Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but more likely under a $100. This is after all a vector editor with specialized clip art library.
This BioRender thing apparently costs over 400 per year at its cheapest. I realize that this obviously means that there's a demand even at these terms, but that's just... disconcerting to see for some reason. It's one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits.
SECURE, TEAM BASED COLLABORATION
Store illustrations in our secure web-based application, forever
Share illustrations with your lab, team or organization
Add or remove team members as needed
Secure, web-based portal that auto-saves your work as you go
my first thought was literally: I don't want this; that's what files are for. I don't want yet another collaboration platform, on which I have to manage users. I don't want yet another piece of data locked in to a random vendor of uncertain expected lifetime. These features are better handled by Dropbox/Box/other file syncing services.
This is not to deny that they did a nice and important job with these icons. They did. But they're also part of an annoying trend of "take what should be desktop software, move it on-line, slap on some 'collaboration' feature, enjoy recurring pricing and taking users' data hostage".
I tend to whine a lot about SaaSS and user control, but even ignoring that, I wish we could remove the platform part from SaaS(S). There's no user benefit from each vendor doing their own half-assed reimplementation of a shared file system. There's only increased account management headache, and loss of data ownership.
When academic teams collaborate on a paper or a poster, what do you think would be more useful- real-time WYSIWYG editor or "here's the file, make the changes you want and then let me know"? Github/Invision/Figma or file servers?
Having worked as a researcher, I can tell you it's the latter.
Because these teams have never used (eg) google slides to put together a presentation from 3 different continents
I have, and I’ll never go back to PowerPoint. Not coincidentally, my lab uses biorender all the time and it saves us an absurd amount of time. We often paste directly from biorender images into google slides. Yeah it’s pedestrian, but it works really, really well.
Ask the penny pinchers who look down their nose at this who funds them, how many R01s/R37s/equivalents they hold, etc. $400 for a decently run lab is jack shit. Unless you’re buying Rain-X by the gallon at Sam’s Club and silanizing your own float glass for gels, I suspect there are other expenditures that offer less marginal value. YMMV, but it probably won’t.
These guys are doing well because they solved a long standing problem that is worth a lot to a large group of people to make it go away. Every single signup I’ve seen went like this:
“How’d you put that together in 5 minutes?”
“We used biorender.”
“What’s biorender?”
“A web application that helps put biomedical illustrations together. If something is missing, you ask and they add it.”
Part of the concern though is that should biorender shut down, for whatever reason (or some other human factor comes into play), you may lose access to anything stored there. You are also entirely dependent on access to that service. This is in contrast to a desktop application - YOU control the data and access to the service. It would be completely doable to have collaborative features built into that too without needing a third party to be involved, just not as profitable.
It's bad enough that we have to deal with Elseveir - we really should not be encouraging stuff like this when it is not necessary as a general principle.
I download the illustrations (duh?). That’s the value. I don’t actually care about the service per se. Once the illustrations are in the paper/talk, the value has been realized, for my lab.
Nothing in this world lasts forever. I’m ok with that. Software undergoes bit rot, and services shut down. For us, the value is simply that we can communicate complicated experimental designs and results, clearly and effectively, without a lot of application training or other bullshit. That’s worth a LOT to my lab.
We release almost everything open source, and are militant open data proponents. We also like to remind people “if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces”. The value of this service isn’t in the pieces.
I think that online subscriptions come with a different set of expectations- I dont expect offline software to ever really get constant updates, work on any computer, and so on. Not have trouble transfering licenses when upgrading and so on. I think that I'm fine with this sort of shift in general as long as companies are actually delivering on those expectations, but I would def be miffed if i was paying monthly and the company stopped developing new icons/updating features etc.
As someone who sells "offline" software, I can tell you customers expect you to be 100% up to date on everything. New Windows feature? Howcome you're not using it!
And then they also want to use it on Windows 2K :)
I guess I would say I expect it in offline software, but I also expect it to be in the form of an upgrade to the new version of the software that i have to buy. Like having office 2007 installed and having to buy the new version of office when it comes out, vs office 365 where the new version is always part of the deal
Notice the example you used was 2007. Today's model is 365, everything is a subscription, which works great for offline software: no server to maintain except a static site.
Fair points, however part of the service is 3-7 day turnaround time on custom illustrations at no extra cost. Also the Student rate is 15$/month and you can sign up for one month, close your subscriptions and your figures and custom commissioned illustrations are still available to you. My lab just started using BioRender and so far so good.
Given that adobe creative cloud subscriptions are something like ~30 euro a month, and adobe illustrator is far better than this program it seems like it is a totally overpriced product
"Better" is entirely subjective. If you are a graphic designer, sure. But that isn't the target market here. Making any one of the figures that are showcased in Illustrator would take even an experienced graphic designer a heck of a lot longer and you would end up paying a lot more to hire a graphic designer to do your graphics than if you just utilized this tool for your medical research graphics.
There a lot of asset packs available for adobe illustrator. It would surprise me if there weren’t biomedical asset packs available. In fact in all likelihood this piece of software probably uses assets created in illustrator. I agree that this is targeted to a different audience, I just think that the price is off.
This pricing is market-based though; if the market won't support it, the price won't exist. The parent's complaint is strange in that light: it's someone lamenting the loss of apparently vastly under-priced software, but framing it as unjust.
It may be so.Bu then again,JIRA is essentially an app that allows to drag a fancy digital post-it across 3 different stages..Yet somehow it is Atlassian booked 800M revenue last year...
JIRA is much more complex than that; unlike with BioRender, yours is an unfair simplification. Your argument can be rescued though by replacing JIRA with Trello.
A lot of software that should reasonably be desktop is now web only. I wanted to download a copy of http://8bitworkshop.com so my son could try it at home where we don't have internet, but there is no download button. I could download the source code and run it locally via NPM, but that requires an internet connection to install properly.
