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WriteMapper 3 — Get from idea to final draft in no time, using mind maps.
WriteMapper 3 is a writing app on macOS and Windows that'll help you get from idea to final draft in no time, using mind maps. This major update features a whole bunch of improvements that we hope you'll find useful. Come join in in the comments below! 👇
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Begtin Ivan
The product is interesting but pricing policy is not transparent. I use several writing apps with lifetime licenses, "Write!" for example, and they follow their promises. I don't see reasonable changes between Writemapper versions 2 and 3. I don't feed that I really by new product. So I am gonna use this app for some time, but most likely I will be looking for alternatives and to developers of other writing apps to implement similar mind-mapping interfaces.
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@ibegtin Thank you for the continued feedback. I will be using it as I continue to work on future iterations of the app, and hope to do better in this regard with future releases.
@ibegtin I have been using MindNode for several years. It is an outstanding and very robust product. It allows for multiple root nodes (for example) which helps during brainstorming and you can connect them easily later. The GUI has been extraordinarily well designed - definitely the best Mind Mapping app I've encountered. PLUS it allows notes on the nodes in a very accessible two pane editor and then the whole structure can can be exported to a range of formats including Markdown and OPML. You can drag and drop images onto nodes and they show up in the GUI as well as in the Markdown output. It has Text Expansion which is critical for a writing app and it even has AppleScript integration and so if like me you are okay with using the Terminal and CLI then you can write a really small Makefile (or script) to generate your output(s) with a single command. I was evolving a workflow using MindNode wherein a single source document could be used for a number of different outputs including seminar slides (that was using LaTeX but now I will be using Deckset 2.0 which is really cool). An advantage of MindNode is that it is a flexible mindmapping app that can also be used for creating documents. The advantage over outlining tools in word processors (for me) is that it has a visual interface where an outline can be created by brainstorming on a canvas. I have a slight aspect of ADD and so this is great for me. Another superb tool is Scapple. Well worth checking out. But no iOS app there. I have absolutely no affiliation with MindNode (or any other developer) - but the pricing though monthly now is fair - here in the UK I think it is £2.49/mo or £19.99/yr - and this includes sync with iOS apps included. And for a single user it can still be installed on as many devices as desired (I think). You would have to go a few years on MindNode before equalling the price of even a 2-device Writemapper 3 licence and then add to that about £30 for the iOS ones (though those appear to be for life). I have an older version which was a fixed price however. It still integrates with the newest one which I have access to via Setapp as well.
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
For the past maaany months I’ve been hard at work on this big update, and today I'm glad to finally present: WriteMapper 3!
WriteMapper is the app that helps you turn ideas into text documents using mind maps, taking your writing productivity to the next level. It’ll help you:
- Relentlessly generate ideas 💡 using mind maps
- Simplify thinking 💭 to overcome writer’s block
- Beat writing procrastination and inertia 🚀
- Work from a beautiful, distraction-free interface
- Export your work (MD, HTML, OPML, DOCX, TXT, RTF, PDF, PNG)
New in WriteMapper 3 are three new headlining features: (1) Live Document Preview, (2) PDF Export Format, and (3) Apple Silicon Support, along with a whole bunch of other new features and improvements.
Free trial downloads are now available on macOS and Windows. For existing customers, this will also be our first paid update (since launching 1.0 here on PH!) in nearly four years. To help with that, there'll be a discounted launch pricing 🏷 if you purchase within the next seven days. This is available to everyone, so make sure to take advantage of it!
The scope of this update was very much driven by direct customer feedback from WriteMapper users. I'm hence greatly looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback about WriteMapper 3 here in the comments, and answering any questions you might have.
Thank you for visiting this post, and here's wishing you a great weekend ahead! 😊
@gx Hmm, I’m a bit confused here. I purchased multiple licenses at the time of the 1.0 release because you specifically advertised them as lifetime licenses. Looking at the ProductHunt release page, you actively promote this as a selling point in your comments. Am I correct in understanding that you’re now charging customers you sold lifetime licenses to for an update?
I’ve actually never used either of my licenses, but liked the concept enough that I thought it was worth supporting just to follow along until the app reached the point where it was mature enough to accommodate an intensive academic research workflow. I only felt comfortable paying for an app I knew I wouldn’t use any time soon because you advertised the licenses as lifetime licenses.
