DevUtils: Offline Toolbox for Developers | Hacker News Reader

DevUtils: Offline Toolbox for Developers

devutils.app

178 pointskyawzazaw75 comments

This looks awesome (beautiful looking app) but wow... its expensive!

I've been using Boop (free) for the same purpose https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boop/id1518425043?mt=12 and really wouldn't mind paying for devutils (I've tried the demo and liked it) but $49.95 for the standard edition seems a little on the steep side for what it is...

In the event of a decent price reduction this would have me purchase for sure.

Edit: "This is a perpetual license and includes one year’s worth of updates." - yeah, I'll pass thanks.

I bought the $25 license and it’s enough. Love the app.

The developer regularly adds more functionality.

I also paid for dash and alfred and love their integration.

All these licenses are affordable and help some very cool people put bread on the table.

Thank you very much for your support, Andrei!

I'm a solo developer and this means a lot to me!

You’re more than welcome. I feel your care in every update and every communication I receive.

> but wow... its expensive!

25 dollars is expensive? Should I remind you that you're complaining about the cost of a few beers while typing your complaint on a >$1000-dollar device.

“Are you seriously complaining about the price of power, when you’re sitting in a home worth hundreds of thousands”?

Same energy.

50 is as expensive or inexpensive as you want it to be considering you are buying a tool for a specific purpose.

It’s also competing with stuff which is free.

For a combination of tools already available elsewhere (command line/existing sites), maybe?

The value is in the convenience of NOT having to spend the time researching, bookmarking, and remembering all those tools you use. That is the calling of software developers right? To abstract complexity so the other person doesnt have to worry about "this"? All businesses are born out of creating convenience for someone else who values time more than experience (in that particular thing).

$25 for this app might save you hours of work, hundreds or thousands. Just like $25 for a half tank of gas will save you a few hours from getting to where you want to go.

Disclaimer: I'm the app developer.

Thank you for the kind words, and I'm glad you like DevUtils! I just want to drop a quick comment about the license terms.

"This is a perpetual license and includes one year’s worth of updates"

In the last 12 months, I added 10+ major upgrades[1] with a lot of new tools, bug fixes, and improvements.

I think the 1-year upgrades term is the best way to keep me motivated and keep improving the app.

This license type is the same as seen in many other popular apps like JetBrains IDE, Sketch, TablePlus, Parallels Desktop, etc.

I hope you understand.

I do offer student discounts and special discounts if you are from a country with a low-income level. Feel free to hit me up anytime (email in my profile).

Thanks!

[1]: https://devutils.app/changelog/

I don’t think it is expensive at all. I wouldn’t fret about it, and nice to have discounts for low income countries.

No need to apologize to anyone. Your pricing is a steal for the convenience. It takes time to maintain and develop new features and it would be crazy for people to expect all of this for free…

I'll echo others' sentiments - the pricing seems fine to me. I happily bought a license this morning.

Thank you very much!

This is why developers constantly choose to go for an ad based revenue model over just charging users. The amount that can be made by not respecting user privacy and getting a million users greatly exceeds the amount that can be made by charging a fraction of those users. Everyone pays lip service to the idea that they are willing to pay for a no ad experience but it's just that, lip service.

I agree. I notice even at big corps, they don’t even pay for a Postman license which is used daily

I'm a happy customer – I bought it ~6 months ago and use it most days as part of my work flow. $25 was a no-brainer for me, I didn't even think twice.

Thank you very much, @kylegawley!

I would say the pricing seems reasonable, especially for teams in the US. Each 1 yr license is less than an intern's hourly wage.

Edit: 1 yr is update so it’s pretty good

Expensive? Not really. I was an early purchaser of DevUtils, and in the intervening time, the author has released a steady plethora of improvements and enhancements. Not to mention develop a bunch of other unrelated useful utilities.

He kind of reminds me of myself 25 years ago, when I used to write utility app after utility app for DOS, early Windows systems, Unix systems etc. Hundreds of long forgotten tools that were used by either just myself, or large corporations and government departments for a modest fee. Had there been a Stripe or easy way of monetising decades ago, I could have made some serious coin. But eventually I burnt out and started a 'boring' consulting business to pay the bills.

I just loved creating, and I wish that someone had paid me enough to just keep experimenting and creating them because who knows where it could have gone. I paid for a DevUtils licence because I wanted Tony to continue to be encouraged to create more without feeling unappreciated, and I don't want him to end up an old, jaded programmer like me. ;) I can either pay $25 over the next week to buy coffees that I will pee down the drain, or I can help a young indie programmer create something new...

