K-Stash: A search engine for your useful links – for devs and researchers

by masc98 • 6 years ago

82 44 6 years ago

anigbrowl• 6 years ago

Good concept. Interface a bit clunky still. Needs a browser extension or something or it's gonna involve a lot of cutting and pasting. No obvious way to jump-start collections from existing data or broad searches. Has potential though.

mendeza• 6 years ago

Love the concept. I have been in need for a tool/service like this for a while. I now resort to creating my own slack workspace and using channels as a way to save links. Using chrome plugins is a crappy alternative. I don’t know if I would pay for it though. I would be amazing if after all the links you add, the system “predicts” or “recommends” what other links would be a good fit in this category, or help you auto organize better.

d3nj4l2• 6 years ago

A recent thread about a similar product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004588

Personally, I think just those limits make this a non-starter for me. 30 resources per topic over 250 topics is a total of just 7.5k links, which is nothing. Charging $19.99 a year for that (and that's introductory pricing!) is insanity, especially when there's free bookmarking tools, some of which are even open source or self hosted.

E: Some less similar alternatives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199419

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346985

http://pinboard.in/tour/

I'm not affiliated with any of the alternatives I've listed.

masc982• 6 years ago

Thank you for your comment. It may sound a coincidence but I've updated the pricing and bundle limits (there was a typo in the pro 30 instead of 130..) just some minutes ago.

Have a good day!

armatav• 6 years ago

Your pricing should be much higher in my opinion, something like $20-25/month, but then give those customers pretty massive access. (unlimited everything)

Doing the math here, for you to make a starter engineering salary off this project, you'd need to hit $10,000/month - which would mean around 40,000 paying basic users or 12,000 paying pro users.

If this hits the front page you'd maybe get around 50,000 hits to the site - which means your conversion needs to be around 80% (for Basic).

Whereas if you had a free plan and a pro plan that was $25/month - you'd only need 400 people. Which is a conversion of 8% from this particular traffic source.

Your call, but I think lower prices these days speak to me as the developer not being all-in on their particular product - even if you are, it's just the optics of it.

If I really need this, you can bet I'd pay $25/month for it.

The Roam Research guys do a good job at this, even if their product is not yet at 90% refinement, just the fact that they are willing to charge a higher price makes me believe they will actually put the work into it to make it better. There are students and researchers that do NOT want to bother with storing the files to build that graph, hooking up VSCode with a graph-editor addon (there are many), all they want is a thing that does what it says it does. And they pay well for it.

dhimes2• 6 years ago

I'm a little confused: do you store a copy of the information/page, or just a link to it?

d3nj4l2• 6 years ago

Congrats on your launch! The current limits are better, but having any limits at all on the top tier is kind of tough to buy into, because it's easy to wonder what I'll do if I run out of space after a while. I'd either have to create another account and pay for another subscription there, doubling my bill and splitting my workspace. If you think unlimited links for your current pricing is too generous, don't be afraid to set up a higher tier with truly unlimited capacity - if people like your product, they will almost certainly pay that.

zorbash3• 6 years ago

I'm working on yet another alternative, which we're about to launch:

https://www.tefter.io/teams/free-trial

We charge 39$/month flat, no limitations on the number of users, links, lists.

The domain of bookmarking is definitely crowded, but we're focusing providing a solution where you forget you're dealing with bookmarks. With our browser extension, you can quickly jump between tabs, search you history and bookmarks either personal or your team's. There's also support for golinks style shortcuts, full-text search, a Slack app and even a cli app written in Elixir!

nl• 6 years ago

We charge 39$/month flat, no limitations on the number of users, links, lists.

Um wow. Does anyone actually pay that price?

goleary• 6 years ago

Cool! My biggest complaint about golinks is the lack of a command activated search...looks like you're tackling that problem.

mynegation• 6 years ago

I think you misspelled “retrieval” on your homepage

HerrMonnezza• 6 years ago

Twice...

kristopolous• 6 years ago

Vannevar Bush should've followed up his article with "As we may organize".