I get why companies are doing this, they want easier cross platform, easier deployability of updates, easier to find devs who know the toolchain, easier to make it work on mobile. Everything's easier with the web, I guess. But is it worth it?
> I get why companies are doing this, they want easier cross platform, easier deployability of updates, easier to find devs who know the toolchain, easier to make it work on mobile.
You forgot it justifies having a recurring revenue model, which I'd guess is the main reason :D.
It was a choice. I was tired of my family being disconnected from one another, getting nothing done, and being always connected to some electronic consumption device.
We got more done in the past 6 months with no TV, internet, or data plan, than in the past 6 years.
Also, social media usually tends to dull a person's enjoyment of life, turn them pessimistic and depressed, make them lazy and prefer endless consumption to hard work, and make them feel resentful of the people in their life. Even "harmless" time killer websites do this like reddit and imgur, and even HN.
I've seen all these affects and more for years on our family and many other families we know, and after getting rid of internet, TV and data plan, our life has turned around substantially.
The internet is a great resource and I use it when I need it, by going to the library and using their wifi. But when I don't need it, it just becomes a burden and a crutch if I have it with me at all times.
Good to hear it works for you. I'm honestly surprised, though. I tried something like this on myself 10 years ago, during my university years - but I quickly discovered that not having Internet at home makes it hard to to get anything done (computer science studies, though) and keep up-to-date with university matters. It also disconnected me socially from other students. I abandoned this after ~a year, because the only thing it did was a) making me almost live on the campus by necessity, b) making life slightly more annoying for other people in the house.
That was 10 years ago. I suppose today the social disconnection would be even more pronounced. So I have to ask: do you live in a small town or a large one? Are your kids pre-school/primary school aged? Are your and your spouse's professions outside of the technical or Internet-requiring fields?
When I split my time so that 9-5pm is work hours and outside that time is family time, whether doing chores, fixing up the house, running errands, or relaxing with the wife and kids, none of these seem to need the internet. But it sounds like that's not the situation you were in 10 years ago.
We live in a large suburb, and because of lack of constant electronic distractions, we're meeting our neighbors for the first time (albeit slowly, since nobody around here ever steps outside).
The kids have a great time at school, but they keep observing that all the other kids are surprisingly behind at pretty much every skill, and express surprise that they enjoy phone games where all you do is tap the screen to make a number go higher.
My wife stays at home raising our young children, and only really uses internet to communicate with the older kids' schools, which she can do with her iPhone anywhere that has wifi, including Walmart.
I'm the breadwinner of our family, doing software consulting work that often needs internet but often can be done offline. As long as I use the library's wifi for that aspect, I'm able to do my job just fine.
Honestly, if software wasn't my skill, I would be using the internet a lot less often, probably as much as I would check out a library book, and for the same reasons too. But software is what God made me good at, so it's how I need to support my family.
That said, I've installed a ton of things on our offline home computer that my kids find useful, such as PICO-8 and IntelliJ IDEA Community (so we can learn Java).
Thanks a lot for clarifying. What you've described is exactly a situation I thought going off-line wouldn't work in, so it's pretty educational for me that it works well for you.
> one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits
My impression is that that's pretty much all of the cases. Sometimes there happen to be benefits for the users, but that's mostly by coincidence.
For people in these fields, $400 is a drop in the ocean. The value one can gain from using it professionally could easily offset yearly subscription costs.
The phrase you may be looking for is “vertical market” and it’s a phrase that makes MBA types salivate. An underserved and overcapitalized vertical market can support amazing profits.
honestly, life-saver. I requested a few icons and asked for it to be done last minute... they actually pulled through! even consulted me about the accuracy. would recommend
This. I sent them some vector art that was already better than 99.9% of figures in quality review articles, and they made it better.
Nobody I know that has signed up for this service has regretted it for one second. (Contrast with Dropbox for Business, which is a horrifying overengineered pile of shit that actively subtracts value)
I get the impression that the engineer types are missing the point. Maybe it’s possible to produce a better product more cheaply and satisfy a greater segment of this market. But others have been trying that for 50 years and somehow biorender is the rising star in their market.
Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, perhaps the haters might benefit from reviewing a Hacker News Classic:
It’s not about the difficulty, or the effort, or the novelty of a service. It’s the value to a market that is willing to pay and underserved. Over and over again...
I wish you talked about the product itself instead of complaining about SaaS models vs desktop software models. But FWIW you're mistaken about the pricing. There exists a similar tool in the chemistry space called ChemDraw. It's desktop software to visualize chemistry. And the cheapest version costs over $1,500 [1]. The more expensive version costs nearly $5,000.
Coming from the field i have to object, that this software seems more like a Vektor based drawing program with some prebuild components and chemDraw is a huge ecosystem with tons of features.
That's not specialized software for medicine, it's a clipart library (like we had on additional CDs for Paint Artist and the others) slapped on top of a basic vector editor.
It does not take anything from the quality of this product, but you can not really compare it to programs that have dozens of norms and verification processes to go through.
honestly, I thought it was just 'another' clipart platform at first, too but it seems like the CEO has some pretty solid experience in the field https://biorender.com/about/. Been using it for a while learned a bit in their newsletter about their icon production process. looks like they consult experts in the field and update the library daily. pretty cool!
digitalis_837, your account is very young and you are making lots of claims about the software. Can you disclose more identifying details about yourself and your relationship with the vendor, beyond merely a customer, if any?
Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but more likely under a $100. This is after all a vector editor with specialized clip art library.
This BioRender thing apparently costs over 400 per year at its cheapest. I realize that this obviously means that there's a demand even at these terms, but that's just... disconcerting to see for some reason. It's one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits.