Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap.
Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)
In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses and maybe offer them a deal based on the amount of developers they have. So sell it do a dev shop with 10 developers at $20/developer / per month. Businesses understand the time/money tradeoff and are not cheap.
Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
No. Monthly subscriptions suck. Every company wants to "tax" me monthly for something that's feature complete. The ones I already pay, I do so very begrudgingly. There's simply too many SaaS products out there.
Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.
I happily pay a lot of money for nice things, but only if I get to own them. I am not cheap, I'm picky. I'm not picky by choice, I'm picky by experience. I already know I can't trust subscriptions.
If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.
I mean, you are taking shit for this comment for some reason, but it is absolutely true! At some point I don't want to have to pay for dozens of apps every month. Just charge me what you need and let me have it. If it is broken when you sold it to me, great, I will update. If you come up with new clever additions, I may or may not want those. But subscriptions take that ability away from you. And I want a tool to use, not a relationship with you forever!
I don’t like subscriptions because they feel like this never ending ticket that as soon as I complete that task it immediately is recreated +30 days out. Buying items for a whole price allows me to close that task for good.
Agree.
I use a tool on Windows called Netlimiter. I use it to block out/in going connections per app, rate limit per app or block internet for certain apps.
It's been working, I purchased a license time ago, no updates and it works.
This year they changed the business model and the new licenses expire every 1/2 years in exchange of a feature i don't even care about.
I'll keep using the old version obviously.
Why on earth a complete software had to resume development and charge me yearly?
I understand the feeling of not wanting to pay continuously for something feature complete. But, as long as the monthly cost for those tools is less, than the hourly-rate it would take to do it yourself, does it really matter? You are still saving money/time.
Yeah, now do the math how much it costs to keep a company in business, and how much it must land in the bank every single month to pay everyone's salaries and infrastructure.
It might be a pedantic point but when you buy a perpetual license you don’t “own” the product - you “own” a license to use the product, on the terms in the license.
> They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)
To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap.
Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc.
I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to.
It’s actually incredible how cheap we are. I catch myself doing it, and what makes it even more ridiculous is how much I won’t even think twice about spending on other things that are just hobbies. Why does my brain think it’s fine to spend hundreds of dollars on a microphone or a lens or even a plugin that is actually also software, but $50 for a tool that will help me with my 40 hour a week job is out of the question.
A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.
If it's helping the job then we ought to (be able to) expense it, there's a much higher bar for getting me to pay personally to help my work - as in it can't just be 'do it faster' (at the end of the day, do/should I care?) it would need to be posture/eye strain improving and not offered by employer, or something like that.
Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software.
Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what?
('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.)
Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)
Well for me this would be a hobby purchase. The problem is that while I could justify dropping $150 on something like this to myself, I don't want to pay for it by the month, knowing that most months I won't use it.
I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..
It absolutely does benefit me to save time, because writing css by hand is one of the most soul-crushingly boring tasks imaginable. Sure my employer also benefits, but that's only if I use that saved time to write more code. Maybe I use the extra time to walk my dog.
> In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year.
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh.
I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though.
So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here).
That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me".
> At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000,
Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0.
> My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses
I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools.
> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in.
This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week.
Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m.
It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision.
I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.
Unless all your work involves CSS I doubt it saves 3-4 hours / week. Also, saving 3 hours of work doesn't mean you get paid for 3 hours more. It's also a dependency that's not guaranteed to exist as long as the default browser dev tools or available on every machine.
If all you do is css I doubt you have a workflow where this tool would save you 3-4 hours a week. It might even be ~20 minutes/week and 10 minutes/week stumbling while relearning your habits to use (depend on) this tool. And then a year later when you are completely dependent on this tool. Boom. It's now acquired by and part of Atom Text Editor Enterprise Ide where all those who invested too much in Atom went to die.
