Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

avohq.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 171 posts

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#51

Post by adrianthedev »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
adrianthedev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful! On point feedback! I had quite a tough time promoting the product and the homepage calculator was one push to highlight one quality of Avo ($ savings). But I agree, that's shouldn't be the biggest selling point. I'll make sure to position the product differently. Thank you!

For what it's worth, I do like that it builds as you scroll down! It shows how much goes into building an app. I wonder if switching the focus to just the dev time, or even have some sort of chart of all the other tools that slowly merges into Avo? EDIT: Or a cute "Dev todo list" that gets crossed off ( https://roughnotation.com/ ) as you scroll down, and Avo takes care of things for you?

Those roughnotation.com animations look so cool! I don't know how much time was spent on building those, but you don't want to know how much time I spent on building that calculator :grinning face with sweat:

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#52

Post by adrianthedev »

gingerlime wrote: post #46

looks neat. A quick question: you mention pundit, but we use cancancan. Would it cause any conflicts?

I'm confident there will not be conflicts. You will have to write pundit policies to enable authorization.

Also, I think you could make some sort of adapter between the two. Pundit is mostly a Ruby class.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#53

Post by highwaylights »

adrianthedev wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I'm Adrian, an indie developer and creator of Avo. For more than ten years, I built countless admin panels and back-offices for all types of apps. After a while, you start to notice patterns and extract functionality away to make the job easier. I took those patterns and applied them to Avo. Now, in just an hour, a developer can build production-ready applications that with traditional coding techniques take…

“I don't want to seem harsh, but I challenge non-believers to give Avo an hour of their time to see how it's different.

TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's toolbox.”

Earnestly, I wish you well. These are rather bold claims.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#54

Post by adrianthedev »

alexalx666 wrote: post #42
adrianthedev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few free packages (Active Admin, administrate, rails admin) built a few years ago that can help you build a CRUD UI, but the conversations I had with developers is that they are a bit annoyed with them. I built Avo as a modern alternative learning from the past products and improving on them.

I think it makes total sense for client work and almost no sense for startups

Why do you say that? Start-ups by definition need to move fast and test out hypothesis. With a tool like Avo you could prototype something, get it out to your customers and get feedback fast.

The secodn use-case is internal tooling. When I worked at a start-up we had a lot of "shady" internal tools built fast, crappy and unreliable (because it's just an internal tool) and we always had issues working with them.

I build a lot of internal tooling using Avo and the process is quite painless.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#55

Post by danenania »

adrianthedev wrote: post #43
andi999 wrote: post #25

Pricing is unclear. It has a fixed price and later talks about subscription. How much is the subscription. Also at what is the frameworks strategie on locking doing transactions in the database.

Sorry about that. I'll try to make that clearer. We have an FAQ item on teh bottom of the page. The pricing is per project (per app). You pay $250, and you get one year of updates and then use it forever. The license is a Perpetual Fallback License. When you stop paying for a subscription, you will still be able to keep and use the latest version of Avo at the point in time when the subscription ended but you will lo…

The "one year of updates" thing is kind of confusing. What if an app has a longer lifetime than that? Can you no longer get updates to Avo? What about bugs and security updates?

I think you're over-complicating the pricing. Why not just say it's $250 per project per year? You can still keep the fallback option and explain it in your FAQ. It would be more immediately understandable this way imo.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#56

Post by adrianthedev »

highwaylights wrote: post #53
adrianthedev wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I'm Adrian, an indie developer and creator of Avo. For more than ten years, I built countless admin panels and back-offices for all types of apps. After a while, you start to notice patterns and extract functionality away to make the job easier. I took those patterns and applied them to Avo. Now, in just an hour, a developer can build production-ready applications that with traditional coding techniques take…

“I don't want to seem harsh, but I challenge non-believers to give Avo an hour of their time to see how it's different. TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's toolbox.” Earnestly, I wish you well. These are rather bold claims.

I was on the fence if I should add those in, but I'm kind of glad I did.

I feel a little bit like Taylor Otwell in the old days when he was telling people about Laravel, or Evan You back in the day when you'd search for "JS framework" and you'd only get React and Angular.

They were on the verge of something new and useful, but nobody believed. I think developers, in general, are pretty inflexible when it comes to new things (only my oppinion), that's why I wanted to add those.

It's obvious that Avo is not the silver bullet for any app and has caveats in some scenarios. All tools do (Rails, Laravel, NextJS, django, spring, you fill in the rest), but for most apps it really does give you superpowers. You build apps 10x faster and the maintenance work is second to none. And in the end, you get a beautiful app ready to present to your customers or team.

Thank you for the encouragement! I need it :)

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#57

Post by jressey »

This is a serious question: Do any of you folks get paid good money to start projects? In my career I have "started" projects for maybe 2-5% of my time. All of the real effort goes in to massaging the app to actually solve unique business problems, about 80-90% on edge cases.

Bold and cynical claim: Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a social media brand about building social media brands. The problem this solves is only experienced by serial creators who like starting projects, not making useful stuff. I personally know 2 people who are like that attempted to start this exact same concept for a company, and that was like 6 years ago, and it was Rails too.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#58

Post by adrianthedev »

canadiantim wrote: post #38
adrianthedev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's better than having nothing. I think there's a lot to be done in this space and having someone or a team working on it full time is the way to go.

Absolutely. I know there are some projects kind of like this, but right now they are lost in my bookmarks folder somewhere... I recall a couple of good admin dropin replacements, I think one or two even have a paid-model which I dig cause I'm more than willing to pay for django-specific code that will save me development time. Likewise, I know there's some good projects trying to do something similar to Avo, but agai…

If you can, buy their product or sponsor the project. The amount of work it goes into maintaining this kinds of products is quite high. Spread the love!

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#60

Post by adrianthedev »

danenania wrote: post #55
adrianthedev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that. I'll try to make that clearer. We have an FAQ item on teh bottom of the page. The pricing is per project (per app). You pay $250, and you get one year of updates and then use it forever. The license is a Perpetual Fallback License. When you stop paying for a subscription, you will still be able to keep and use the latest version of Avo at the point in time when the subscription ended but you will lo…

The "one year of updates" thing is kind of confusing. What if an app has a longer lifetime than that? Can you no longer get updates to Avo? What about bugs and security updates? I think you're over-complicating the pricing. Why not just say it's $250 per project per year? You can still keep the fallback option and explain it in your FAQ. It would be more immediately understandable this way imo.

I tried that and the question that popped up was "what if I don't pay anymore? will I not be able to use it then?". It kind of turned people away, and that's why I change the copy.

If an app has a longer lifetime than a year, and I hope it does, then you'd have to resume the subscription to get the updates (bugs and security). It's the way the perpetual-fallback license works. There are plenty of products (table plus, jumpstart rails) and large companies (jetbrains) that practice this model. I wish there was an easier way of shipping those updates without a subscription.

Post reply on HN