Show HN: Instorier – A tool for creating rich scroll-based stories for your site

Hey HN!

After 2 years of bootstrapping, we're excited to introduce you to Instorier, a new digital storytelling platform that helps businesses and agencies craft compelling stories using a variety of modules like powerful imagery, videos, maps, and even fully customizable 3D scenes with seamless transitions and motion that sync to the user's scroll position.

Our editor allows users to create stories without any web development or coding experience, making it a flexible option for companies looking to tell engaging stories online, whether it's for in-depth feature articles, digital exhibitions, or a company's "About us" page.

We created Instorier because we saw a frequent demand for high-quality and advanced storytelling sites in our own agency work, but budgets were often a limiting factor for the client's vision. Our subscription-based pricing model has two tiers: Professional for companies looking to enhance their own storytelling, and Agency for agencies working with customers that have these needs. Early bird pricing is available for both tiers until the end of January.

We're looking forward to hearing your feedback on Instorier and any suggestions for how we can improve the platform. Our current roadmap includes things like improving accessibility, making sure stories can render in reader mode and/or without JS enabled, and continuously improving the editor experience. Happy to share details on the stack if anyone’s curious! Thanks for checking out Instorier!

Founders & Devs, Bjørn and Daniel

Show HN: Instorier – A tool for creating rich scroll-based stories for your site
instorier.com

You missed a plan tier… 1 story, “landing page mode”… I’d be willing to try something cool and new like this for $35 to make a super slick landing page… but the entry price of $350 USD per month is… well past “why not use SquareSpace” and into maybe I can justify the hours of time to hand craft my own scroll based 3D presentation using the old revealJS 3d tools… the fact that your per “story” price is more than an entire site on several hosted site platforms is … it’s very premium and while you may indeed have something so good it’s worth it, odds are Im not going to use the remaining 20% of perfect Apple grade scrolling animations to justify the price.

Im not suggesting you’ve made a mistake pitching it as premium, I’m just unsure if you’ve over shot, because this is definitely pricier than I’m comfortable with and I’m not afraid to just use Wix or SquareSpace or Typeform or any one of a number of tools instead of coding it all myself.

Scrolling through your landing page on mobile was an awful experience. I both had my scroll speed reduced to stop in the middle of sections then was zipped by the small amount of content.

Looks flashy but isn't functional and definitely needs some polish. Not that I would ever be happy with this sort of interface. Just stick the text on the page and let me scroll like every other page on the web.

Same experience here on mobile, where scrolling vertically tends to skip sections.

I had the same issue on a website with scroll-snapping a few months ago and fixed with the following CSS applied to each section:

    scroll-snap-stop: always;

Thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate it, and agree completely with you when it comes to the pricing - especially for things like personal or small-business use. In the longer run, we aim to introduce more affordable tiers to enable as many as possible to use the product, but until then we understand that either hand crafting or things like Wix/SquareSpace might be a better option for many.