3 ms·

Important question! I plan to keep the core product free forever because I think it's important in a world of profiteering healthcare. My minimal wish is to mak

Important question! I plan to keep the core product free forever because I think it's important in a world of profiteering healthcare. My minimal wish is to make enough to keep it running forever. It costs about $3k a year right now, but I expect I could get these costs down with a couple infra changes. I'm fortunate to have Startup School credits covering a large part of it for the next 10 months. I have ideas for a premium plan that will give extra insights, the ability for users to make money by adding their own affiliate links to things they use, and perhaps adding over a certain number of therapies or adding things in certain categories like test results to their stack. I welcome any ideas as well.

gardenfelder 3y ago
Pretty decent answer! In matters of health and personal data, not only are there strict laws on the books (e.g. HEPPA), but there remains the matter of trust. I, too, think in terms of the "freemium" model, but I do so in the context of b-corps, the idea being that stockholders in a b-corp are not free to sue the board over financial matters. What that signals is that the entity was created with no option for exit strategies of the usual kind. I work on open source biomedical NLP projects which aim to dive into the vast (and messy) PubMed literature, and all of the many databases on health, disease, microbiome, and etc. It seems to me that a project such as yours may end up wandering in similar directions.
- jamesfly 3y ago
  Yes, I am conscious of the immense protections health and personal data need to be guarded under when stored together. I recognize that there are strict certifications companies get to handle such info and I don’t have those. This is another place my decision to make everything public actually shines in my opinion. If I allowed making things "private", it might give a false sense of security (and require convincing the user to entrust that I could maintain that) whereas right now I hope it is clear that you should anonymize anything you input. I do not collect any personally identifiable info other than email (which can be a burner). Even if/when I integrate payments, the user should be able to use something like privacy.com. I'm not well versed on business structures, so I'm having a bit of trouble following your second point about b-corps with relation to freemium. Wow, that is exactly a path I have been thinking of taking this from the start. Vaguely, I'm interested in integrating biomedical papers linked by the conditions, therapies, and causative effects they mention and allowing discussion on them. Some of the higher-quality APIs I've found with this info do charge, so I'd be especially interested to hear about the projects you work on and if their license allows for use.
  - gardenfelder 3y ago
    We simply need to find a way to open a communication channel. I'll ping you through your website. Our projects are open source under a viral license, one which does not preclude you from using them, but with care. Edit: pinged in the feedback message.

gardenfelder 3y ago

Pretty decent answer! In matters of health and personal data, not only are there strict laws on the books (e.g. HEPPA), but there remains the matter of trust. I, too, think in terms of the "freemium" model, but I do so in the context of b-corps, the idea being that stockholders in a b-corp are not free to sue the board over financial matters. What that signals is that the entity was created with no option for exit strategies of the usual kind. I work on open source biomedical NLP projects which aim to dive into the vast (and messy) PubMed literature, and all of the many databases on health, disease, microbiome, and etc. It seems to me that a project such as yours may end up wandering in similar directions.

jamesfly 3y ago
Yes, I am conscious of the immense protections health and personal data need to be guarded under when stored together. I recognize that there are strict certifications companies get to handle such info and I don’t have those. This is another place my decision to make everything public actually shines in my opinion. If I allowed making things "private", it might give a false sense of security (and require convincing the user to entrust that I could maintain that) whereas right now I hope it is clear that you should anonymize anything you input. I do not collect any personally identifiable info other than email (which can be a burner). Even if/when I integrate payments, the user should be able to use something like privacy.com. I'm not well versed on business structures, so I'm having a bit of trouble following your second point about b-corps with relation to freemium. Wow, that is exactly a path I have been thinking of taking this from the start. Vaguely, I'm interested in integrating biomedical papers linked by the conditions, therapies, and causative effects they mention and allowing discussion on them. Some of the higher-quality APIs I've found with this info do charge, so I'd be especially interested to hear about the projects you work on and if their license allows for use.
- gardenfelder 3y ago
  We simply need to find a way to open a communication channel. I'll ping you through your website. Our projects are open source under a viral license, one which does not preclude you from using them, but with care. Edit: pinged in the feedback message.