Anytype.io

Posted by satis
Aug 27, 2023 at 02:19 AM

By the way it looks like Anytype is gearing up for more stable support and growth, as they just completed a $13.4 million VC round.

https://blog.anytype.io/anytype-raises-13-4million-usd-funding/

That about what Craft got from its first round of funding (Craft also completed a second round for a total of $42m), but a drop in the bucket compared to Notion, which anytype is most compared to. Notion has pulled in more than $340m so far (and went on a small spending spree, picking up the Cron calendering company, Flowdash and Automate.io).

Anytype is gearing up to start charging for the product when it exits beta - which appears to be soon - as well as offering additional features at an additional charge. Right now users who weren’t in the Alpha get 1Gb storage on Anytype’s backup node (if and only if you want to use it), but “Once that’s exceeded, additional files are only synced P2P. They’re planning on providing extra storage for a cost and soon anyone will be able to self-host their own backup node.”

They had a page on the beta to allow you to self-host your backups but then they pulled it, and now say it’s planned for 3Q of this year.

The advantage of the data being encrypted is that your computer’s file manager cannot read it, which is potentially problematic if the app crashes and borks data. An Anytype rep responded, “we have described our data format, so your data is yours, you can write any adaptor to read/write”

https://github.com/anyproto/any-block

This highly geeky suggestion shockingly means the company has little interest in offering strong export features itself. If third parties step up, great, but will those solutions be supported? Might they break as the app develops (or data formats get changed or amended)? Seems like s bit of a mess.

It does seem like this space is getting so competitive and filled with VC money (ClickUp has received over $500m in funding) that sooner or later (probably sooner *than* later) there’s going to be a shake-up: products will fail, or some of these otherwise-unprofitable companies (and most [all?] of them are unprofitable) will stop getting cash injections and fail from cash flow problems. I’ve never seen so many web-connected productivity, writing, todo, calendar and wiki apps (and the huge variety of cross-pollinated iterations) and it seems it just cannot last.