Yet Another Great App Drinks the AI Kool-Aid
David Pierce, writing for The Verge:
Aboard is just one of a new class of AI companies, the ones that won’t try to build Yet Another Large Language Model but will instead try to build new things to do with those models and new ways to interact with them. The Aboard founders say they ultimately plan to connect to lots of models as those models become, in some cases, more specialized and, in others, more commoditized. In Aboard’s case, they want to use AI not as an answer machine but as something like a software generator. “We still want you to go to the web,” Ford says. “We want to guide you a bit and maybe kickstart you, but we’re software people — and we think the ability to get going really quickly is really, really interesting.” The Aboard founders want AI to do the work about the work, so you can just get to work.
Since it was featured in the Installer newsletter last year, Aboard has quickly become one of my favorite apps.[1] Now, I'm deeply worried about its future.
In short, the Aboard app consists of multiple boards that can each house cards. Cards can then be further organized using stacks (folders) and tags. It excels when using the browser extension to clip web pages into cards, where it pulls relevant information such as an image, price, brand, or genre.
For me, this has manifested in the app being a truly excellent way to keep track of interesting products. I use only one board, but I have tags for things such as accessories for my mountain bike, a wish list for my ever growing collection of bags, and a list of clothing items I might want to buy. My board is like a big Amazon wish list that can contain anything on the internet. It works perfectly for someone who, like me, accumulates things they want much faster than disposable income.[2]
Recently, Aboard announced it's march into becoming an AI-based software.[3] In my experience, this type of announcement usually signals the death of the support for my simple and specialized use case. This AI foray means that you can now ask ChatGPT to create a board for you — for example, Best Picture nominees. You could then sort that board into stacks such as "To Watch" and "Finished" and create tags to rate them. Of course, the AI often makes an incorrect or incomplete board.
This method flies in the face of exactly what I liked so much about Aboard in the first place: curation. My Aboard database is carefully curated collection of objects that I find interesting or compelling, and I'm realizing that I'm quite attached to it. I'm somewhat conflicted about that attachment since it's deeply rooted in consumerism, but that discussion is outside of the scope of this post for now.
If it were only about AI features that are useless to me, then I could live with that as long as my use case remains intact. But this whole thing smells like a larger pivot — they are starting to monetize, and creators Paul Ford and Rich Ziade are explicit about focusing on the workplace market over personal users. The free tier, which used to to be quite generous, now offers just 50 cards per board, with a maximum of three boards. I believe that good software should cost money, but $12 a month is quite steep for AI hype.
This monetization strategy feels bad because it doesn't charge for the expensive part. Data is cheap, and I don't think that users having too many cards and boards is what's going to hurt Aboard's bottom line. The API fees for accessing LLMs are the costly part, but instead of monetizing that alone, Aboard is forcing users to upgrade in order to bypass arbitrary caps on storage. Presumably, this is because they know that the AI isn't very useful yet but they need to start showing cash flow somehow.
Again, good software should cost money, but paying for additional features is a lot easier to swallow than paying to bypass an artificial limit.
Aboard is a cool idea and I hope they find a niche. But I don't think that I'm alone in growing tired of seeing AI features crop up in every app I use. For now, I'm going to test out Raindrop as a promising alternative and, sadly, bid adieu to Aboard.[4]
In fact, it's often one of my pinned tabs. I use it most every day. ↩︎
With the added benefit of helping prevent impulse purchases! ↩︎
I should also mention that the visual facelift that accompanied the AI features is gorgeous. Aboard has long been one of the better-looking apps out there, and they've further solidified that fact. ↩︎
Also, Anybox looks very promising, but there is no way to access it from Windows, unfortunately. ↩︎