Should I Build It Should I Build It
01 Jul 2025
Productivity

Free open source self-hosted bookmark manager / read it later app with ...

...accent on data ownership and privacy, with nested tags support

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Freemium

People love using similar products but resist paying. You’ll need to either find who will pay or create additional value that’s worth paying for.

Should You Build It?

Build but think about differentiation and monetization.

Your are here

You're entering the bookmark manager/read-it-later app space with a focus on privacy, data ownership, and nested tags, offering users more control over their information. This puts you in the "Freemium" category, where many users appreciate such tools but are hesitant to pay for them. The existence of 2 similar products indicates some market validation, but also growing competition, so you'll need to figure out your differentiation. The engagement around these products is high (44 comments on average), so it's clearly something people care about. Given the freemium category description, and in light of the competitive products, you should focus on a niche to make it worth it for users to pay. The discussions around similar products reveal user interest in collaborative features, archiving, and full-text search, along with concerns about resource usage and authentication methods.

Recommendations

  1. Given the 'Freemium' categorization, start by deeply understanding the users who benefit most from the free version of your bookmark manager. Identify their pain points and usage patterns. What features are they relying on, and where are they encountering limitations?
  2. Develop premium features that directly address the needs of your most active free users. For example, consider full-text search for archived pages, advanced collaboration tools, or integrations with other productivity apps. Address the criticism of the similar products by offering missing features such as export functionality, SingleFile support, and cross-browser sync, particularly Safari support.
  3. Explore a team-based pricing model, particularly if your bookmark manager includes collaboration features. Small teams or communities might be willing to pay for centralized bookmark management with enhanced privacy and data control.
  4. Offer personalized support, onboarding assistance, or consulting services for users who need help setting up and managing their self-hosted bookmark manager. This can be a valuable upsell, especially for less technical users.
  5. Experiment with different pricing strategies with smaller user groups to determine the optimal price point and feature set for your premium offering. Consider usage-based pricing, tiered features, or one-time purchases for specific add-ons.
  6. Address concerns about resource usage by optimizing your application for smaller VPS environments. Provide clear documentation and configuration options to help users manage their resources effectively. Offer a Docker version to ease setup and management.
  7. Prioritize user authentication methods, especially alternatives to username/password such as next-auth and LDAP. Implement a system for merging existing users and data to streamline onboarding.
  8. Improve the user interface based on feedback from similar products. Make the UI more intuitive, especially for non-technical users. Implement easier bookmark management and archiving. Focus on cross-browser functionality, especially on Safari.

Questions

  1. Which specific user segments are most likely to upgrade to a paid version of your bookmark manager, and what unique value proposition can you offer them to justify the cost?
  2. Given the high engagement but no net buy/use signals in similar products, how can you demonstrate the value of your premium features in a way that resonates with users' concerns about privacy and data ownership?
  3. How can you build a sustainable open-source business model around your self-hosted bookmark manager, considering the challenges of supporting a freemium user base and the need to generate revenue for ongoing development and maintenance?

Your are here

You're entering the bookmark manager/read-it-later app space with a focus on privacy, data ownership, and nested tags, offering users more control over their information. This puts you in the "Freemium" category, where many users appreciate such tools but are hesitant to pay for them. The existence of 2 similar products indicates some market validation, but also growing competition, so you'll need to figure out your differentiation. The engagement around these products is high (44 comments on average), so it's clearly something people care about. Given the freemium category description, and in light of the competitive products, you should focus on a niche to make it worth it for users to pay. The discussions around similar products reveal user interest in collaborative features, archiving, and full-text search, along with concerns about resource usage and authentication methods.

