Soup hater turned soup lover // Building a better web @ https://rollup.id // YC W22 // a11hard.twitter

Couple things:

1) It wasn't a "10x better" product. Partly due to M1, partly due to people moving away from browser for apps like Figma + Notion, but it's just not compelling enough to pay ~$30/mo.

2) Low margins. It's not cheap to run their stack— I suspect high price was necessary to offset the cost of running.

design @splits | /wireframe /latenightcrew /event-pass /feud

3) Target market doesn't need the product. IIRC, their target was high-performance teams, but those teams will just buy the best machines. They don't need a better browser.

4) the most important reason: people do not like new browsers. They just don't catch on, for some reason.

Context: i worked there for a bit.

All very good points.

I’d also imagine some people don’t want yet another party collecting their data.

IIRC it was communicated wasn’t the business model but the resolution of data would be so high users may default avoid (makes me wonder if the outcome would be different if it was offered for free)

That is another good point. AFAIK, they were committed not to sharing user data. That said, they're still collecting keystroke data for example. And even if it's not used to target you, who knows what could happen.