#PlanMySemester - Academic Planning made Simple

161 messages Β· Page 1 of 1 (latest)

dusty ivy
#

Some images so you know what it looks like.

dusty ivy
#

Just got done adding a built in support ticket system as well as some more mobile optimizations. I should bring back the ability to download as a PWA for a replacement to mobile apps for the time being until I get the time to do mobile apps (plus, I am taking 100% hit on cost to host right now so I do not wanna pay the $200 to get it on iOS and Android just yet)

#

The support ticket system will soon allow for upto 5 file uploads as well as 10MB max upload size. Then filed will be removed 24 hours after the ticket is closed to clear space on the backend.

#

PlanMySemester - Academic Planning made Simple

keen copper
#

Might want to consider not charging people at first otherwise you're gonna hit a saturated market with gatekept options

#

Also I don't think I should be required to login to use the free version

dusty ivy
dusty ivy
#

Accounts are free. You get a free tier which is essentially a trial period.

keen copper
dusty ivy
keen copper
#

If you aren't incurring costs (or very little) there's no reason to be charging for your service

dusty ivy
#

So ofc it has no users.

dusty ivy
#

Or at least, I would be a bit irritated by that.

keen copper
#

Oracle offers free cloud hosting of whatever you can put on a VPS, among other sites. There's lots of free hosting options for a backend.

#

(Especially if you're a student like you say)

dusty ivy
#

I am a student, but I also have a job.

#

I am not poor per se.

keen copper
#

Just saying students get a lot of free offers for hosting and development stuff. I don't care if you have money lol

dusty ivy
#

I can take the hit on costs, technically. However, I just am unsure how people would take being free for X months or potentially year+ and then be forced to pay.

dusty ivy
keen copper
dusty ivy
#

I am not arguing. You are the one being passive aggressive. I am just responding to the questions and asked questions back.

dusty ivy
#

Wouldnt it be kind of annoying to be free for potentially 6-12 months and then be forced to pay?

#

Wouldnt it be better to have less restrictions on the free?

#

Like, I can make it where you can plan the whole semester still, instead of the limits it has now.

keen copper
dusty ivy
#

Sounds less anti-consumer to me.

#

My idea is to try and be as little bait and switch as possible. I just feel like making free users who get premium features now have to pay premium in the future is a bit anti-consumer.

#

If I did that I would probably just give them the Premium free for being around since the beginning. Would that be fair?

#

I plan on doing AI study tips, guides, syllabus breakdowns, etc., as well. I can easily charge for that instead of the premium (as AI plans and Premium plans will be seperate)

keen copper
#

You have to understand the average student using this is gonna be a 1-4 year customer, especially if you target more computer science-like people.

dusty ivy
#

I know that.

#

I already know that.

#

That is why I would give it free and future customers would pay.

#

Most probably will use the free and be fine. Or do a month here and there maybe a year once or something.

#

Even MyStudyLife does not have a huge adoption ratio

#

And with the new UI they got a lot of hate.

#

Or not hate more so backlash or pressure.

keen copper
#

I know my school has academic planning built into their LMS so the current feature-set of this project isn't something I'd be willing to pay for and makes me wanting to try it less desirable as it's limited amount of stuff I can add. Β―_(ツ)_/Β―

dusty ivy
keen copper
#

If you're paying for AI as a student you're doing it entirely wrong 🀣 Just saying...

#

I did pull up MSL though and I dunno if it's just cause I can't switch to dark mode but yeah the UI isn't great

dusty ivy
#

But I feel like they did that on purpose to make people pay.

keen copper
#

I know tons of people and professors that prefer light mode so it really depends on the person

#

Like a LOT of my fellow students stick to light mode

dusty ivy
#

It just seems intended.

#

But I was not the one who made MSL so I am unsure.

keen copper
#

It doesn't seem bad per se it looks like they did a mobile first approach and the web app took a hit

dusty ivy
#

What sucks is that they used to have a nice UI.

