Natrium [link redacted; see below] appears to be a Complice-alike, at least in some aspects. Anyone tried it?
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Wow, this basically looks like a Complice clone, for minimalists who hate colors. I initially thought this might be a coincidence, but then hereās the pricing page:
and hereās Compliceās pricing page:
Iād put the odds of this happening by accident at basically nil at this point. It looks exactly like what youāre expect if someone were trying to copy the text but make it slightly different to avoid looking like plagiarism.
How did you find this @adamwolf?
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It came through my RSSāI donāt recall the feed, but I suspect Hacker News. (Update: it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586375)
I told a buddy, āit looks like someone rethemed Complice with Bootstrap.ā
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Wow, thatāsā¦ blatant.
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Oy, yeah, thatās uncool. Some seriously sincere flattery for Complice though! Have I mentioned lately that Complice is awesome and everyone should try Complice?
I think Iāll edit out the link in @adamwolfās post above and we shall never speak the name ānatriumā again, unless youāre talking about salt and speaking Latin, if that sounds good to everyone.
PS: Ha, I see they cite and link to Beeminder for their terms of service. That oneās totally unnecessary since we just copied ours (with permission) from WordPress. But no mention anywhere of Complice, which they copied without permission. SMH.
PPS: Omg, duh, itās not that they cited Beeminder when copying our terms of service, itās that they copied Complice wholesale and itās Complice that cites Beeminder so Natrium is just copying the citing of Beeminder. Facepalm.
Bwahaha this is hilarious
Anyone else think of the Stanislaw Lem story?
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You are our new best friend. Fun Beeminder fact: @bee (the other Beeminder founder as you probably know) and I had an excerpt from one of Lemās Cyberiad stories read as part of our wedding ceremony.
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Huh, I initially thought this wasnāt true, because they include the āLawyers seem to have a funny definition of āagreeā.ā I removed this from the Complice legal page a few months ago when I did the GDPR update, because the tone wasnāt quite what I wanted for my page. So since this app is newer than that, I figured that they did go back to Beeminderās and copy theirs?
Except huh, the top section seems more obviously copied from Complice (and paraphrased) than Beeminder. I think it might just predate that.
Iām kinda wondering, should I call this guy out on Twitter or something? Seems likely to be net beneficial. Snarky option would be āHey @KevanAhlquist! They say that copying is the sincerest form of flattery, so thank you for your appreciation of Complice. Were you intending to let me know that you had cloned my site?ā
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Iām so conflict averse I just had a vicarious panic attack at the very idea. 
But also I feel like I have to defend Complice publicly so I replied in the Hacker News thread that @adamwolf mentioned above and linked to this forum thread. 
But other than replies to things already public, maybe start with private communication?
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Public callout sounds fine for something this blatant, though make sure you have easy proof available that your site came first. This canāt possibly be a misunderstanding, and possible misunderstanding would be my only prerequisite for starting off āniceā with a private message.
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Just let it go. You have dedication to your site, keep working on it and make it better.
When this other site stops working in 6months when he gets bored and clones the next thing he notices, some of his customers will find their way to you.
(That saying about wrestling with pigsā¦)
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Aww I love you guys too! You are the coolest!
What excerpt? I canāt think of anything wedding-themed, not that that needs to stop you.
(Iām assuming it wasnāt the part where King Zipperupus almost got trapped in the Black Box forever due to his love for the Princess Ineffable.)
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@zedmango, ha, I guess that would be thematically appropriate? But itās in fact the love poem specād for Trurlās electronic bard as āā¦lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.ā
Hey everyone, Iām Kevan, the person behind Natrium.
The criticisms youāve raised are fair. I was watching Complice too closely when I was building my product and ended up with very similar content. Thatās not cool and Iāve removed it.
Malcolm, Complice is a great product that you should be proud of. It solves the problem I had, but I didnāt want to pay for it so I built my own. Then I tried to see if there was a market for a minimal version.
