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Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it. The
by matthewgapp 3mo ago
Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
- moostii 3mo agoWhat is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
- njaremko 3mo agoThat was our goal :P https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms
- matthewgapp 3mo agoFair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money. Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI. We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products. Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
- matthewgapp 3mo agoAlso, we've designed the product so it costs us zero dollars to run :) having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't
- htrp 3mo agoIs this because your free customers bring their own ai/tokens?
- njaremko 3mo agoYeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app
- bathtub365 3mo agoHow does that work, do you not pay the developers who build and maintain this software?
- njaremko 3mo agoI'm one of those developers :) I linked in this thread, and Matt replied above in this thread, but we charge companies making >$100M in revenue for using Nobie to provide a service to users, or for using it to help train models.