Couldn't agree with this more. It's always nice to think that some super clean UI beats making quick CSS adjustments alongside HMR or a quick build time but in my experience it probably never does. If I wanted to test different font weights of some text I wouldn't go into the CSS in my browser and adjust it, I'd just change the value in my CSS (helped more-so by CSS frameworks such as Tailwind), and see how the output changed. The upside being that if I like how it looks, I've already made the change to my code. I don't know who this would realistically save any significant amount of time a week for outside of an inexperienced developer who doesn't have a pretty good idea of how slight style differences will impact the final product.
Maybe this should have a slightly different audience than developers, namely UX designers, technical product managers (semi-technical folks who know about html and css), etc. so that they can play around with their products, produce prototypes based on the actual product, share design specifications more easily etc.
For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools.
For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!
I understand your point but $30 more per month to have a web inspector that is slightly nicer in some way but also much more limited in many other ways is expensive. Monthly subscriptions adds up and not everyone has too much money.
Let's say they sells it at $10 / mo. They would need 1,000 customers to make a reasonable wage at $10,000 / month. If they sells it at $30/month, they would need only 300 customers.
Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem.
Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation.
Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc.
My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer.
I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly.
What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so.
People don't like subscriptions. And for entirely rational reasons, even if they can't articulate them. If you insist on selling subscriptions for people, they will treat it as predatory pricing (because for them it is) and will antagonize you.
Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons.
Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.
People keep saying there are rational reasons, but I haven’t seen a single response here that doesn’t boil down to “feels”.
They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing.
Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.
Subscriptions have ruined software development by introducing a ton of external SaaS dependencies.
For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc..
When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old.
Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it.
I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right?
I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal.
The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value.
Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.
It is insulting, but sometimes the shoe fits. Developer tools is notoriously difficult because engineers (and their managers, and the teams) are very cheap.
* This tool may increase my time spent rather than save time. I need to spend time to find out. So I don’t buy every one of the million tools because I am too cheap. I don’t have time to evaluate all of them.
* I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway
* Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.
I have a theory that a lot of us became developers after being poor teenagers who downloaded warez for $0 in the olden days.
For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.
> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count.
Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs.
I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.
> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week
Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time.
I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it.
Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources.
Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.
Spending money is one thing. I don’t think most devs are opposed to doing that, especially for things that are central to your work. But I’m hard-pressed to see how a browser extension that will improve but not demonstrable change how browser dev tools work is worth $30 a month. This reminds me of Mighty, the $30 a month web browser that promised to be a lot faster and better (it ran off of cloud servers), but was absolutely not worth $30 a month (and I tried it and gave it an honest shot and it wasn’t). Mighty failed and now I think is trying to pivot to some sort of AI generative art thing.
Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.
I’m responding to this more because of the change to Kaleidoscope (MacOS diff tool) from one-time to subscription pricing.
I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration.
I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO).
I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation.
I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.
That is the central point of subscriptions, of course. They make people totally misjudge how much they pay for something. And that then enables $5 instead of $50 software. $5 is cheaper than $50, isn't it? Of course, no, it isn't, but that's the point.
Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS.
And if you calculate:
* At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers.
* At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.
> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo
Personal anecdote:
Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment.
I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away.
So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).
I'd like to point out that developers are likely exposed to more subscription costs than most average people. This or that tool is $5/m, hosting is $80 (or you run your own server, of which the electricity usage is constant), GitHub is $5-$15/m, Jet brains is close to $20.
Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.
Or perhaps I don't want to get fleeced and/or locked in to a model where if I stop paying, I lose access to an offline program that costs the app developer NOTHING extra for my use
On the other hand there are thousands of things that will make my life easier and you're right I will not spend 30,000 dollars a month to make my life easier.
At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments:
1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered)
2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever.
3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick.
This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth.
Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.
It's actually $180/year (works out to $15/month), not $360/year
And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial.
Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool.
If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right?
But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer.
When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial.
> $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year
Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month.
edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS
> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap.
