Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

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.

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.

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.

We do, just not on every tool and widget.

I think you make a lot of insulting assumptions about other people. I'm sure there are many who are more frugal than me for their personal reasons, but it's not some personal failure not to be persuaded to rent a particular product.

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.