They give the error “because the authors membership has expired, BlackWow.com, is temporarily unavailable. You can visit the original site instead.
Anyone else seeing this? I thought the sites wouldn’t be affected until the shut down on Aug 23?
I wasn’t aware until yesterday that we need website credits to keep our Manus generated websites running. I was under the impression as long as we had a subscription that the sites that Manus built would be supported. But I just got an email stating my free website credits was almost out and I needed to enable the Auto Top Up feature. I asked Manus this and it referred me to support which as we know is useless and I can’t find anything online that talks about this. Even under the pricing tab I don’t see any mention.
My daily life is complicated. I wear a lot of hats as a small manufacturer, distributor, service provider and inventor. I often wonder if my poor memory is due to me getting old or maybe I’m just overburdened with data. So I built an app.
Over the years I’ve bought many apps that claimed to simplify my life but nobody knows MY life. I decided yesterday that I would ask Manus to help me build a tool just for me. One that worked for a procrastinating perfectionist. If you saw my desk at work you would laugh as it’s piled high with stuff I don’t want to forget. I’m bad at making decisions for things like this. I feel like if it’s front of me, I won’t forget it. But then I lose it as the pile grows bigger. Soon it’s just becomes a pile of stuff that’s no longer meaningful and I fear if my wife moves it to clean it up I will forever forget about it. But then it feels great when she does move it because then I can start a new pile. Lol.
This unfortunately is how my brain works and why I named my app NewRowList. It’s an app about my brain and how I’m constantly trying to keep track of that new row of data to free my brain. The app is a list of those rows that bring me freedom and how to control them. Plus it sounds like Neuro.
I initially asked Manus the following question ”Can you help me build a simple web app that I can enter as a Todo list? I'm so disorganized with thoughts in my head and I currently put them into a note app which then disappears until I open it up again and then I lose track of the todo list. I have BusyCal which helps me keep track or things but I need a way to keep track of what I need right now and today and in a way thats easy and fast to input and with a history lets me go back and review it”
Manus asked me some questions to narrow the focus and ground my ideas to be achievable. In a few minutes the first version was created. I tried it and saw great potential but certain features like the voice transcription didn’t work properly. So Manus worked on that and I kept adding more requests such as adding a note to finished tasks to keep track of the outcome of a finished task such as after a phone call.
I came up with a name for the product and asked Manus to create a logo for it. Then I added more features like being able to prioritize tasks and convenience features like inline editing of tasks then I asked if we can add multiple users so I can share the tasks to my wife and also to be able to push tasks to my iCal calendars, then I wanted a weekly summary report of my progress to show what I accomplished each week and what needed still to be done, then I wanted to add subtasks to the tasks to better organize the tasks then I wanted to be able to order them then I wanted to have projects so a task could be grouped and tracked better then I wanted a better way to visualize the tasks and then more troubleshooting to make sure it worked perfectly on my phone or iPad or laptop.
As a problem solver who tends always choose the unconventional solution, and having access to a tool that lets me create whatever I can dream up is power I’ve never had before.
Manus lets me build apps to solve my problems. It lets me develop fully functioning apps at a level I could only have dreamed of before.
Although the website is public I currently have it set so I can invite users to have their independent app that we can share as a team so it’s not a publicly accessible app.
Note this is my third attempt at posting this as Reddit keeps flagging it.
I built a solution for memory care patients. REMNS (Recall Emotions Memories Narratives Stories) My father is 93 with dementia and he repeatedly asks the same questions over and over in a loop. This solution which is a combination hardware and software controlled by my phone eases his anxiety, provides relief to his caregivers, and gets the important information like upcoming events and appointments fresh in his mind. It also helps distract him when he goes on a tangent by introducing a new memory that lets him reminisce about other past memories. The tool initially began as a standalone Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen. It began as a 4 inch portable device and I realized with my Dads poor eyesight it needed to be bigger. The interface was designed to be as simple as possible. It just works and he controls it by touching the screen. He can point to different areas for different functions but it’s limited. It then became a faster Raspberry Pi with a 10 inch screen but that still had limitations when viewing a webpage for instance. Eventually we realized an iPad in Kiosk mode was the best interface.
Existing memory care tools don’t address the needs of my father. Someone who can open and turn on a phone but can’t remember what to do next. Or once the app is open how to intuitively make it work. The tool isn’t just for sentimental patients. It’s for helping them remember important things such as where did everyone go? Why am I here? If the caregiver needs to go outside and leave the patient alone for a short time- to the patient that could feel like days. The tool calmly reminds the patient he is safe and the caregiver went to pickup the mail and will be back in a few minutes. And then distracts him with memories from the past and every few pix the reminder announcements is played back as both a voice thats from the caregiver and a message as if they were there telling them not to worry.
My father was in the hospital last week and he kept asking why he was there. The app showed him in the hospital unconscious and getting blood transfusions. Once he saw that he stopped asking why as the tool showed him why he was there any my voice calmly told him what happened. The photo above shows him reading the announcement.
Manus helped me turn my idea into a reality. The evolution and discovery along the way about how to solve this problem, how to implement it, trying out dedicated hardware solutions versus realizing an iPad in Kiosk mode was the best for performance and least limitations in usage. As each stage progressed and evolved whether I needed to build a website for this idea or help get the idea out to the press, Manus was there as my partner for every step.
