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

csspro.com

21–30 of 299 posts

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

#21
There's some neat things in here - the gradient editor showing the stops on the element is pretty nice.

But overall the design of this tool is very difficult for me to use. It's trying too hard to be pretty, at the expensive of utility. I found the Typography section to be really difficult to grok with a complete lack of labels and borders around text boxes. It's neat that you have the same flexbox controls that Webflow had in 2015, but the way those icons are laid out makes it so inscruitable.

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

#23

I think the comments criticising the pricing are wrong, you can't compare one generalist tool to another highly specialised tool. But on top of that comparing to Figma, Framer or other VC backed products is a mistake, these products are priced to capture market share and grow rabidly. They are clearly underpriced. I may be wrong but CSS Pro looks like a small bootstrapped product, pricing for market growth doesn't ne…

Many investor backed businesses also might increase their pricing over the years. At the moment you reach enough users, especially users which are highly dependent on you, you increase the prices to make shareholders happy.

This is unfortunately a very common strategy, and I rather pay for indie developer bit more than a tech company with a large amount of investors.

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

#24
How does the element copying work?

> Copy the designs of your favorite websites, frameworks, or themes. Extract the HTML and CSS code of an element and all its children in seconds.

> Not the right element you're looking for? Precisely re-target any DOM element using your keyboard's arrow keys (▲ ▼).

The documentation talks about it a little bit but not much.

I am wondering if this feature is another cheapskate implementation that doesn't actually do what it says it does. How for example would this tool handle the Firebase[0] featured header?

The other features look OK, but I don't think I could justify the price though. If you want to charge for it so much, maybe change your pricing to a yearly license and then do updates, and simply restrict new updates to people who stop subscribing. Seems like a lot more reasonable approach and it also gives you a chance to really work on extending this product beyond what it currently does.

[0]: https://firebase.blog/posts/2023/05/whats-new-at-google-io

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

#27
This is one of the more impressive and polished "Show HNs" I've seen recently. The landing page is superb, the tool is impressive and the ease of trying it out with the "Try on this page" is really great.

I think I'm inclined to agree on some of the other comments about pricing. It doesn't sit quite right in comparison to what I pay for other paid tools that I use daily.

I can see myself using something like this, and I don't mind paying for great software, but there is something about the $30/month entry price that just stops me considering it further. Maybe I need to actually use it to understand that it's worth this, but it's not clear enough to me coming to it cold.

One criticism. I clicked on the "Try on this page" to test it out, and after being initially impressed I clicked on "Try it Free" in the menu, assuming this was a link to see what free/trial options were available, but the link didn't do anything. It took several page refreshes and re-clicking this to realise that this was just doubling up the function of the "Try on this page" option and in fact there is no free trial available.

Overall though, seriously impressive work.

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

#28
post #4

Looks very cool. Sadly, it is very expensive for our small startup though (we are already paying github, jira, confluence, google suite, figma, miro, adobe, etc.).

If you're looking to save a few dollars check out WikiJS as a confluence replacement (can import too), pretty, easier, works with OAuth out of the box, and you can self host on pretty much any instance.

Also, figma has figjams which is similar to Miro for many use cases.

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

#29
The killer feature here would be hooking this up to Netlify/Vercel etc. and having a 2-way-write. Every time you update something in the CSSPro editor, your codebase is actually updated and the site is rebuilt in the background. This would let you essentially design in the browser and avoid the tedious copy/paste, rebuild, reload cycle.
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