trydeepwork.com is designed to help users stay focused and achieve their goals. One of the features from the start of the platform was a guest tier that allowed users to access certain features without signing up for an account. However, the guest tier is removed today. Here are some reasons for it

Difficulty of deciding what should be part of the guest tier

Given that the data can come from either firebase, or local, it makes it challenging to determine what features can be made available to guest users and what cannot be. There’s also the added challenge of the determining the data model that is offline only, and a data model that can be persisted to firebase. Which leads up to…

Limited resource of an indie developer

trydeepwork.com is developed by me, a single indie developer who has limited time and resources, and doing it as a passion project. Maintaining the guest tier required a time and effort, which was taking away from other tasks such as adding new features, improving user experience, and fixing bugs.

I had to test each feature to make it’s not breaking the guest mode, and vice versa.

Sub optimal user experience

The guest tier also led to a sub optimal user experience. When it started, the website just had a list of timers, so it made sense to offer it both with guest, and with registered user. However, over time with all the other features that are added, I felt that I wasn’t giving an website experience I wanted to get (as a user). What’s the point of giving a half assed experience to user, who will probably find similar functionality on the clock app on their phone? If I am going to make something, might as well do a good job at it.

For most of the users this shouldn’t matter, but for others, there are plenty of other sites which have a timer that can run locally. If you need more, probably register to use trydeepwork.com!

It’s free (as long as it’s in beta!)