Recommendations

  1. Given the 'Freemium' categorization, start by deeply understanding the users who benefit most from the free version of your bookmark manager. Identify their pain points and usage patterns. What features are they relying on, and where are they encountering limitations?
  2. Develop premium features that directly address the needs of your most active free users. For example, consider full-text search for archived pages, advanced collaboration tools, or integrations with other productivity apps. Address the criticism of the similar products by offering missing features such as export functionality, SingleFile support, and cross-browser sync, particularly Safari support.
  3. Explore a team-based pricing model, particularly if your bookmark manager includes collaboration features. Small teams or communities might be willing to pay for centralized bookmark management with enhanced privacy and data control.
  4. Offer personalized support, onboarding assistance, or consulting services for users who need help setting up and managing their self-hosted bookmark manager. This can be a valuable upsell, especially for less technical users.
  5. Experiment with different pricing strategies with smaller user groups to determine the optimal price point and feature set for your premium offering. Consider usage-based pricing, tiered features, or one-time purchases for specific add-ons.
  6. Address concerns about resource usage by optimizing your application for smaller VPS environments. Provide clear documentation and configuration options to help users manage their resources effectively. Offer a Docker version to ease setup and management.
  7. Prioritize user authentication methods, especially alternatives to username/password such as next-auth and LDAP. Implement a system for merging existing users and data to streamline onboarding.
  8. Improve the user interface based on feedback from similar products. Make the UI more intuitive, especially for non-technical users. Implement easier bookmark management and archiving. Focus on cross-browser functionality, especially on Safari.

Questions

  1. Which specific user segments are most likely to upgrade to a paid version of your bookmark manager, and what unique value proposition can you offer them to justify the cost?
  2. Given the high engagement but no net buy/use signals in similar products, how can you demonstrate the value of your premium features in a way that resonates with users' concerns about privacy and data ownership?
  3. How can you build a sustainable open-source business model around your self-hosted bookmark manager, considering the challenges of supporting a freemium user base and the need to generate revenue for ongoing development and maintenance?

  • Confidence: Low
    • Number of similar products: 2
  • Engagement: High
    • Average number of comments: 44
  • Net use signal: 2.7%
    • Positive use signal: 17.3%
    • Negative use signal: 14.5%
  • Net buy signal: -0.9%
    • Positive buy signal: 1.8%
    • Negative buy signal: 2.7%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

Relevance

Linkwarden – An open source collaborative bookmark manager

31 Jul 2023 Developer Tools

Hey there HN! Meet Linkwarden, a fully self-hostable, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.Please also visit/star our GitHub repo [1].Linkwarden was built using TypeScript and NextJS, backed by a PostgreSQL database for the lighter-weight data. The rest of the data can be chosen either to be stored on the filesystem, or stored on the cloud on Digital Ocean Space/AWS S3, the reason for the cloud storage solution was for the Cloud offering [2], we realized that the preserved webpages (archives) take up space pretty quickly and S3 was much more efficient for this task. On the front-end we used TailwindCSS for styling and Zustand for state management.You could either use our Cloud offering (with 14-day free trial) to directly support this project and experience Linkwarden, or you could self-host it on your own machine and have maximum flexibility.Feel free if you had any questions, we'll do our best to answer it.[1]: https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden[2]: https://cloud.linkwarden.app/register - Hosted in Digital Ocean's datacenter located here in Toronto, ON.

The Show HN product, likely a bookmark management tool, received mixed feedback. Users praised its features, potential, and neat design, with some expressing interest in self-hosting options like Linkwarden. Authentication methods, including next-auth and LDAP, were discussed. Monetization strategies and project vision were queried, with a $4/month fee mentioned. Technical aspects like using Next.js, Prisma, and Docker were debated, with some concerns about resource usage on small VPS. Suggestions included free tiers with ads, integration of SingleFile support, and full-text search capabilities. Issues with Safari extension support and comparisons to other tools like Raindrop.io, Archivebox, and Floccus were made. Some users were interested in collaborative features, while others preferred non-collaborative use. The community also discussed archiving, with decentralized solutions and the ability to save and search web pages being important to some. Overall, the product was seen as cool and promising, with room for improvement and expansion.