That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.
The problem is not a single subscription. The problem is that today everything is a subscription. So you end up paying 600 euros per month from 20 subscriptions of "just 30 euros" and if you don't pay attention, you can even pay more.
Add to that most of the time GUI is just so much more work then writing code.
I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.
I have no idea what you do (and what startup idea you tried before and got burned) but your generalization is not accurate. You can also say that developers are extremely particular about what they want to pay for. Developers spend hours to automate something that takes 5 minutes every week is because it's fun. Obviously my previous two statements don't apply to every developer, hence the generalization is wrong. Some are cheap, some are particular, and some are even more particular. Just like every other field I suppose, who would've thought!
You act like 3 dinners for 2 people in a year is nothing.
Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that.
Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap."
Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.
It’s long been this way, even in the days when we had to (gasp) spend money for compilers. I remember feeling like the typical user on Usenet back in the day would rather smelt sand to make a microchip than spend money on computer stuff.
It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.
> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week
This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year.
As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on?
And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?
I'd be very surprised there's any developer that spends more than 4 hrs per week to tweak CSS to begin with, I just don't see the savings that you outlined.
I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.
If you're starting your own project, sure. But most people are paid hourly or salary and not paid based on completion of tasks, so I don't really care if it saves me hours at work - I'll be given more work to do. If the company is paying for it, I'd be happy to use it, but then your cost-effectiveness comparison goes out the window.
After subscribing to absolutely everything and wondering where your paycheck is going every pay period, you sort of learn to just stop subscribing to anything at all. It's not cheap, you just learn the hard way you'll just make your paycheck evaporate otherwise.
1000% agree. Don’t sell to devs, always sell to their employers. I now see how keeping your price hidden could be beneficial. The person you’re selling to isn’t the person who should be interested in the price!
You should talk to real estate, especially commercial real estate people. They are just as cheap, even though a commission could be $100k net or a new deal could yield $1M in profit in the next 5 years
It’s not about being cheap, it’s about not wanting a company to own your workflow and not wanting to limit your knowledge and skill to a proprietary product.
I have opened myself up for more subscription services over the last couple of years. I freelance. My income is generally 'high', but irregular. Monthly subscriptions aren't irregular.
Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple.
I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these.
I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar.
Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now.
Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature.
I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no).
"to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier".
My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.
the way you calculate savings is not really true in reality. even if I can now do my work 4 hours a week faster. I'm not immediately getting a pay bump, my boss just gives me 4hours of extra work.
It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours.
My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.
This is one of the more impressive and polished "Show HNs" I've seen recently. The landing page is superb, the tool is impressive and the ease of trying it out with the "Try on this page" is really great.
I think I'm inclined to agree on some of the other comments about pricing. It doesn't sit quite right in comparison to what I pay for other paid tools that I use daily.
I can see myself using something like this, and I don't mind paying for great software, but there is something about the $30/month entry price that just stops me considering it further. Maybe I need to actually use it to understand that it's worth this, but it's not clear enough to me coming to it cold.
One criticism. I clicked on the "Try on this page" to test it out, and after being initially impressed I clicked on "Try it Free" in the menu, assuming this was a link to see what free/trial options were available, but the link didn't do anything. It took several page refreshes and re-clicking this to realise that this was just doubling up the function of the "Try on this page" option and in fact there is no free trial available.
I think the comments criticising the pricing are wrong, you can't compare one generalist tool to another highly specialised tool. But on top of that comparing to Figma, Framer or other VC backed products is a mistake, these products are priced to capture market share and grow rabidly. They are clearly underpriced. I may be wrong but CSS Pro looks like a small bootstrapped product, pricing for market growth doesn't need to be the strategy. This is priced for sustainable development and supporting the developer on a small niche product.
If a developer/designer is using this 1 day in 5 then they can justify the subscription.