It's a pretty unsolved aspect

rawoke083600• 6 years ago

Best way to save important stuff for me is to just email it to myself :/ Crude but effective, even with GMail's less than optimal search.

xenihn• 6 years ago

I haven't used it in a very long time, but pushover.net was my go-to for many years. I just use iOS Notes now. I would suggest checking pushover out as a replacement for email.

masc982• 6 years ago

Thank you for your support guys! 5 of you have already bought the premium plan.. this is insane! I'll do my best.

szhu• 6 years ago

It looks like people are discussing alternatives here, so I wanted to give a quick pitch for my setup.

I stash my useful links in Asana. For those who haven't used it, Asana is like a big, organized to-do list. Each link I want to keep becomes an Asana task. I can organize them the Asana way, using tags or projects (task lists), or I can just put useful words in the description so I can search for them later.

Asana probably wasn't built for this use case, but it works pretty darn well. My most important workflow is being able to send the current webpage I'm reading to Asana using just a few taps, and Asana supports that easily -- the official Chrome extension is specifically for doing this, and the Asana apps support the Android and iOS share integrations.

In addition -- and this is important too -- I feel pretty confident that Asana (and thus my data) will still be around in 5-10 years. I'm not sure if I can say that about almost all of its competitors.

Note: I'm not affiliated with Asana. I'm familiar with Asana because I used it at work, but other to-do apps might also work for bookmarking. If you have one in mind, let me know in the replies!

dnpp1232• 6 years ago

Has anyone a good open source, self hosted alternative of this?

Since I don't know any, I was thinking of starting something like this at some point.

Something to save interesting bookmarks/lightweight media (gifs, memes, ...) or even small blog articles. Make it federated, with some full text search feature ala elastic search but more lightweight, with a reddit like interface.

teraku• 6 years ago

I use Zotero, which is an OpenSource reference management tool (think Citavi). I save links to blogs, articles, make notes and tag and categorise it.

Then I sync it all into my NAS via WebDAV.

Jipazgqmnm2• 6 years ago

I just use a folder with (text) files. E.g. if you call them

keyword1-...-keywordN

you can `find` for keywords and `grep` for content and put in everything you want. You could also use subfolders for topics.

I don't see what K-Stash offers more.

dnpp1232• 6 years ago

I mean the whole point of this is to have a crawler who look for the texts in your links, index them, then you can search a link when you just vaguely remember something the page in question mentioned.

etherio2• 6 years ago

Wow! This sounds exactly like the project I'm working on (elasticsearch, open source, self hosted etc...).

Here's the link https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy

IncRnd• 6 years ago

Why would I pay for a beta with extremely low topic-limits, especially when there are great tools that do this for free? I'm sure this is a fine tool, but this honestly needs to be very compelling in order for me to pay in order to change my workflow.

black_puppydog• 6 years ago

I love the idea of this, but frankly, this seems like a system that becomes more useful if you use it for a long long time. And for systems like this, I need a guarantee that there won't be "exciting news, we got acquired, and tomorrow all our services are shutting down."

I know that's a bit of a downer take, and maybe I should just not hang out on HN with this attitude, but I really wonder if I'm that alone with this opinion...? It's the same issue I have with roam research, the same issue I had with Mendeley.

kstenerud• 6 years ago

This is an ongoing problem with dev tools. One thing I miss about the old shrinkwrap days is that you could just buy a tool and know that you have it forever. Hell, I still have my old copy of Cygnus Ed (1989), and it still works on an Amiga emulator (and I still use it for some text editing tasks).

Once that guarantee is gone, I no longer have any incentive to pay money or even use the service. I'd rather invest time and effort into hosting a tool myself, on infrastructure and hardware I control, choosing when and if to upgrade on my own terms.

reportgunner2• 6 years ago

You are not alone. The first thing I went to look for was an export feature. No mention of it on the landing page.

mlang23• 6 years ago

The Pro and Premium plans seem to have a JSON export. "We allow you to export your data only if you pay enough." Hmm.

bszupnick• 6 years ago

At least with Roam you can always export it to org-mode format so you have the power to update regularly and you're data will never be lost.

tokai• 6 years ago

maybe I should just not hang out on HN with this attitude

Sycophants are numerous everywhere else.

pk78• 6 years ago

Not exactly a dev-specific tool, but I created a mind map for storing all the interesting stuff I've read/want to read in different formats than just plain text:

https://mapsofmind.com

No restriction on "topics" or "maps" or anything. Fully free to use.

