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Comment by RushPL | Hacker News Reader

Hey y'all, I've been working on this part time for a couple of years now. Recently it started getting more traffic so I thought I'd try sharing this project with hacker news. If it's useful to you, and the free app is good for most use cases, then hopefully it will reach wider audience. Cheers.

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Hi, just wanted to say you've built something very nice! I just tried it out by re-making a fairly complex diagram and it took me like 10 minutes, including learning the syntax, very nice idea, done well!

I did notice one annoying bug, as I change and break the code sometimes, the editor just stops working and it's hard to tell what's happening (the loading indicator just stays there). Opening the dev tools, it appears you're not catching all errors when your parser (peg.js) fails.

  SyntaxError: Expected ":" or [^\t\n\r :;[\]] but "\n" found.↵    at peg$buildStructuredError (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:2:12222)↵    at Object.peg$parse [as parse] (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:5:1413)↵    at exports.FlowWorker.onUpdate (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:5:4410)↵    at callback (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:2:8619)"

Like everyone else...well done. Great concept, easy to learn, nice results. I'll probably be a paying customer one day.

Font-resizing would be nice on the visual view. And killer feature would be two way interaction, but I can imagine that's a tricky one.

Here's a generic "SaaS subscription workflow" I made up in about 20 mins.

https://code2flow.com/NDIQIf

Love it!

Looks great! I couldn't get any of the Download options to work, but following the links from the Share menu to, e.g. the PDF version, did work.

Is the layout using https://github.com/cpettitt/dagre ?

Do you use a handwritten parser for input?

After trying hand-written approach and later perl's Parse::RecDescent I ended up using peg.js (http://pegjs.org) parser generator. It was probably the most flexible and performant out of all the options I tried.

Peg.js is excellent. I'm working on a browser IDE for it to help people learn how to build programming languages.

I hope your pricing model ($100-$300/month) is meant as a joke, and you're not really serious about it. It's extremely expensive. I can drag and drop text boxes in google docs just fine and it's not costing me a dime. The added productivity would be worth it if I was doing this all day long, but it's not the case (as a software engineer).

Ignore this feedback. You have validated that customers will pay what you're charging, which means what they're getting is less valuable than what they're paying. Keep it up!

Too late to edit but if it wasn't I would have corrected the above to "what they're getting is MORE valuable than what they're getting."

You're welcome to use the free trial version and I can assure you that the SaaS paid version will be very affordable.

As for $100/$300 pricing, these are on premise business/enterprise versions meant to be used by bigger teams where data confidentiality is crucial.

I think the feedback you should get from that comment isn't that the price is too big, but that the pricing page may not be as clear as you think. I.e. you never intended that dev to pay 100$/month but he/she took it that way.

I think this is a great execution of a time consuming problem, good job!

Consider repricing to $99 and $299, respectively. It seems like a cheap trick but (a) it's been shown many times to work, and (b) especially with the former, you may just put yourself inside someone's purchasing limit.

Not even sure using graphvis in this way is legal. I certainly wont be paying $300 a month for a free download. At&t certainly wont be pleased.

Graphviz is under the Eclipse Public License, which allows commercial use.

But requires "royality free" distribution. so charging per month and limiting to internal use only for self hosted product isnt in agreement with the licence.

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