#

That is so much better

#

This is another example.

maxresdefault.png
keen copper
#

That looks like a glorified trello board

dusty ivy
#

It definitely does.

#

It does seem Trello inspired.

#

But I got a question for you.
The AI plans I planned on starting at $7.99 a month. That might be too much for students; however, I can easily drop it to my $4.99 (the AI API would charge about $1.50-2 per user with the current token limit).

If I did AI paid plans only. With minimal margins and made all the premium features now free. Would you think that would be better?

keen copper
#

I'd feel compelled to bother signing up and trying a free plan, yes. I forget if it was one of the other helpers or moderators here but they said something along the lines of if you can't provide enough free content for them to be interested they won't bother with it. And I'm fully in agreement with that.

dusty ivy
#

The only real limits are 5 courses max and 10 assignments per course.

#

But I can easily set those to unlimited.

dusty ivy
#

Including all assignments in that course.

keen copper
dusty ivy
#

That is a good suggestion, I can absolutely do that.

#

Does my approach seem.... bad?

#

Or does that seem fair?

#

I genuinely wanna make it as accessible as possible so I am absolutely open to allowing a better free plan

keen copper
#

I'd maybe allow 1 or 2 more courses for free and raise the assignments to 15-20

#

Not fully unlimited but close enough if you understand?

dusty ivy
#

I can do 8 courses and 25 assignments per course. I think that would allow for a full semester or most of for free.

#

My semester is definitely not 8 classes. But I can get close to that assignment limit.

#

I will also add GPA calculations and projections back to free.

#

I think that adds value to at least be comfortable using free and if they like it and have the funds being able to pay

#

I do think you are right that my limits on free is a lot currently.

#

Before I go on to the next bit, anyone who registers in the next 7 (seven) days (free registration) gets 30 days of Premium on me to test the service and see if it is for you.
Oh, this is what made it seem like had to pay to sign up. I see that now.

keen copper
#

No I meant just having to sign up to try it as a free user is a tad annoying, but obviously you need to save the data for the user just the limits made it kind of not worth trying

dusty ivy
#

I guess I also did not explain the limits all that great either.

keen copper
#

Especially when you don't have SSO

dusty ivy
#

My goal was to not add it so that it was not another service using another account of yours. However, it is nice to have

keen copper
#

I mean I have throwaway emails that forward to my main one so I don't have to worry about signing up lol

dusty ivy
#

So if I add the 6-8 course limit and 15-25 assignment limit and removed the GPA projection and GPA calculation limit you think the free tier would be worth it?

dusty ivy
keen copper
#

It's not really something I'd care about being free one way or another anywho

dusty ivy
#

Right now it is just set for reaching GPA targets.

keen copper
#

So a lot of my classes are split into 2 or 3 sections - take home assignments, exams, projects and even stuff like in-person labs and you have to consistently score across all of them

dusty ivy
#

So like weighted

keen copper
#

Sometimes the class will give you the higher grade other times it's combined together to be the overall, and other times you get the lowest mark

dusty ivy
#

That is interesting. My classes go purely on weight. So some assignments are 25% of my total, others are 5%, etc., which is how the calculator works right now.

keen copper
#

Yeah unfortunately all my classes have at least 2 components and you MUST score at least 50% on both or you fail the class

#

Depends on the prof a lot cause the ones that write the courses can take liberties and basically change how things work to test it out (Yay being a guinea pig)

dusty ivy
#

Ah, okay. So you have like minimum % requirements on top of there being two parts.

keen copper
#

Yes

dusty ivy
#

So maybe if I add something like custom field for "minimum grade" for said assignments that gets calculated into the calculation

#

I should also add marks for if an assignment is Homework, Test, Quiz, etc.

#

Well, I appreciate the feedback. I will relook into the free account thing. And adjust limits.