To those suggesting this shouldn't be a subscription, keep in mind that CSS is going through a period of rapid improvements, this enables them to add support for new features without having to either eat the cost on a sold product or charge for upgrades multiple times a year.
VC backed business setting low prices for rapid growth has unfortunately damaged the ability for small indie developers to price their products sustainably.
On the subscription side, I think it's an issue as it moves the control away from the consumer when doing those upgrades. With the older, one-time purchase upgrade model, which has since fallen out of favour; I could evaluate once a year whether the updated product was worth the additional cost. With a subscription model, there's a chance I could end up funding the development of features that I neither want nor need.
The old model was tightly coupled to the CD as distribution vector—you got what came on the disk, nothing more. It was easy to understand for everyone involved, and the path of least resistance for the developers
The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.
JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.
You could also just cancel when you realize it's not worth it instead of sinking a large upfront on it only to find it didn't fit into your workflow. I find that a benefit as even very loved and low priced software often just doesn't fit my personal desired ways of working.
I'll try it because of hype/marketing/good Show HN/etc, and then never really adopt it. So my thought is it's better to just make it easy to cancel the subscription otherwise I'd probably never even try it.
Many investor backed businesses also might increase their pricing over the years. At the moment you reach enough users, especially users which are highly dependent on you, you increase the prices to make shareholders happy.
This is unfortunately a very common strategy, and I rather pay for indie developer bit more than a tech company with a large amount of investors.
This looks great and I’m not against charging for tools — I’m not even against subscriptions (even tho they often annoy me personally), but the value prop here doesn’t seem to match $30 a month (or $15 if you do annual).
And it isn’t because I’m cheap — I spend lots of money on lots of stuff — or that I don’t value indie development (same), but this pricing puts this utility in the same class as things like Figma, the Adobe Suite, a lot of CMSes (Webflow, Craft, etc.) for a utility that might be useful, but doesn’t strike me as $360 a year (or even $180 a year) useful.
The value prop just isn’t here for me, even tho I like what this is trying to do. At $5 a month/$50 a year, I think you’d get more traction and much better volume than what you can get at $30 a month/$180 a year prepaid.
And I have to say, when I see prices this high, I’m hesitant to prepay from unknown companies because I don’t have any expectation about how long it will be in business or continue to update the product, because I don’t see how you get sustainable development at this price point. Figma and Adobe can charge what they charge because they’ve earned it and because those are tools where you feel like you get your money’s worth.
$30 a month for something that will improve but not fundamentally change the way I do web dev, I’m sorry but no.
Couldn't agree more. I have no problem paying for tools, especially when they will save me time.
That said, don't I need to know how to use devtools (chrome/ff/safari) to do my job in the first place? It feels like this product is trying to inject itself into a process that isn't super refined but works fine.
The real problem is the dependency it creates. If I only know how to do frontend work with handheld UI controls, then I have to use them and am locked into this product. It doesn't promote me learning the css rules or understanding how to actually fix things, so then I'm back to the devtools and why am I using this?
So prefixing that line with "javascript:" and putting it into a bookmark would let you use it on any site you wish, simply by clicking the bookmark. Without having to install an extension.
Would be a good alternative the author could offer imho.
Looks like this is meant for professional web developers to make their life easier. So it is not here to replace wix. So,
1. I am struggling to understand the value proposition of this. Demo is cool but most developers working in an organization will not use most of the features shown here. No, no rotation or fancy fonts or colors. The only thing they will do is to use the standard font or color. And most elements don't use any backgrounds, and if they do they use one of the three predefined colors as the background. Gradient color? Maybe once a year. You can already do spacing stuff and text modification in the chrome devtools. I know this tool seems to make it easier, but is it worth paying money for it? I just don't see myself or any medium/large organization (e.g. Microsoft) paying $30/month. Figma is expensive but that is a whole product by itself. It enables new workflow and is irreplaceable in many ways, but I don't see this tool being the same.
