Pastegrid
A collaborative, real-time, infinite canvas application for organising and sharing visual resources.
It was developed to prototype stage between 2016 and 2017 by Daniel Mahal and Sebastian Gorton Kalvik at internetfriendsforever.
What pastegrid is
An experiment and a potential. Active development ended in 2017, after over a year of hard work and discussing different business models.
There was a need for a tool like this. We saw it and we used it, but it lacked some important features and we ran out of money to work on it.
It was hard to make extra time for a project we couldn’t figure out a viable way to maintain.
We still think there’s room for a vision and a similar product.
Since 2017, many similar projects have appeared, amongst them Milanote and Miro. Both great products, but not exactly what we had imagined for Pastegrid.
How was it that all of these companies ran on other people’s capital, only some to deliver returns, all of them selling a user’s data back to them. A sort of data prison where you have to pay monthly bail.
And what are they doing to our data? Some services are serious about privacy. Some aren’t as much, and lots of them run statistics on our data without telling us.
It’s the dawn of a new era. One where users get to keep their own data, secured and encrypted with a provider they trust.
And if they find your software useful, they should pay for it.
If you design software that’s also useful for businesses, they will pay for the software. Maybe that’s a way to provide a generous free license?
A free license and an open community for plugins like obsidian would make the tooling around it invaluable.
Building trust by being source-avvailable, free for private use (with options to pay yearly or one time fee if wanted)