#

Maybe I will also add value to the current premium plans by adding heavily reduced AI limits versus the AI plans.

#

Being that this is my first attempt at a paid service... I am kind of going with the flow and learning as I go.

#

My other stuff has all been free

#

I always appreciate the extra eyes and perspectives.

#

Also, appologies if the start of the convo sounded like I was being aggressive. Text is not my strong suit so understanding intent behind text and expressing my intent in text is not great.

keen copper
#

No worries πŸ‘

dusty ivy
# keen copper No worries πŸ‘

Sorry sorry, I see you are a fullstack dev. That leads me to wanting to ask a question.

Based on the image I provided in the original post... Do you think the UI is fine or do you think it can use refactoring?

#

I know one thing I got is "it looks very react like"
Which, I use react so... ig that checks out.

keen copper
#

Looks very MUI to me

dusty ivy
#

Ig that makes sense. I used to use MUI a lot... so, I kind of tend to lean into that a lot.

#

That is probably where the "looks like react" comments come from.

#

Well, again. Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. Especially since I assume you probably have way more experience than me.

keen copper
dusty ivy
keen copper
#

lol I literally threw the picture into AI and asked it to make it using MUI and React + nextjs

dusty ivy
#

Damn, it did it that easy πŸ˜…

keen copper
#

AI is really good at throwing stuff together with MUI

dusty ivy
#

That is crazy. I use Copilot to help me speed the repetitive tasks up, but.... ig it can do a lot more than that. How good is it at actually programming?

#

I notice it gives me a lot of problems even doing repetitive tasks.

keen copper
#

If you know how to prompt it you can easily get -working- code I wouldn't say it's great at efficiency or conciseness

dusty ivy
#

Hmm, interesting. I wonder if I should have it create me some form of outline or draft and see how good it does.

#

Because I absolutley use it for repetitive things. I am lazy lol. I hate those tedious things.

keen copper
#

Worse case you spend a few minutes to test it out, best case it saves you a lot of time

dusty ivy
#

That would be aweomse.

#

I am going to start trying that.

#

Ig the rule of thumb is to not let it do things I have no idea about

#

Sounds like the clear advice I should give myself.

keen copper
#

Just gotta make sure to use the right model

dusty ivy
#

I hear Claude is good tho. I will give it a try instead.

#

Probably way better at problem solving too id guess

#

OMG Opus at 3x

#

Did not notice that before.

keen copper
#

If you have Github for free from school pretty sure they don't care about the limit

#

There are some settings to enable preview models though

dusty ivy
#

So I instantly applied

#

And felt stupid doing it LMAO

#

I should look into Oracle like you said.

#

I forgot all about them.

keen copper
#

@dusty ivy To be honest I tried MSL out for the past day and I don't see why you would use it if you had to pay, I read that schools can implement it pretty seamlessly into Moodle, Brightspace etc which is the only way I'd be using it. Otherwise I have a calendar app on my phone that can take care of assignments, classes etc

dusty ivy
#

I also understand course planners is not for everyone; however, people like them.

I can not even begin to tell you how many times I hear from people how Moodle sucks, Brightspace sucks, Canvas sucks, and so on.

#

And then the amount of people who do not even care to look for course planning things or any form of announcements because all they wanna do on the platform is what is required and get the hell off of it.

#

So, some people love it; some people do not.

#

My target is to make it easier to use to target those who do not like their current learning platform.

#

Not people who like it.

#

All I need is a 1-3% turn over rate to paid to cover my costs.

#

And I am going to scale according to that.

#

Because Brightspace, for me...................... that is a nightmare, not fun to use.

dusty ivy
#

And MSL got success from it... and they are not even that good.

#

24 million users of success.

#

They also offer AI for users for their $4.99 plan but not on free. I am still working on feature releases to match MSL's feature set; however, the plan to be different is to offer more for less while being maintainable by scaling based on proportions.

#

Sorry for a long a$$ response to your comment.