2. Demo does not seem to tackle one of the biggest pain points -- layout. Based on stackoverflow questions and their upvote numbers plus what I see in my company, many people (including new and experienced developers) have trouble handling various methods of layout and arranging items. That is where this tool could help -- if done correctly.
3. What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day? Can this compete at all? I'll be surprised if something doesn't already exist today.
Basically, this is all interesting stuff but I can't see how it is a viable business if you charge $30/month.
You probably aren’t the target market, you’d typically ask the company you work for to pay for it or if you’re a freelancer and use dev tools daily for this CSS stuff (which I’ve personally done at various times in my career) you just factor it into your business expenses.
It’s not like a random person paying for Netflix. $30 is a reasonable ask.
> What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day
In the video there’s a serious amount of functionality, that would take someone doing this as a hobby a very long time. And most OSS design-wise typically doesn’t look as good or polished (designers care about that). That’s usually the difference, the time/effort a commercial company can put in vs volunteer OSS teams.
The killer feature here would be hooking this up to Netlify/Vercel etc. and having a 2-way-write. Every time you update something in the CSSPro editor, your codebase is actually updated and the site is rebuilt in the background. This would let you essentially design in the browser and avoid the tedious copy/paste, rebuild, reload cycle.
This is what I’ve wanted for ages from browser dev tools. It’s now fairly standard to have hot refresh where the dev server uses websockets to control injecting changes and refreshing the browser when changes are made in the code files. I want to go the other way. If I tweak css in browser, have a way to write those changes back to the project. The real challenge would be traversing a change in browser css back to scss/less.
We used to have full WYSIWYG editors in browsers as far back as the 90s (including deployment via FTP). Specialized editors just seem to have always been the preference for developers.
I wonder if there is a way to "export changes to git", such that you can download some sort of script (or apply some cherry-picked git changes) from an external source?
In this case, you would press "export changes to git" and then somehow apply them to your local repo, and bam, all the changes transferred without having to actually change any files.
One problem with this is that the changes in the browser are done on the distribution (bundled) files. Maybe using source-maps it could still be possible.
The changes exist in the file system of wherever the server runs. Presumably in the repo if code. Run your git commands to see what is changed and select what to commit.
Readit News
Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)
In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses and maybe offer them a deal based on the amount of developers they have. So sell it do a dev shop with 10 developers at $20/developer / per month. Businesses understand the time/money tradeoff and are not cheap.
Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.
I happily pay a lot of money for nice things, but only if I get to own them. I am not cheap, I'm picky. I'm not picky by choice, I'm picky by experience. I already know I can't trust subscriptions.
If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.
People seem to forget what the cost of a perpetual license use to be.
Licenses would easily equate to 3-years (36-months) or more, of what a monthly subscription would cost.
Case in point:
$439, you can buy a perpetual license of Microsoft Office
$7/mo, you can get the same functionality + hosting + storage as a monthly subscription
It'd take over 5-years to breakeven.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
Doesn’t that option completely remove your concerns with this product?
It's been working, I purchased a license time ago, no updates and it works.
This year they changed the business model and the new licenses expire every 1/2 years in exchange of a feature i don't even care about.
I'll keep using the old version obviously.
Why on earth a complete software had to resume development and charge me yearly?
There is a perpetual licence listed on a page; Life-time $900
> Monthly subscriptions suck.
They do. But for a SaaS biz that has to pay the bills for infra it is hard to get around it.
To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap.
Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc.
I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to.
I love "subs" like JetBrains though.
A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.
Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software.
Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what?
('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.)
Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)
Hobbies are hugely important to a healthy life.
They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh.
I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though.
So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here).
That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me".
> At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000,
Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0.
> My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses
I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools.
> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in.
This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week.
Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m.
It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision.
I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.
For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools.
For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!
30 USD here, 30 USD there, soon enough your bills go in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem.
Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation.
Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc.
My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer.