I understand if you dislike me for the way Iāve built this product. I think that I would feel the same if this happened to me, and I apologize for how I acted. Iām working to be better at this. If youāre ever in Minneapolis Iām happy to buy you a beer.
Kevan
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Youāre not Kevan of uin/nohari fame are you?
It looks like itās still up. I think you should replace the website with a link to Complice and additionally send Malcolm any money youāve received from it.
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Ah, thanks for responding (and editing the webcopy)! Iāve argued for a long time (see blog.beeminder.com/competitors) that competitors, in a sparse market like weāre all in, help you more than hurt you.
(Just saw @zedmangoās take, which sounds extreme to me. Iād say the only thing to worry about is demonstrable plagiarism and it sounds like (though I havenāt looked close enough to vouch for it) thatās been addressed. A competitor thatās merely replicating functionality seems ok. In any case, I tend to agree with @insti that itās probably not worth thinking about.)
But as I was saying, thereās a highly ironic and counterintuitive thing that Iām convinced is true. And, doubly-ironically, the following is adapted from a conversation @malcolm and I had some months ago about another Complice competitor, The Amazing Marvin.
If Compliceās whole goal were to make The Amazing Marvin eat Compliceās lunch and they literally put a banner like
āThe Amazing Marvin is a Complice alternative you might want to try!ā
on Compliceās front page it would lead to more growth for Complice.
I suppose Iām slightly exaggerating (maybe) about having an actual āmaybe use our competitor insteadā banner, but my point is, youāre creating the Complice-Marvin link in peopleās minds (and the Googlebotās mind) which means that as people hear about Marvin theyāll also more likely come across Complice and try it too. Because 99.9+% of everyone has heard of neither of you. So when Marvin gets new users and more attention, almost none of that is at your expense.
Itās like how our public list of our competitors does nothing but help us by making it more likely that when any competitor gets press, we get mentioned too. Weāre constantly pointing journalists to that list and mentioning it all over the web any time it would be too self-promotional to just pimp Beeminder. And itās a genuinely useful compilation of apps so itās all very win-win. (Or win-win-win-win: good for us, good for our competitors, good for potential users, good for journalists writing about such tools.)
In fact, in the above blog post listing our competitors, we also give an analogy about sushi in Peoria to argue the claim that pimping your competitors helps you.
Also relevant is RunOrElse.com. Itās amazing how small businesses are the diametric opposite of the dog-eat-dog stereotype. And Iām making this kind of Slytherin argument for how it helps your own business but the strategy is identical to just ābe a total altruist and help everyone as much as possibleā.
That was all pre-Natrium and I canāt decide how reasonable it is to take that to its logical conclusion and apply it to (real or hypothetical) direct clones.
Some final points from @drtall on advantages of talking openly about and linking to your competitors:
It highlights that the product space is populated which implies youāre solving a problem worth solving which helps convince users to actually seek a solution. If they only knew about your product, some wouldnāt be convinced they had a problem worth solving at all. Yet another advantage: It proves that either you genuinely care about the user getting their problem solved even if not by you, or that youāre just very confident users will choose you, or both. Ok, or you just bought into the argument that competitors help you and itās purely Machiavellian.
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I come from the Open Source Hardware space, where we deal with literal clonesāwhere folks will take our open source design files, and run them at factories theyāre affiliated with and take a smaller cut and have an identical* output file.
This is different, but it informs a little as to where I am coming from. I think the serious issue here was the identical text. Having a workalike copy is just fine, in my third-party opinion.
In an extension of what dreev says above, it is comforting from a user perspective for a lot of reasons. Letās say I wanted to use Complice, but early on I realized that if I switched to Complice, it would quickly become the dominant strategy for how I schedule my life. That is a little scary, in a space where if Complice goes away, there are no obvious places to move to. Compare that to task managers. If Todoist went away tomorrow, I could make my life work just fine in under a week of screwing around.
Having Complice and Natrium and The Amazing Marvin to a lesser extent helps me feel OK relying on tools like this.
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