Over the last few days there has been some interest in my bookmarking web app that I’ve been working on.

Why another bookmarking solution though?

I used Pinboard and Pocket for a while, but I was never comfortable with either of them. Pinboard hasn’t seen much change in the last two years and Pocket is more akin to Instapaper (which I already use) than it is to Pinboard. I also wanted to work on something that I could pin to my GitHub repo as an example of work.

Features are light at the moment, with just the ability to add, edit and delete bookmarks as well as the ability to group tags into bundles. A basic web application, but it works. I’m using it on a subdomain of my own site .

I’ve had replies from people who are interested in a hosted solution rather than having to roll their own. I initially pushed back against the idea of starting a SAAS product. There’s a lot to do to make this happen as the open source version is for a single account only. There’s also all the other parts of a SAAS product to consider such as billing and privacy now that GDPR is a requirement. Also, my first attempt at a SAAS product is still ticking over but hardly a success in terms of revenue.

However, with growing interest, I am going to entertain the idea of making Commonmarks into a SAAS product. I won’t be abandoning the open source version, but the way ahead might lie in using the same model as Feedbin. They are an RSS reader service, but the source code is open source. I’m wondering if this would work for Commonmarks as a product as well?

There is a lot of other things to consider as well for this such as hosting, pricing and support. I won’t be entirely excluding the idea though until I can at least gauge some interest in the product.

The next step looks like it might be to set up a page to allow people to register their interest.