Anyway, I’m a bit disappointed if this is the case. Could you please clarify?
@zvh (pasted from my email reply to you)
Thank you for your email.
Past customers of WriteMapper are free to continue using version 2 of the app, with your existing license codes. We have continued to make WriteMapper 2 available for download from our website, and the License Manager will continue to process WriteMapper 2 license codes as per usual. It is up to the user if they wish to upgrade to WriteMapper 3, and if so, only then would they need to pay for additional licenses.
As mentioned in the original email, this is our first paid update in almost four years of work (during which we published 42 updates, at no additional cost other than the one-time upfront purchase price) - and significant updates require the corresponding amount of resources in order for the app to be sustainable, and hence continue to exist at all.
We hope this email was helpful and clarifies your question. Please also do let us know should you need further help or have more questions. Thank you. :)
@gx as I indicated, that’s not at all what a lifetime license is. Again, you should never have used that term to sell licenses for your app if you had no intention of living up to your commitment.
So a lifetime licenee, then, but only if you have the lifespan of a goldfish or a hamster?
And your updates to V 2.0 seem to have been made very infrequently and included almost no new major features. So, you sold a bunch of people lifetime licenses, made them purchase multiple lifetime licenses because they needed a separate license for each computer, made very few updates, and now want us to buy new lifetime licenses—is that what these still are?—in order to do a pdf export, which is something that should have been a much earlier feature that should certainly have fallen within the “lifetime” of my license.
I think this is all a bit dishonest, and would caution anyone interested to think twice before buying, but best of luck with your app.
@zvh Thank you for sharing your views on the matter.
As I've said, past users of the V2 app (as well as everyone who benefited from having free 1-to-1 upgrades from V1 to V2) can absolutely still use their purchased product, and there is no element of that being abruptly discontinued in order to coerce users to purchase this new version.
To honestly share my viewpoint as an (first-time) app maker of one-time purchase software too, what I've learned over the past few years is that the situation is frankly quite binary — either the app continues to sustainably operate in order to get updated and exist, otherwise it simply ceases to get worked on, falls into disrepair, and then just doesn't work or get updated anymore.
I truly get why, myself being a consumer of apps too, the recurring pricing business model by software companies is disliked very much by consumers. However, there is a reason why they continue to grow in number, with more of them launching (and growing) by the day. PH is a great place to be witness to that.
It's also worth mentioning that I'm not some big tech company like Google or Facebook, or backed by some VC fund, where I can afford to simply give out my work for basically free. Worse yet, there are apps that provide free software but resell private and sensitive information of their users in order to make money — something I absolutely abhor.
So overall I think we're here on PH for open discussion, which is what this is. So I read your writing with an open mind. Moving forward, I will consider how to make it easier for past customers to upgrade; perhaps by extending the 7-day launch pricing window. Thanks again for participating in sharing your thoughts. :)
Edit: a letter
@gx No trouble, I suppose. The funny thing is that I typically choose to pay for upgrades to apps that I have lifetime subscriptions for--apps like Alfred or Arq--because they give me the option, recognizing their commitment to me as a customer, but I also feel that they provide enough value to me that I'm happy to pay for an upgrade even when I don't have to. It's about respecting your customers--particularly the ones that make early (and ostensibly lifetime) investments--and trusting that they'll continue to support you based on the continuous work you do.
But this is literally you, taken from the 1.0 ProductHunt release page, responding to a question about what justifies the relatively high cost of your app: "Besides getting a lifetime license from just a one-time purchase (as opposed to recurring yearly or monthly fees), we are further committed to providing our customers with regular updates of the app with improvements and fixes over time, at no further cost."
Based on claims like this, I purchased two "lifetime" licenses for myself with the intent of tracking your app's development as an early (and I had hoped valued) adopter and supporter.
Also, from what I can tell, you haven't updated WriteMapper 2 since March 28, 2020. So your claims of longterm paid updates are a bit suspect. It seems like you've let the app to languish for current paid subscribers until releasing this new paid major version upgrade. The update before that was on Nov. 27, 2019. And those updates were only bug fixes. Your release notes indicate that you haven't actually added any significant features to the app for over two years.
