I just thought the same and thought this was really some dark pattern not adding any trust. Also there is no really good examples or performance metrics.
There is stuff on GitHub that actually does similar stuff [0] [1] . We tried some pipelines a year ago for a project (understanding compliance relevant process diagrams) and it was still quite a challenge . Wonder what the state is now with all those vision llms and even if commercial how good that stuff is.
I really appreciate you calling this out, and I'm genuinely sorry for the bad experience. The wording was misleading, and we should have been much clearer.
To be transparent, when we started, the AI model costs quickly became unsustainable with purely free usage. We had to introduce a paid model to cover these costs and ensure we could keep the service running and improving. It was a difficult decision, and we clearly fumbled the communication.
We've since added a free trial with credits for every new user. I know we made a poor first impression, but I hope you'll consider giving it another try. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us do better.
You are absolutely right, and we're sorry for the frustrating experience. Forcing a sign-up before you can even try the tool is poor form, and we apologize for wasting your time. As a new team, we're still learning, and this was a clear mistake on our part.
Based on this (very necessary) feedback, we have now implemented a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account.
If you do choose to sign up later, we also provide some free credits. We have to cap the trial usage due to API costs, but we've tried to make it generous enough for a fair evaluation.
Thank you for the blunt feedback. We genuinely appreciate it and would be grateful if you’d consider giving it another look. We are committed to listening to our users and continuously improving.
They should have let us tried the tool without signing in, that is only natural. Why would I give you my time and my personal information because you claim you do something? It is deceptive and unfair to our time to ask me to sign in as the final step. Instantly closed. The new generation of developers should learn some manners.
We're very sorry that our actions came across as deceiving. That was never our goal, but we understand that the impact is more important than the intent.
To be transparent, we were struggling to manage the high costs of the AI models and made a clumsy decision to put a wall up too early. It was the wrong choice, and we apologize.
We've listened to the feedback and have since corrected our mistake. You can now try the product without signing in, and if you do register, you'll get 5 free credits to test it properly. We hope this action demonstrates our true intention, which is to build a product people genuinely like and trust. We'd be grateful if you'd consider trying it again.
I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML).
At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get new licenses), and which is easy enough for teammates of varying technical abilities to contribute to.
For Arch Diagrams, most people seem to jump to Draw.IO, which is nice, but I'm not sure how easily it can be version controlled (although I haven't tried). At work it usually falls into the "did you put your latest version on SharePoint" black-hole (we don't pay for the cloud syncing version of draw.io). I wanted to try Figma, since it's at least a bit more collaborative, but there aren't any good first-party templates, so maybe it's not the right place, either.
For DFDs, I'd like to try Mermaid, or D2, or PlantUML (scared by the syntax on that one, though). I've not tried any of these, right now we usually do these in draw.io too, but I feel like code-defined ones would be an easier to maintain option and can live in a repo easier.
Sequence Diagrams are currently usually done using the sequencediagram.org engine, which I'm not a huge fan of, but at least it's relatively easily handled text. I don't think there was a good VS Code integration last time I checked (I think it was some web emulator, not a built-in engine?).
ERDs, I'd also like to find a good local tool to probably just use SQL on the backend, so that it's one less conversion. I'm open to all suggestions for that, though.
I've been doing diagrams with Mermaid. The beauty is that I use Gemini to ask it to add stuff to the diagram. And there are a bunch of plug-ins for Google docs to visualize the diagrams. I just wish Confluence had a free way to do it.
tldraw is also something very easy to use but surprisingly powerful and I know they are compared a lot to Excalidraw, not so sure about draw.io - but could be worth adding to your list. It is a very extendable library with some fun genai hooks like makereal.tldraw
There’s also a “include a copy of my diagram” feature when exporting an image from drawio, which partially overlaps with the use case of this app (assuming the export in question was done with this feature enabled).
Youtube videos that are lectures with slide shows .. or PDF slide decks ..can also be a input / starting point..with some additional detection and parsing. Both can have multiple images in them.
This is an excellent idea, thank you so much for suggesting it. You're right, parsing lecture videos and PDFs to extract diagrams would be a powerful feature.
We've officially added it to our backlog. We're excited about this one and will prioritize it.
We genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Please keep the great ideas coming!
Readit News
"It's that free diagramming tool that just works. No credit card, no trial periods, no BS", etc
There is stuff on GitHub that actually does similar stuff [0] [1] . We tried some pipelines a year ago for a project (understanding compliance relevant process diagrams) and it was still quite a challenge . Wonder what the state is now with all those vision llms and even if commercial how good that stuff is.
[0] https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/diagram2graph
[1] https://github.com/modhtom/Pic2Chart
To be transparent, when we started, the AI model costs quickly became unsustainable with purely free usage. We had to introduce a paid model to cover these costs and ensure we could keep the service running and improving. It was a difficult decision, and we clearly fumbled the communication.
We've since added a free trial with credits for every new user. I know we made a poor first impression, but I hope you'll consider giving it another try. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us do better.
Based on this (very necessary) feedback, we have now implemented a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account.
If you do choose to sign up later, we also provide some free credits. We have to cap the trial usage due to API costs, but we've tried to make it generous enough for a fair evaluation.
Thank you for the blunt feedback. We genuinely appreciate it and would be grateful if you’d consider giving it another look. We are committed to listening to our users and continuously improving.
Deleted Comment
Flagged for not gratifying my intellectual curiosity.
You were right to flag it. The onboarding flow was broken, and we've since fixed it based on this feedback.
We've now introduced two key changes:
1. A no-login trial to let you test the tool immediately.
2. 5 free credits for every user who signs up, ensuring you can run several tests before seeing any paywall.
We understand if the ship has sailed, but if your curiosity remains, we would be grateful for a second chance.
To be transparent, we were struggling to manage the high costs of the AI models and made a clumsy decision to put a wall up too early. It was the wrong choice, and we apologize.
We've listened to the feedback and have since corrected our mistake. You can now try the product without signing in, and if you do register, you'll get 5 free credits to test it properly. We hope this action demonstrates our true intention, which is to build a product people genuinely like and trust. We'd be grateful if you'd consider trying it again.
It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.
Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams ...
I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML).
At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get new licenses), and which is easy enough for teammates of varying technical abilities to contribute to.
For Arch Diagrams, most people seem to jump to Draw.IO, which is nice, but I'm not sure how easily it can be version controlled (although I haven't tried). At work it usually falls into the "did you put your latest version on SharePoint" black-hole (we don't pay for the cloud syncing version of draw.io). I wanted to try Figma, since it's at least a bit more collaborative, but there aren't any good first-party templates, so maybe it's not the right place, either.
For DFDs, I'd like to try Mermaid, or D2, or PlantUML (scared by the syntax on that one, though). I've not tried any of these, right now we usually do these in draw.io too, but I feel like code-defined ones would be an easier to maintain option and can live in a repo easier.
Sequence Diagrams are currently usually done using the sequencediagram.org engine, which I'm not a huge fan of, but at least it's relatively easily handled text. I don't think there was a good VS Code integration last time I checked (I think it was some web emulator, not a built-in engine?).
ERDs, I'd also like to find a good local tool to probably just use SQL on the backend, so that it's one less conversion. I'm open to all suggestions for that, though.
Deleted Comment
Youtube videos that are lectures with slide shows .. or PDF slide decks ..can also be a input / starting point..with some additional detection and parsing. Both can have multiple images in them.
We've officially added it to our backlog. We're excited about this one and will prioritize it.
We genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Please keep the great ideas coming!