You can see the site at https://remns.us which is pronounced “Reminsce Us”. The actual app and back end controller isn’t available for public testing yet but thats in the works now that I know the concept is sound and there are millions of people that need this.
So now that Meta is taking steps to reverse the acquisition as was mentioned in the news yesterday, what should us Manus users do? I’ve begun backing up all my files to GitHub and dumping the database contents and structures and any written documentation from each project into my NAS for safe keeping. I’ve also been asking Manus to produce documents for future upgrades so I have a path forward possibly with a different agent. We all know that support has been terrible and I think it has a lot to do with the fact this acquisition was in limbo. I don’t know how much time we have left or if our projects will suddenly disappear or if things will just keep running. I don’t know. I do know that I’m concerned, disappointed, and sad as I’ve built some amazing things that are just starting to get some traction and was looking towards a bright future of more innovations. Now I’m not so sure.
Manus is still helping me get a ton of work done and I still love it but it’s starting to show some cracks in what I believed was an incredible and amazing tool. It’s happening enough to make me doubt its answers. I read an article how LLMs are basically always trying to guess the answer and narrowing the odds to feel confident with that choice. So over the last 3 days i had 28,000 credits I needed to spend before it renewed to 63,000 credits. So I’ve been intently using Manus to finish 3 major projects I’ve been working on. One of the projects is a large website and several times it would grab photos and replace them with the wrong ones even though I explicitly told Manus which photo to use. I would ask it to rotate it and three times it rotated the wrong photos and replaced photos I didn’t ask it to replace. I pointed out the mistake, Manus said I’m sorry and will fix it but it doesn’t get fixed. Another try and it fails. I have to tell Manus to stop and take a break. I now have to straighten out the mess Manus caused as photos have been removed and replaced and other photos were modified that shouldn’t. Before this it seemed Manus never made mistakes but now it seems to make them all the time and can’t fix them. Manus will suggest I make a change and two instructions later I tell it to make that change and it no longer remembers. Maybe I’ve just spent too much time with Manus lately but past ideas I ran by Manus about building is now saying it’s not a good idea and that I shouldn’t do it. Manus almost feels bi-polar. It’s wild.
Most of the posts here are negative which is mostly expected for the internet. So far Manus has been great for me but I do have some fears such as no human support which Manus told me to contact when I asked it about credits. I opened my account on my phone and later used my desktop to access Manus and it wouldn’t accept subscription updates from there telling me I had to use my phone and that’s fine. Anyways on to the good. I make finished goods for retail and professional use. We do everything from printing commercial quality color labels to die cutting them to formulating the contents and producing them to fulfillment and customer service. Manus helped me redesign my product labels, and most recently helped me design a computer controlled system where it controls three chemical sources and precisely measures out each amount and mixes them together using all off the shelf parts from Amazon. At one step I was struggling with one aspect which was the slowest part of the manufacturing process so I asked Manus how I could speed it up and that lead to me creating an electrified portable vibrating sieve and while building it bounced ideas off Manus. That lead to the next issue, my formula couldn’t tolerate being blended with a blender due to being too violent. So we talked about some lol violent aka low shear methods. It suggested a tool which reminded me that maybe I could use an electric egg whisker and when I combined it with the electric sieve I basically built a method that cost me $60 that solved a problem that normally costs thousands. And the end result? It reduced the manufacturing time from an hour to 10 minutes. What a time saver. That’s how manus helps me. We bounce ideas back and forth and for me it’s a game changer in how I build and design. I’m still blown away.
I tried Manus about a month ago making an iOS app for my father with dementia and a few other tools with some free credits. The process blew me away as I experimented more about what were the limits of this tool as I was relatively new to incorporating AI into my business and personal life. While overall the experience has been life altering, there have been a few instances where a lot of credits were wasted because Manus promised me results it couldn’t deliver and despite repeated attempts I gave up realizing it’s just not one of his fortes. Unfortunately that was an expensive lesson. In short I had Manus design some product labels for me for a new product I’m selling and after every iteration it asked if I wanted him to make into a print ready production file. Eventually I relented and the results were comical. Like a serious bait and switch. It produced an amazing rendering and when converted to a print ready file it wasn’t even close to being ready. I ended up using the rendering as a base layer to trace from to create my own production file. Manus still saved me a ton of time but I realized it wasn’t ready for that task yet. I did provide a follow up by asking if Manus can learn from past mistakes and showed the file I created and he compared his results with mine and realized what was wrong. I haven’t asked it to do it again though. But regardless that was the one task I realized Manus isn’t ready for. But in other areas, Manus helped me troubleshoot the php code on a website that was written 10 years ago from some developers for a partners website and Manus fixed some bad coding and improved upon it. I’ve built and launched 7 websites and they are all amazing. I love being able to revise them so easily. If I get a new testimonial, I send a screenshot to Manus and it gets read and interpreted and added on. I normally wear a lot of hats in my business but now I have an equal or even superior partner that can help me in so many ways and doesn’t complain. Truly mind blowing. I’m currently at the $200/month level because the only way you can get instant credits is to upgrade the plan, if you downgrade you don’t get new credits til the month is over. That’s where Manus is like a drug. But what Manus has done for me for this price is only a fraction of what it would cost me in labor costs and time so it’s worth it to me. Amazing. I’ve got probably 40 tasks in progress right now.