As I purchased my two "lifetime" licenses in October of 2017, this means that my lifetime licenses only entitled me to about a year and a half of actual active development. In what world could that be considered a lifetime license?
Anyway, there's nothing I can do about this, of course, and you're free to treat existing paying users how you wish. But I wanted to make my grievances public in the hope that others would avoid what I consider to be my mistake.
Is it me or does the developer not understand where he went wrong with the whole Lifetime Licence issue?
A startup needs to get its first customers so it offers a lifetime licence to a select early few adopters.
Those early adopters, taking a risk on a new product, invest their money into it.
The startup gets a sudden influx of funding, and the adopters get a lifetime of use of the product REGARDLESS of how many numbers he sticks at the end of the product title.
The only argument he makes is "I can't afford to do all the work and give it away for free!"
Well the answer to that is TOUGH S**T mate, you should have thought of that at the start and only gave away a number of lifetime licences you knew you could afford.
The point is that you are NOT giving it away for free, you sold a product with a lifetime guarantee and then failed to provide further updates as part of the licence. By calling it Writemapper 3 doesn't make it a different product, that 3 gives it a version number, and those with a lifetime licence deserve a free upgrade to that version number for the same product for the LIFE of that product.
If you can't afford the licence holders now, you should be concentrating on the business model, rather than the product. You should be looking at selling it and getting new subscribers so that you have money coming in to pay for those lifetime licences. You should NOT be planning a new Version 3 until you have that revenue stream because you are trying to fleece people that helped support its early development, and all you are doing is saying "Well version 1 didnt work as I only got a few lifetime licence people, Version 2 flopped as nobody subscribed to that, so I will do a Version 3 which will also probably flop, and see if I can force everyone that showed faith and loyalty in me and the product to cough up again!!"
If you can't afford it, the product sucks. Nobody wants it and instead of trying to fix that, you are looking for the people that funded you to fund your pet hobby again.
By asking for upgrade costs says several things.
You are willing to take investor money from the early adopters and not fulfil the commercial contract you agreed when you sold the licence.
You don't believe you can get new customers for your product and expand the non-lifetime subscribers to cover the costs of the free upgrades. So you have no faith in your own product selling enough.
You have shown you are probably a good developer but a dodgy businessman who will grab a persons money and run for the hills with it.
That WriteMapper 3 is unlikely to get further development time for it as you are not getting enough customers to pay for the lifetime licence holders, let alone enough to pay for further development time.
And you now have a reputation as someone that doesn't care about the only customers he does have, so why would you care about new ones? All anyone will get who subscribes to WriteMapper 3 will be a product that receives little to no updates and suddenly a request to purchase WriteMapper 4, 5 and so on.
Anyone with an ounce of sense would have limited the number of lifetime licences, valued the very people who give you a cash injection to keep the project going and would offer them free upgrades for LIFE to anything called WriteMapper, regardless of how many numbers you stick on the end of it and try to call it a new product.
Because those early adopters are the one that gave you the chance to last as long as you have, got robbed blind, and were the ones that would post 5-star ratings if you wanted to get your product noticed but now will rate it 1-star.
And if you kept them sweet, they would probably have bought APPAWESOME 2 or AWESOMEAPPLICATION 4 or whatever new products you develop and brought out and given that early investment too because the customer experience with WriteMapper had been so positive.
To top it all off, you excuses on a public board like this, that is trying to showcase your product for you is to say "Well, I am broke, I took your money, I sold you a fake promise and now I want to find more suckers to buy into it, so tough!" which is never going to give you a reputation as a serious business.
And if you are not broke, then might I suggest you apologise to all the early life-time licence holders and give them a free update to WriteMapper 3, and 4, and any other versions you make, and a 50% discount to any other totally different apps you make, and hope they remove their previous comments because you want to work WITH your community of fans to make the product hugely successful, rather than p*ss all over them and say "thanks for the money, sucker!".
At the end of the day, the early adopters paid you money for something that you have failed to deliver and you have this bizarre attitude that somehow, they are now a hassle you want to offload, rather than a loyal early customer that believed in you when many would not.
That is NOT how you run a successful business.... ever!