I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly.
What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so.
Rant over.
Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons.
Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.
They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing.
Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.
For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc..
When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old.
Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it.
I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right?
I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal.
The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value.
Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.
>but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
Your post is insulting and it really seems like it is an ad for this product.
* I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway
* Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.
I don’t own the product when subscribing, I am only leasing it for as long as I pay. I don’t like that, I prefer to own my products.
Everything is slowly turning into a subscription, sure this is only 30$ a month, but if all my products were subscription based, I would go bankrupt.
For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.
How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count.
Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs.
I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.
Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time.
I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it.
Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources.
Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.
Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.
I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration.
I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO).
I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation.
I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.
Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS.
And if you calculate:
* At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers.
* At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.
We're not all making 100k+/yr, $30/mo is a significant amount.
Deleted Comment
Personal anecdote:
Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment.
I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away.
So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).
if I wanted to make my life easier I'd stop using emacs and arch linux
and no I won't
Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.
FWIW, if it were a 1-time price I would have paid probably $50 - $99 for that.
Here's a good interview with Adam Wathan from Tailwind about lifetime pricing:
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
Congrats on making it to the homepage of HN!
At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments:
1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered)
2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever.
3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick.
This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth.
Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.
If your a developer business owner(not hourly freelancer) than absolutely makes financial sense.
If your an hourly freelancer your customers probably aren't going to offer you more money for your time.
If you work for someone else they should pay for it.
If you are fixed bid or some variation on that then probably makes sense because your time is money.
And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial.
Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool.
If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right?
But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer.
When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial.
> $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year
Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month.
edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS
That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.
Either that math is wrong, or we're eating different dinners.
In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”.
It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.
Devs aren't cheap, tools like this are useless. "Don't write code - use our GUI!" has been a winning proposition almost never.
I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.
Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that.
Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap."
Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.
It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.
This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year.
As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on?
And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?
I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.
Just because developers in US in San Fran make $350k a year doesn't mean everyone does. And it's incredibly short sighted to assume that.
But ignoring all of that, your only recommendation is to sell it cheaper B2B... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of keeping the $30 price?
Developers who spend their time commenting about how something is too expensives are cheap.
I have a job to do and can't afford to create the computing world from scratch just to be cheappy.
Likewise I want the folks that provide the tools I enjoy using, to also afford the same lifestyle I can enjoy having.
Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple.
I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these.
I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar.
Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now.
Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature.
I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no).
"to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier".
My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.
It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours.
My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.
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I think I'm inclined to agree on some of the other comments about pricing. It doesn't sit quite right in comparison to what I pay for other paid tools that I use daily.
I can see myself using something like this, and I don't mind paying for great software, but there is something about the $30/month entry price that just stops me considering it further. Maybe I need to actually use it to understand that it's worth this, but it's not clear enough to me coming to it cold.
One criticism. I clicked on the "Try on this page" to test it out, and after being initially impressed I clicked on "Try it Free" in the menu, assuming this was a link to see what free/trial options were available, but the link didn't do anything. It took several page refreshes and re-clicking this to realise that this was just doubling up the function of the "Try on this page" option and in fact there is no free trial available.
Overall though, seriously impressive work.
If a developer/designer is using this 1 day in 5 then they can justify the subscription.
To those suggesting this shouldn't be a subscription, keep in mind that CSS is going through a period of rapid improvements, this enables them to add support for new features without having to either eat the cost on a sold product or charge for upgrades multiple times a year.
VC backed business setting low prices for rapid growth has unfortunately damaged the ability for small indie developers to price their products sustainably.
The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.
JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.
I'll try it because of hype/marketing/good Show HN/etc, and then never really adopt it. So my thought is it's better to just make it easy to cancel the subscription otherwise I'd probably never even try it.
This is unfortunately a very common strategy, and I rather pay for indie developer bit more than a tech company with a large amount of investors.