-Github lists not collaborative or searchable. - Freemium model needed for massive scale. - Missing central user authentication. - Figure out merging existing users and data. - Only username/password as default. - no export functionality - Why save a click? - Not suitable for small VPS. - Doesn't need collaboration feature - Dislikes JS apps - archive.org problematic, lacks collaboration features. - Archive.org problematic, not allowing more sites. - Archived content may be removed under pressure. - info on removal process is hard to find - No periodic update check option. - Websites require addons to be tolerable. - HamsterBase is not open source. - No docker version available yet - Focus on service benefits, not technical details. - Crashes on Mac M1 due to Prisma. - Unclear if highlights and annotations are saved. - Limited to MVP at launch. - Lacks SingleFile support. - Issues bundling Prisma packages in Next standalone mode. - No text search for bookmarks. - Not a single tool solution. - Left column is too narrow - Linkwarden lacks automatic archive.org submission. - Sluggish and buggy. - Never used local personal search engine. - Lacks API, YaCY disappointing. - Archiving stops after a few hundred bookmarks. - Not actively maintained. - Not top priority. - No page for most popular collections - People don't use Zotero for archiving - No Safari extension or iOS app available. - Missing or broken documentation link - Full-text search doesn't cover website contents. - Effort not diminished, but Floccus preferred. - Collaborative feature missing. - Lacks UI for managing, archiving bookmarks - Not user friendly. - Safari not user-friendly. - Not user-friendly for non-Apple users. - This wasn't an answer - Artificial limitations imposed by Apple. - Developer fee to publish extension app. - No Safari support due to Apple's policies. - Floccus lacks features. - Browser extension not working, manual URL addition. - Common login error with Shiori server. - Web app not actual browser bookmark sync. - Questioning need for third-party bookmark syncer. - No cross-browser sync, Safari missing. - Firefox UI could be better. - Can't use own server - Browsers lack advanced bookmark management features. - LinkedIn causes pain to humanity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=qwerty456127

Can it import a list of URLs and aut-tag them using some API or pre-trained ML? If yes, I bloody want it! No matter the price.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewrothman

I like to save the best / most interesting links I come across as I browse the web. It can come in handy to pull up a blog post I read a while ago or remember some new sass product or developer tool I wanted to check out. I'm using https://raindrop.io now which works great for this.When I looked into it I was surprised that browsers don't have this kind of bookmark management built-in. I'd be very happy with two small additions to browsers: (1) display by / sort by date added and (2) a small separate freeform text box for notes (so I can describe why I saved the link).(Optionally it could be nice if browsers adopted some standard sync mechanism for bookmarks, maybe based on WebDAV like the Floccus extension).Then again, these dedicated external bookmark managers do have nice features like tags, search, and offline downloads or page screenshots. Those are all great!Linkwarden looks like a nice product. Looks like it would tick all the boxes for my use-case and the design is pleasant. I like that it's open source and has a fair price for the hosted offering. Maybe I'll give it a try!

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ipiz0618

This is great! I've always wanted something like this, and even tried launching my own app for this. My app failed to gain traction but happy to see the same idea succeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=joekrill

I threw together a quick docker-compose.yml to try this out. For anyone else that wants to spin this up and give it a try locally: https://gist.github.com/joekrill/cc503e21e14f95fefa91acc5f86...(Though I'm seeing crashes on my Mac M1, which I think is being caused by Prisma)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=swozey

This looks really nice, great work. I'll definitely give it a try.Have you considered a free tier where you could monetize it maybe via sponsorships/ads with the goal to have a social aspect?I'm a huge fan of Githubs social trending/explore/lists/topics section for finding new tools for specific things that I work on, rust, go, aws, etc. for myself and my teams. Also things like dev.to, daily.dev, etc but they're not really as useful as I thought they'd be. You can see an example of the Lists I've created here https://github.com/mikejk8s?tab=stars - I wind up putting these lists into a team notion doc right now.There's those "Awesome-XXYZ" lists but I don't think they're the best way to do this at all. They also wind up very out of date. My Github lists aren't collaborative, I can't give people a way to contribute to them and as far as I know they're not something you can search globally to find if someone has some interesting lists.It's quite a bit different than what you're doing here but what I've been hoping to find was some sort of technology Looking Glass/aggregator where I could click a topic/Collection, say Rust, and see rss feeds, blogs, curated and very well organized bookmarks, hashtags of other related lists, etc in a collaborative manner with lots of contributors.I was sort-of beginning to do this via a published notion domain and treating it like a wiki.. https://mrj84.notion.site/Go-Wiki-c637ff57e00046bfbe22fb2562... - that's the closest I've been able to brain storm as something remotely near what I'm aiming for.Sorry for the long post, maybe it'll give you some ideas or maybe someone has some ideas for me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pratio

