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

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

csspro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 299 posts

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

#191

Post by zapt02 »

soneca wrote: post #154
jchw wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nailed it. I happily pay a lot of money for nice things, but only if I get to own them. I am not cheap, I'm picky. I'm not picky by choice, I'm picky by experience. I already know I can't trust subscriptions. 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 wh…

They have a one-time pay option. $900. So, if you love to pay for nice things as long as you can own them, they have an option for you.

Problem is this product is worth like $30 in total.

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

#192

Post by bombcar »

jchw wrote: post #162
soneca wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a one-time pay option. $900. So, if you love to pay for nice things as long as you can own them, they have an option for you.

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.”

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

#193

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

graderjs wrote: post #122

This is a wonderful interface! Great UX, really landmark, effortless design! Reminds me of Bret Victor, and the top notch best products to come out of Apple and Google. You have produced something that big companies spend millions, thousands of developer and designer hours, and months to build. You are truly awesome! Thank you for inspiring the world with this awesome work!!! :) ;P xx ;p Do you have a GitHub or place…

Are you a chat gpt bot?

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

#194

Post by bombcar »

not_a_shill wrote: post #165
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every developer understands how subscriptions work. A product may provide value today, but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices. With a subscription, you’re agreeing to let a company tax you to do your job in the hope that it pays off instead paying upfront one time for a product.

>but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices. You can cancel a subscription

I’ve not seen the research but is suspect the average cancelled subscription goes far beyond “when it was no longer worthwhile” before it is cancelled.

Which reminds me I have a few airline card to cancel.

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

#196

Post by bombcar »

tiffanyh wrote: post #188
bombcar wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a reason all these companies love SaaS vs yearly upgrades and I think it’s because “subscriptions” get forgotten or ignored or “it’s not worth worrying about”.

Having predictable revenue is a huge reason. As opposed to super lumpy revenue due to bursts of revenue coming in after a new version release. There's also a lot of business risk because if you have a new version people don't like, they don't have to upgrade and now you don't get that burst of revenue your company needs to stay afloat. EDIT: also, perpetual licenses create the wrong incentives. We've all complained a…

The first can be solved with “pay over time” setups (which can be relatively easy to setup even if it’s just internal accounting, or you can literally buy appropriate bonds on the open market).

I suspect the second is a bigger driver; companies don’t like people not choking down whatever idiotic change they’ve made in the latest version because it makes whichever exec pushed it look bad. With subscriptions you usually HAVE to keep updating.

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

#197

Post by donmcronald »

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…

Subscriptions have ruined software development by introducing a ton of external SaaS dependencies.

For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc..

When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old.

Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it.

I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right?

I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal.

The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value.

Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.

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

#198

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

not_a_shill wrote: post #165
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every developer understands how subscriptions work. A product may provide value today, but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices. With a subscription, you’re agreeing to let a company tax you to do your job in the hope that it pays off instead paying upfront one time for a product.

>but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices. You can cancel a subscription

Right, but what if your subscription tool that you want to cancel is pipelined into your workflow in such a way that you’re paying a technical or operational cost to cancel beyond just severing the account itself, i.e. vendor lock-in?

This is why it’s often better as a solo dev to not rely on these tools in case you have to jettison them and break your workflow.

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

#199

Post by sangupta »

kamikaz1k wrote: post #150
sangupta wrote: post #145

This is an awesome tool, however, the pricing is lot costly to subscribe as most of these tools are already available for free. * Ruler - Dimensions for Chrome * Assets - Easily get from network tab * Eyedropper - Digital color meter on MacOS * Custom CSS - Stylebot for Chrome The only tool that I personally don't know is the color palette from the page - but then Eyedropper itself can do it. And thus comes the quest…

can you please link to those referenced tools? thank you

Dimensions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dimensions/baocaag...

Save All Resources: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-all-resources...

Stylebot: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...

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

#200

Post by POiNTx »

I think it looks great!

For the pricing, consider adding tiers depending on the type of user. What you're asking for now is perfectly fine for companies. But for individual developers I think it's a bit steep.

Also a demo that you can test out in the wild for maybe a week or so would be interesting, or a generous 7 day refund policy.

Good luck!

Post reply on HN