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And it isn’t because I’m cheap — I spend lots of money on lots of stuff — or that I don’t value indie development (same), but this pricing puts this utility in the same class as things like Figma, the Adobe Suite, a lot of CMSes (Webflow, Craft, etc.) for a utility that might be useful, but doesn’t strike me as $360 a year (or even $180 a year) useful.
The value prop just isn’t here for me, even tho I like what this is trying to do. At $5 a month/$50 a year, I think you’d get more traction and much better volume than what you can get at $30 a month/$180 a year prepaid.
And I have to say, when I see prices this high, I’m hesitant to prepay from unknown companies because I don’t have any expectation about how long it will be in business or continue to update the product, because I don’t see how you get sustainable development at this price point. Figma and Adobe can charge what they charge because they’ve earned it and because those are tools where you feel like you get your money’s worth.
$30 a month for something that will improve but not fundamentally change the way I do web dev, I’m sorry but no.
That said, don't I need to know how to use devtools (chrome/ff/safari) to do my job in the first place? It feels like this product is trying to inject itself into a process that isn't super refined but works fine.
The real problem is the dependency it creates. If I only know how to do frontend work with handheld UI controls, then I have to use them and am locked into this product. It doesn't promote me learning the css rules or understanding how to actually fix things, so then I'm back to the devtools and why am I using this?
Looking at the code, you can indeed run it as a bookmarklet. I went to https://www.example.com and typed this in the browser console:
Boom! The tool is running.So prefixing that line with "javascript:" and putting it into a bookmark would let you use it on any site you wish, simply by clicking the bookmark. Without having to install an extension.
Would be a good alternative the author could offer imho.
However it may work as a UserScript depending on the UserScript engine.
1. I am struggling to understand the value proposition of this. Demo is cool but most developers working in an organization will not use most of the features shown here. No, no rotation or fancy fonts or colors. The only thing they will do is to use the standard font or color. And most elements don't use any backgrounds, and if they do they use one of the three predefined colors as the background. Gradient color? Maybe once a year. You can already do spacing stuff and text modification in the chrome devtools. I know this tool seems to make it easier, but is it worth paying money for it? I just don't see myself or any medium/large organization (e.g. Microsoft) paying $30/month. Figma is expensive but that is a whole product by itself. It enables new workflow and is irreplaceable in many ways, but I don't see this tool being the same. 2. Demo does not seem to tackle one of the biggest pain points -- layout. Based on stackoverflow questions and their upvote numbers plus what I see in my company, many people (including new and experienced developers) have trouble handling various methods of layout and arranging items. That is where this tool could help -- if done correctly. 3. What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day? Can this compete at all? I'll be surprised if something doesn't already exist today.
Basically, this is all interesting stuff but I can't see how it is a viable business if you charge $30/month.
It’s not like a random person paying for Netflix. $30 is a reasonable ask.
> What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day
In the video there’s a serious amount of functionality, that would take someone doing this as a hobby a very long time. And most OSS design-wise typically doesn’t look as good or polished (designers care about that). That’s usually the difference, the time/effort a commercial company can put in vs volunteer OSS teams.
Would you need to mount it locally with curlftpfs if you're on Linux?
Not only does it provide means for visual editing (for Tailwind only), but it also saves all changes to your code.
Free and open source.
[1] https://impulse.dev/
It'd have to ask you for the FS permissions again though since the active FS handle is stored in the IndexDB which of course is separate in incognito.
We used to have full WYSIWYG editors in browsers as far back as the 90s (including deployment via FTP). Specialized editors just seem to have always been the preference for developers.
In this case, you would press "export changes to git" and then somehow apply them to your local repo, and bam, all the changes transferred without having to actually change any files.
One problem with this is that the changes in the browser are done on the distribution (bundled) files. Maybe using source-maps it could still be possible.
Triplex has some of that 2-way sync for frontend to code: https://triplex.dev/docs/overview