Jipazgqmnm2• 6 years ago

Functionally I do not see any additional value compared to a simple 'grep' or 'find' on a folder with notes.

lonelyasacloud• 6 years ago

fwiw Diigo https://www.diigo.com/ was the tool I ended with last time I was looking for something like this. It's already got things like bookmarking plugins, page archiving, outlining, tagging, in-page annotation, highlighting, sharing, search, exports etc.

I've now been using Diigo for over three years now; it's been reliable, its feature set feels very complete, works well, and they seem to have a sustainable business model based on subscription plans e.g. I consider the $40 p/a I pay for standard somewhat of a bargain.

Always interested in new shineys, but what is K-Stash's unique value proposition vs Diigo?

ClearAndPresent• 6 years ago

I mean this kindly: I highly recommend you hire a copywriter to go over your site. The spelling errors and grammar issues undermine confidence.

cik2• 6 years ago

The problem I find with this entire segment of the industry - is that nothing seems to work as I grow and change. Everyone is actively trying to achieve vendor lock in. It's true for Evernote, OneNote, Notion - and all the other things too.

To make it worse, none of them are better than pen and paper. I want the ability, from my desktop to clip sections of pages, capture pages, annotate them, etc. I want to have the same experience on phone and tablet whether iOS, Android, or a mixture thereof. I want to annotate with notes, that I want to remain as handwritten notes, but be legitimately OCRed for the purpose of search. I don't want to click anything to make this happen; on a tablet this means just write and go. Rocketbook is the closest I've gotten to that, and it was still unbelievably far away from the goal set.

So now, I'm back to pen, paper, and OneNote. I hate it - but it's currently (and not two months ago) the best answer for me.

dhimes2• 6 years ago

Does Rocketbook have OCR now? I used them when they first came out but the lack of OCR limited what I would use them for.

I just tried to start the app after reading your comment and apparently I have to log in or something and I have no idea how to do that. It was such a cool idea that it's a shame that it never quite got its act together.

cik2• 6 years ago

They do - though it no longer solves any of my other needs. I use their whiteboard sticker things so that I can have pictures immediately go into a OneDrive, Google Docs, or email destination. That they solidly got right and it's one of my favourite things.

Admittedly, with the android share button, it's not really that useful, though I love it.

WealthVsSurvive• 6 years ago

You've just described the problem of all technical products that are designed under the auspice of producing a profit for its investors. I simply call it babel-tower building, as it's the earliest and simplest metaphorical example of what happens when Turing-complete languages interact with ergodic, evolutionary human incentive. Namely, differing incentives create Balkanizing forces in information processing and human trade; it's the creation of a disaster in slow-motion, and one in which the outcome will be worse for all parties than if cooperation was involved.

andybak• 6 years ago

The tiers are a bit strange.

Free/Basic/Pro gives you 15/40/130 resources per topic.

I would routinely use the maximum for even simple pieces of research and 130 feels like way too small a limit.

I would honestly expect to see those limits tripled at least.

KoenDG• 6 years ago

Personally, I have a github private repo where I put everything in named directories.

Small cleanup every now and then.

Can't recall where something is? Grep it.

etherio2• 6 years ago

This is kind of similar to an open source knowledge base project [0] I am working except instead of just for webpages it allows you to pretty much index anything you want (including links and their contents)

[0] https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy

jamesrr39• 6 years ago

Looks nice!

I wrote a chrome extension for natural language searching of bookmarks a while ago (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-search/fc...), I like your grouping of topics though (so you can see everything in the topic, not just the search results).

I don't really understand the comments complaining about the pricing; there's a free version, or the paid versions are really not that expensive. If I find myself wanting something more than bookmarks for links, $3/$10 a year seems fine to me for the productivity gain.

K-Stash: A search engine for your useful links – for devs and researchers

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