office 365 subscriber but OneNote cannot replace Roam for me.

Honestly, it's not that hard to implement something like Roam compared to the aforementioned competitors. The value is in the idea, and even that isn't novel. It really is a mystery to me why an open source alternative doesn't exist / isn't more popular.

>Honestly, it's not that hard to implement something like Roam compared to the aforementioned competitors.

Getting hard "Dropbox is trivial to implement with FTP, curlftpfs and CVS" vibes from this kind of thinking.

Come on, that's the opposite of my “vibe”. The commenter you refer to didn't believe there was any value in the existence of such a product, while I see so much value in this that it's puzzling to me how we still don't have an open source alternative. I didn't say it's trivial, but I bet it's simpler than that for the likes of Notion (and we do have alternatives to those).

Damn, sorry, honestly misread your comment. Yeah I actually do agree completely.

I think Roam can be successful because they are charging $15. It gives them a completely different customer base (among other things, probably one that doesn’t see cost as a relevant factor in deciding which note taking app to use).

From this list, I am familiar with Evernote and Notion, but IMHO they are not Roam competition, since Roam is too different from them.

Same response as I gave to another comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667492

Why are we talking about Roam rather than those services then? Why don't we just "find and replace Roam with Bear?" (anyone know the Regex for that?)

Notion is mostly free now since they seem to target companies more than personal plans: https://www.notion.so/pricing.

I'd add DynaList to the list, too

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