I'll definitely give it a short this weekend. Are there any plans to support different authentication methods? Like LDAP, OAuth2 etc?I'm using linkding at the moment https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding which also has a browser addon, the only missing thing is some form central user auth but we're using it as it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pratio

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm already using authelia backed by ldap, it'll be an easy setup. I might've to figure how to merge the existing users and their data though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=meiraleal

Why would I want to save a click? The project is very cool and I will use it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=burkesquires

I have saved this to my bookmark manager! :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=j45

Looks really clean.A few questions:- It’s not clear if this saves highlight in Ng and annotations (notes about the highlights). More than saving a bookmark we think about a sentence that can be searchable.- Is there any plan to save the entire webpage as text (to maintain the annotations in it) in addition to pdf and screenshot?One product I am overly dependant on is Diigo - I would love a replacement even if it was self hosted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DaniDaniel5005

Saving webpages as text was actually something we wanted to do before launch but just went for the “MVP” for now.So yeah we’re definitely bringing more archive formats.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DaniDaniel5005

Prisma is great and I definitely recommend it to anyone who’s either starting out or on a more advanced level.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ecliptik

I've used Raindrop[1] for the last few years and it works well - cross device support, archived pages, and tags/folders.Going to check out Linkwarden since I really like the idea of being able to self-host something similar since Raindrop could one day disappear (#googlereaderneverforget).A feature Raindrop has is it can export bookmarks to a standard xml file, which I then have a script that automatically adds them to Archivebox[2] for a local copy and to add them to archive.org[3].Does Linkwarden, have a feature to automatically submit a bookmark to archive.org along with the local copy? That would greatly reduce this setup and have it all in one tool.1. https://raindrop.io/2. https://archivebox.io/3. https://ecliptik.com/bookmarking-with-raindrop/

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lannisterstark

eeeeh.Shiori looks like it'd work infinitely better compared to floccus. It has an extension, tags, and everything is stored in a central repository you can visit from web (or server itself) any time you want. It also archives your bookmarks. It has been working flawlessly for me for a couple of years now.https://github.com/go-shiori

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nirav72

I've been self-hosting and using Shiori for couple years now. Originally it was my replacement for pocket. It’s the closest thing I found to Pocket. Not only for read-it-later, but also as my archiving tool. My only issue with Shiori is that I have not been able to find a working browser extension or get the official Shiori extensions to work. So adding URLs is a manual process. So I only use it archive dev and longform articles for reference later.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=freedomben

Thank you! This is exactly what I needed, and what I've been looking for for years! Open source, lightweight, and stable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=neontomo

Thank you, seems like what I wanted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johnnyworker

If you have a WebDAV server, you can use that.I use several browser profiles (stuff like social, entertainment, dev), and now I can put the usual sites I visit with each of those in the top level of the their bookmark bar directly, but also have a single folder for the ones I want to share between all of them, yay! I am very happy right now. Thanks GP.

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Relevance

Linkwarden – An open source collaborative bookmark manager

25 Jul 2024 Social Media

Hey there HN, a major problem we're dealing these days is content on the internet can be taken down for any reason. On the other hand, we have lots of bookmarks and links that we want to keep for future reference. That's why we've built Linkwarden, a fully self-hostable, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive your webpages and bookmarks.One thing we're planning to do in the near future is to add a free plan to make it more accessible to everyone, especially if you’re just starting out without a commitment. This plan is also intended to bring users closer together with the goal to have a social aspect.As of now you could either use our Cloud offering [0] to directly support this project and experience Linkwarden, or you could self-host it on your own machine [1].Almost a year ago we introduced Linkwarden (the new version) for the first time on Hacker News [2]. We've announced tons of new features since then [3].Feel free to ask any questions, and we’ll do our best to answer![0]: https://linkwarden.app/#pricing[1]: https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942308[3]: https://blog.linkwarden.app

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