I did see the parsing component, and it looks good. My worry though is that even with the parsing format being good, you're not really selling this as a parser; it doesn't seem like the text format is the most exciting part of this.

With notes in specific, because they're such an important part of my life, I'm taking a very long-term view; what still exists after 15 years? Everything else is kind of ethereal and doesn't matter because I can't really invest into building systems around something that will disappear suddenly. So I look at /tap through that lens: what parts of this still exist if tomorrow the developer either gets bough by Google or joins an Amish community?

It seems like it's only the parser? Not the SMS stuff, not the visualization or searching, not emailing, not how the ledger works, not the API. And again, it seems like a good parser, but I already have some decent parsers I use for taking notes in text format, that's a somewhat crowded space that's hard to compete in.

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I may not be the kind of customer you are trying to target, and that's fine, but I'll try to explain more clearly what I mean.

When I think back to OneNote, I built systems around something that stopped working for me, and then those systems all had to be rebuilt from scratch. It was a huge loss of time investment that outweighed any monetary investment. If I'm thinking long-term about my notes, I'm paying $7 for... basically just document storage, I can't really build around the API or the SMS or email integration, because that stuff doesn't exist in a permanent form, it's all ethereal and it all goes away if you join Google. In some ways it's even worse than that, because the focus on SMS integration means I'm likely to get heavily reliant on SMS for notetaking, which is a huge issue if I ever need to self-host anything and realize suddenly that building apps around SMS handling is very difficult. I've now kind of accidentally made my life much harder.

But I compare that situation to something like Matrix/Wallabag, apps where prices for official hosting are basically in the same neighborhood as /tap and that cost me very similar amounts of money to subscribe to:

- I'm getting a lower barrier of entry that means I can start relying on the project before I ever learn anything about hosting.

- I'm getting the chance to build infrastructure around an actively supported piece of tech, where I don't have to solve all of my own problems.

- I'm paying for short-term uptime guarantees.

- I'm paying to have to think less about security.

- I'm paying to not have to think about the horror of integrating with SMS/Email notifications

In theory, I would be paying for the same stuff in /tap, but in practice I'm not because the SMS features and integrations and stuff don't actually exist in the long-term. Everything except the parsing format is ethereal and is going to go away.

So I have a short-term uptime guarantee from /tap that's higher than my own would be, at the cost of needing to redo my entire infrastructure and needing to figure out hosting from scratch in the future. I can think less about security right now, at the cost of needing to build my own product some day where all of those security problems will come back in full-force even worse. I have a lower barrier of entry now, but later on I have to drop everything and start from scratch, and I won't be able to really do anything with my notes when that happens other than parse them until I rebuild my own solutions for stuff like repeated tasks. I can build infrastructure around an actively supported tech stack, except that tech might all vanish one day, so I can't really rely on any infrastructure that I build, or on any other service that relies on /tap.

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It's difficult to put into words, but I want to feel like I am paying for a service, not for a technology. With Matrix/Wallabag/insert-whatever, I get to temporarily not think about problems that are annoying, but I could think about them if I needed to. If something goes wrong, I could even pay another person to think about them and keep putting that problem off. And that means the service is just making my life easier, I'm just paying for people to solve problems for me and to deal with things I don't want to deal with. I'm paying for someone else to help me use a piece of technology.

In contrast, with /tap, I'm paying for access to that technology just as much as I'm paying for any service, which far from solving problems actually introduces problems in my life, because it would add new API requirements for whatever custom solution I'll need to eventually build when the company pivots or gets bought out or dies.

In a weird way, because notes are a long-term investment, the exclusivity around the tech means the value proposition for me as a user is much lower than the value proposition from more open applications, because kind of summing up everything above, a concept that encapsulates a lot of these ideas is that I'm paying for peace of mind, I'm paying to have someone take my worries away and to stress about stuff like hosting for me. And /tap's approach to peace of mind seems to be "don't worry, you can rebuild everything yourself if something goes wrong." The only way I'd get peace of mind out of that is if I paid you for hosting and then only used the REST API and only after reimplementing the entire REST API myself locally. But it's not worth $7 a month for me to do that, I want solutions that I don't have to plan around a bunch, I want solutions that don't give me anxiety when I think about the future. Parsing is a very small part of that, I'm not really worried that no one would be able to figure out how to parse a documented text format if /tap went down, I'm worried about everything else.

Again, I am probably not your ideal customer, so I think take that with a grain of salt. But my perspective is that I want a service that makes me feel more confident about the long-term, not less. I feel like if I was setting up auto-responders or integrating Tasker with my SMS app on my phone around /tap -- I don't think I'd feel confident about any of those systems, /tap seems to be encouraging me to build some very long-term fragile solutions/integrations for my notetaking setup.