I'd stay miles away from any developer that ditches its early customers. And if you sold lifetime deals before, you shouldn't be launching paid upgrades for them.
@ashish_bhateja Thank you for joining the conversation about the launch. Firstly, I'd like to lay out some information for context:
- Our early WriteMapper 1 customers all received free one-to-one license code upgrades to version 2 when it was launched, as WriteMapper 1 was to be discontinued.
- With this launch, we have worked to ensure that WriteMapper 2 continues to be operational, usable, and accessible.
- Existing owners of V2 license codes will be able to continue using the full features of WriteMapper 2, without being affected in any way.
- Version 2 also remains available for download from our website, and will continue to be so.
- It is not mandatory to upgrade from WriteMapper 2 to 3; it's entirely optional and up to users.
- This is our first paid update in almost 4 years, after having provided a total of 42 product updates since the original macOS-only launch of WriteMapper 1.0.
- This product is sold on a one-time purchase basis, and not a recurring subscription, allowing a purchase option which is vastly preferred by consumers.
As a matter of personal principle: I would never allow previous customers of mine to not be able to access something they paid for, or deliberately remove or withhold features in order to get them to pay more money. This type of behaviour fundamentally goes against who I am as a person and the integrity that I stand for in my being. I hope you can see where I stand on this.
Also for your consideration in this matter: it's necessary to also think about the sustainability side of things. Ultimately, progress can only be made if it is sustainable to do so. Without it being sustainable, upgrades, and perhaps even the app itself, could cease to exist altogether.
Ultimately, all I'm trying to do through this work is to help others be more productive in their work and save time on tasks, in my own small way. Time saved also means more time spent on other more meaningful things in life — and meaning, I believe, is at the end of the day is what is truly valuable.
Apologies for the disproportionately long reply, but I felt like this comment was worth laying out. Thank you for your time to read this — I hope you enjoy your weekend ahead, and stay healthy and safe! :)
@ashish_bhateja Totally agreed, this was a really shitty move, however they try to justify it, still looks shitty in the end.
@bmediax indeed. And then launching on PH!
If a developer can't value early supporters, they will always struggle and this case is one such example
@ashish_bhateja Most developers are working to make their apps M1 compliant. Here we are expected to pay for a full new app - calling it an upgrade is simply dishonest - otherwise our existing licenses won’t work on what soon will be a de facto standard for Apple.
Confused.com! I downloaded a trial version of WM3 only to find that the free period had expired at install! I’m interacting with Guan to get this rectified but just before turning in I noted that the app that gets installed has a create date of 6 May! Please note this is distinct from my WM2 installation. I’m sure I will get this sorted out but was wondering whether others had this problem too. This particular Mac is a 2018 Mini W/Big Sur. I always try and identify potential problems with my situations so greatly appreciate others feedback if they have trialed but had similar problems.
@rama_lakshmanan Just sent you an email with an update - thank you for your patience! :)
@gx Tried once more, same problem. I assume that I don't need to reinstall the app from the image? Or should I try downloading a fresh install image? If you let me know by email I will try one of these. I don't want to reinstall now just in case there is a time lag in the update process.
@gx About to turn in after my ice cream dessert arrives. Will take this up early in the week. Just to remind that you forgot to tell me what the Education discount is - it might be good to share it here so that people are aware - it would be in keeping with the spirit of benevolence you are projecting here. No point having something that is intended to be a kind gesture to potentially needy people if it is not publicised, eh?
@gx I appreciated your quick responses over the weekend, but the fix has not worked and I haven't heard since including about the Education Licence. You had pointed out that since I was on one before you had updated your back end to include my email address but I had taken a leave of absence from Uni so told you I couldn't in all honesty avail of that until the Fall when I hope to resume studies after some relapse of my medical illness. I appreciate you must be busy right now but it would be good to be able to trial v3 and to know what the Education Licence would actually cost. Disabled students in Scotland get some funding from the government for Uni costs. However, I need to put in the application months in advance.
@rama_lakshmanan Hey Rama, apologies for the delayed response — I’ve locked myself away to fix this very issue in order to get back to you ASAP. I've just published a fix via version 3.0.1 of the app, and downloading the it from the website should hopefully resolve the issue. More details are in the email I've just sent you (can't seem to format links in this comment)