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Comment by matt_holden | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch, and great you'll be dedicating more focus to Tiptap!

If anyone wants to see another example of an app using Tiptap, I built https://duckbook.ai as a fun/free solo project (it's a Notion-like SQL notebook built on Tiptap, DuckDB, and GPT-4).

I evaluated a bunch of editors (ProseMirror, TipTap, Remirror, Slate, Quill, Draft.js, Lexical) and went with TipTap.

I've been generally happy with it, the APIs/docs are good. ProseMirror is super powerful, but large/slow to work with. Tiptap helped me launch a product much faster, but still pop the hood to the ProseMirror layer in a few places where needed.

Main request is to keep the tiptap/core project free and MIT licensed, even if you raise prices on other pieces (like the managed collaboration server).

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Duckbook looks promising. I like the clean and neat design! I will share it with my colleagues.

I can take away your fear. The core of Tiptap will always be free and open source. We will do maintenance and improvement, but eventually we have to generate revenue to put Tiptap on a sustainable path. A few weeks ago, the work at our digital agency was funding Tiptap, and it has always been a challenge to balance these two branches.

We are trying to find a good balance between the open source part that a lot of people love and our paid services that give your project your advanced features.

We always think about our pricing model, as we literally do today! Feedback is always welcome to adjust the fine line between our open source and business parts.

Cool, makes sense!

It seems like you're heading in the right direction on packaging/pricing.

Charging for services you manage, more team members, and security features bigger cos care about all make sense to me.

I previously looked at your Pro extensions and some seemed nice to have (UniqueId, emoji), but it wasn't enough to get me to pay, and I rolled my own versions of those instead.

Building multiplayer sync is really tricky, so providing that as a managed service seems valuable and worth paying for. I have no problem paying for services like Clerk.com or Liveblocks.io that involve managed "servers" I don't want to build/run vs a purely client-side library.

I recently discovered Liveblocks, and think their positioning/marketing/docs are great -- the fastest way to turn any SaaS app multiplayer.

I wonder if you could do something similar but focused on all the complexities of text editing (esp since it's such a core primitive for LLMs now). Just a thought - excited to see where you take it!

Thank you for your feedback regarding our pricing!

We know that some individual Pro extensions don't justify the price of the whole tier. That's why we are thinking about selling individual extensions in the future. A lot of people build these types of extensions on their own, which is possible thanks to open source, and that's totally fine. In the last few weeks we have added more value to the paid tiers in the form of the advanced extensions TableofContents, Mathematics and the brand new Tiptap AI. We think it's worth it!

We feel the same about Managed Services. In addition to maintenance, support, development and so on, there are hardware resources that you have to pay for. We think that's fair.

I really like Liveblocks, the slick design, the impressive documentation and the detailed examples. We can learn a lot from them. As a technical decision maker I definitely wouldn't choose it because the backend source is closed source. The collaboration space is still new and there is no real standard in my opinion. The only (de-facto) standard can be an open source solution. In the end, at least the file format has to be interchangeable between a managed cloud and the open source core, regardless of the features around it. A few months ago I thought Yjs might become that standard, but it has too many rough edges. There are CRDTs popping up every month. We'll see.

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