Bench has failed to deliver on their commitments to allow users to download their data, so it's interesting that some of Bench's competitors are now starting to provide their own solution to facilitate data export.
When users now go to login to Bench, it asks if you want to consent to share your data with employer.com; OR request a download link be emailed to you. However, the download links never came, and Bench now says they will arrive by January 15th. Additionally, Bench now reportedly says that you must consent to share your data with employer.com in order for them to prepare a download link.
We use nextjs because we want to optimize the page for SEO and crawlability. If you don’t need your page to be crawlable (eg a dashboard behind a login), then there’s a good chance you don’t need nextjs, and pure React will indeed be simpler.
Given how much front end has evolved over the last 15 years, is it really the case still these days that you should do SSR for SEO? That would be a strong indictment of Google and other search engines if they still so many years later are not properly crawling JS based websites wouldn't it?
Google does crawl client side generated content but at a low priority and with mixed results. It's expensive and slow to render js pages so I see where they are coming from.
hey thanks for linking to routerino <3, i;ve thought about using something like this for my vanilla react projects and this seems perfect.
do you know what are the actual downsides for the end-user/client when compared to SSR (besides requiring client js)?
the main downside as a developer is it can be a little more work to set up Prerender depending on your hosting setup (although Netlify has just a checkbox to enable) to allow Googlebot to view the page JS-free. I've been playing around with some ideas to eliminate that requirement, however.
as an end user, the only downside would be the typical SPA ones, such as the client needs to render the site with JS like you mentioned (except in cases where we use pre-rendering).
Unfortunately, yes. While Google and many other search engines/crawlers can render JS it’s much faster to give them the rendered page - especially for very large sites.
But page load optimization does typically bring better user engagement so it’s not just an SEO strategy.
I created a subreddit in case any current/former Bench users would like to continue talking to one another and compare notes: https://www.reddit.com/r/BenchUsers
I created a subreddit in case any current/former Bench users would like to continue talking to one another and compare notes: https://www.reddit.com/r/BenchUsers
Has anyone figured out how to download your data from Bench? In the original email they sent out that announced they were shutting down, they said data would be available to download from http://data.bench.co. But right now, this domain appears to be inactive. When I logged back in, they gave me the option to: give employer.com permission to access my data, or download my data. I selected the former option so that I could access the dashboard, but I'd still like to download my data in case it turns out I would like to migrate to a competing service.
I'm in this same boat. I started the onboarding with kick.com over the weekend. Yesterday clicked the "Opt Out Download Data" button and still haven't seen any data.
Current (I guess now former) bench customer here. Concerned about this comment in their FAQ:
> On this website, by December 30th, you’ll be able to enter your Bench login credentials to download your current and prior year-end financials, as well as any documents you’ve uploaded such as receipts and bank statements.
This makes it sound like they are only making the year-end financials available - not the individual transactions/ledger entries. I’m concerned about this - aren’t the individual transactions required if one were to be audited? Would this create a lot of liability for their former customers?
W520 running Ubuntu is still my daily driver after 12 years. The build quality of their older models is just insane. I wish Lenovo would bring back their classic hardware.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549343
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42523061
Bench has failed to deliver on their commitments to allow users to download their data, so it's interesting that some of Bench's competitors are now starting to provide their own solution to facilitate data export.
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