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

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

#291

Post by hjkl0 »

rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

> 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?

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

#292

Post by gofreddygo »

bombcar wrote: post #192
jchw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! And I do, in fact, I will pay much more than that for a one-time software payment, and I have. However: > 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. At $900 , it's not so easy of a sell. edit: Especially…

I’d love to see software escrow for companies like this - something as simple as “if we stop making the software or go bankrupt or otherwise make it unable to be used, we have the source code and friends escrowed with a company that will then release it under the AGPL.”

Right... and an insurance company to cover for the escrow company going belly up.

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

#293

Post by miragecraft »

rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

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.

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

#294

Post by ppetty »

I don't think this is a devtools* replacement or a significant enough "game changer", this is just a different way to interact with CSS. Devtools reveals both the HTML & CSS (as well as the cascading rules that comprise what I'm seeing). Devtools let's me introspect & debug why what I'm seeing as it's happening with CSS in conjunction with HTML & possible HTML changes caused by JavaScript events or pointer-events, for example. I like that this tool could make looking at the parsed & rendered code in a browser window easy to "see" & maybe copy. But for a small part of what devtools does this really is expensive. More expensive than most other apps I use. More expensive than GPT+ plus. More than the cost of hosting my site on DigitalOcean or AWS.

If this were a truly must have app & I could get past the price, I'd enjoy it with the concern that most features could be incorporated into devtools directly, by browser makers or by other extensions that expand what devtools can do, although many features of this tool already can be achieved. In fact, I think that's the real missing feature in this service: it could be an web extension for augmenting CSS work devtools.

Lastly, what if the price started at $15/month and for every 250,000 (maybe less, maybe more) new users everyone's price was dropped by a $0.50/month but could never drop below $3/month. By the time the price hits $5/month there are at least 5 million subscribers ... (with no annual plans & no life time bananas plan) that seems pretty good.

* devtools is pretty awesome & pretty consistent in every browser.

(Oh, and I'm super cheap, too.)

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

#295

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

aceazzameen wrote: post #90
rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

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…

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?

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

#296

Post by candiodari »

halostatue wrote: post #171
rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

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 h…

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.

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

#297

Post by avighnay »

rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

Also there is an inherent 'I can do this way better myself' as part of the developer psyche. Though no one gets around to actually doing it.

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

#298

Post by rrix2 »

rcconf wrote: post #69

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 a…

> 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.

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

#299

Post by BigJ1211 »

zapt02 wrote: post #270
warent wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how the original comment gave some thoughtful napkin estimates about how this product may be worth several thousand dollars as a function of time saved, and your counter argument is just "nah it's $30 total" with absolutely no reasoning or logic. Like it or not, this is the kind of response from an engineer that falls into the category of emotionally cheapo.

Some of the costs people rarely consider for europeans is VAT (25% extra) and the decreasing price of european currencies. In the last ten years USD is 30% stronger against EUR and about 40% against my local currency. So for me this is more like a $60 dollar product than $30, and that's not just feelings. The problem here is everyone thinks their product is so damn valuable. I happily pay $20/mo for OpenAI because it…

The primary reason the Euro even got so high was the 2008 subprime mortgage fallout. After recovering from that it went to around ~1.1 and seems to remain there with some ups and downs. Considering the current sociopolitical circumstances surrounding the EU it's not strange that it's slightly lower than normal.
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