Worth noting that RR is experiencing some serious capacity issues at the moment. Slack thread about it here. Symptoms are very low load times, sync failures and data loss.
Please - if you’re a Roam enthusiast, make sure you have backups, and make sure you aren’t dependent on it for time-critical and urgent work.
Conor (developer) has tweeted he’s thinking seriously about freezing new users which, I think, might be wise.
This is why, even if Roam was the most impressive note-taking tool there was (and it may actually well be), I will never touch it.
I want a robust product I’m willing to pay for, with apps that work offline and that take absolute care of my data. Roam feels like a plane in flight with the pilots wondering if they have enough fuel for the journey. (And the childish, aforementioned PR tactics make me cringe - boast if you want but only when you actually have a bulletproof product and a business model.)
New sign ups close tonight.
Hi John, any idea if this will prevent existing users from creating a new/fresh database? As that process goes through the signup process again?
Sorry, no idea. You could ask on their slack channel. My guess would be yes, as they’ve experienced explosive growth the last month or so (10k users added every few days).
https://roamresearch.slack.com
Doesn’t look like it - I just tested via the invitation page and got the “Gates closed” message
Charging to start in a month or so
$15/month with discounts for under 21/edu/unemployed
High price to reduce user numbers to a level they can handle
Well, that absolutely feels like stellar management…
Well - they have a massive “cult” (their word) now, including people who’ve put massive chunks of their work and life into it. So they can probably afford to lose the “I won’t pay more than $5/month” brigade and leave themselves with a more selective part of the market.
Remains to be seen how well that works of course. Could end up with baby going out with the bathwater
I’ve been really liking Roam since starting heavy use of it a little over a month ago. However, this is the exact reason I’m thinking of ditching.
For the current reality (vs. envisoned ideal), $7-9/mo seems reasonable. I’d even pay $12. It has a bunch of features that are helpful, and has a modality for taking notes that makes sense. But $15/mo puts it in a class of apps that feels heavily overvalued for what’s being provided (not even just software and reliability, but lack of support too). A premium price for an early beta experience.
Hope they can prove themselves to turn it around.
FYI Roam’s most enticing feature is apparently in the process of being replicated elsewhere. For example, the founder of Workflowy (free or $50/yr Pro)said last year they were working on hyperlinks, and recently tweeted they would be implementing Roam-like birdirectional hyperlinks in addition to other features
I think that doesn’t provide bidirectional links whose contents can be edited from either link, yes?
It links notes both ways… so you can edit any note on its own. As a bonus, you could Cmd-click a link and have it open in a new window, editing both notes side-by-side.
Definitely not as elegant as Roam implementation, but it’s a feasible workaround on Evernote that could be translated to pretty much every apple scriptable app that allows linking to specific notes.
I’m going to be trying this as a replacement.
Yes, but the main thing about Roam is that you don’t merely link A to B, you can read B inside and edit B without going to B. Otherwise you could just use a hacked personal Wiki app - there are several I’d pointed previously that offer basic 2-way linking. (It’s what wikis do!)
Yeah, that is great indeed! And not replicable on Evernote or other note apps
I agree with this - and I also note that the $15/month is for the “beta”, which raises two important questions:
If it’s still beta, does that imply less than commercially acceptable levels of reliability, support, functions? Will we get defined feature set, housekeeping tools (can’t delete a database or account, can’t change an email address), service levels, documentation, backup?
If $15 is for a beta, does that imply a still higher price for a release version? And if so, when and how much? Because if I pay $15/month and Roam becomes a central tool for mw, I’m not going to want to risk being priced out of it later, am I?
From what I’ve read online the free options people are exploring are TiddlyWiki, DocuWiki and MediaWiki. But the people doing it have to delve into the guts of the wikis to understand and properly implement the features. Not something I’m personally interested in learning or babysitting.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Backlinks
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AdvancedBacklinks
Roam still has numerous little advantages: for example, in Roam, a page is created automatically when mentioned while in the wikis you need to click the link, (optionally) type some text, and hit “Save” or the page doesn’t actually exist yet. A subtlety that can make a huge difference quickly when inside the app.
I fully agree here – the beauty of Roam is the less-restrictive nature of entering in information. But it is yet to be seen if the benefits outweigh the costs, financial, effort, and otherwise.