Thank you so much for the encouraging words, cyberferret!

I recently quit my full-time job and go solo to work on DevUtils and my other apps. Your comment is such a great motivation boost for me!

I really appreciate this, thank you so much!

It is expensive for me, personally, but just in the that it is just enough of a price point to encourage me to automate and script these things myself, relative to my income. But I'm surprised to hear that sentiment on here more broadly, don't y'all all have fancy jobs? Also its an osx app, y'all already have macbooks, and $25 is too much?

The price seems 'about like a software development book.' That doesn't strike me as jarringly out of range for what it is.

if $25 is expensive then I would say you value your time at a very, very cheap rate.

If you are not on macOS and like something similar check out DevBox https://www.dev-box.app/ It has most of the utilities as DevUtils.

It's available on macOS, Windows, Linux and as Chrome and Firefox extensions. (edit) I'm the developer of DevBox.

You should also disclose that you are promoting your own app.

Thank you for reminding me :)

Nice that something like that available for windows. But judging from the first screenshot of both apps - the former is more powerful, as allows querying and sorting json. And features syntax highlighting. But yeah, as you said - it has most of the utilities.

You are right :) I'm planning on adding a lot more features in the future though, like the ones you said.

I'm working on it in my spare time, so things are going slow.

I'm working on a similar open source command line tool: https://github.com/ludovicianul/dvt

Including of SAML tools would have been great (sign, encrypt/decrypt, encode/decode).

So.... Cyberchef.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Hi, app's author here.

I have a page that compares DevUtils vs CyberChef, hope it helps :)

https://devutils.app/devutils_vs_cyberchef/

I really like this app for quick tasks. @trungdq88 thanks for also leveraging setapp[1]. I am using this via setapp subscription. 1. https://setapp.com/

Thank you very much, @p2hari! Setapp is a very good platform!

Thanks for making DevUtils available through Setapp.

Do you plan to add the M1 version to Setapp? Seems to be missing for me.

Hi hobr, the version on Setapp is already M1 native.

(Make sure you upgraded the app to the latest version 1.12)

Weirdly it's not showing for me even after a Setapp update this morning. I'm not on Monterey yet if that's needed? If not, I'll email Setapp support.

How did you check for M1 support? Can you share a screenshot with me (or via email if you prefer, my email is in profile).

You can see a screenshot here for reference: https://cln.sh/ZEULbo

In case anybody is having problems finding DevUtils in Setapp - we found that it was hidden in our Setapp Teams account for some reason!

Thanks @trungdq88 for your help.

Looking through the site, the developer's "Show HN" and ProductHunt posts mention that the app was "open-source", but I could not for the love of me find any links on the site to the source. Had to turn to google to find it: https://github.com/DevUtilsApp/DevUtils-app.

Of course, given that the license is the super restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0, so I guess makes sense to not bother advertising it given the very limited freedoms that are available.

Thank you @kyawzazaw for posting this! I'm the developer of the app. I'm happy to answer any questions :)

Mac only. Stuff like this should be in the title

This is the risk with the ‘no electron’ crowd. Everything native is nice, but you’re always excluding a bunch of people.

I like that it’s not subscription based pricing.

I also like having an offline json converter and similar small tools you often go online for, with risc of leaking company code/data.

But isn’t a standard license cheaper than a team license?

Hi, I'm the app's developer. I'm glad you like the app!

Yes, the standard license is cheaper than the team license, but the terms is for 1 person only.

I'm counting on companies' good faith that they won't cheat on a solo developer :)

Could there be an offline GitHub Copilot at some point in the future which does some of this stuff in the editor itself? i.e. an interface where you just describe what you want in a comment.

Cool toolset. Thanks for sharing it, and I sincerely wish you luck.

It appears to be one that is aimed at JavaScript/TypeScript developers, as opposed to native Swift devs (like me). Some of the tools are quite interesting, but only a few would probably apply to my workflow.

looks super nice, thanks for sharing. Maybe a cheat-sheet for cmdline equivalents might be fun.

This looks great however if the dev here I just want to point out that scrolling up and down the home page a few times gets super laggy and eventually crashes the tab on my phone (Chrome on iOS on iPhone SE 2020)

Thank you so much for letting me know, I will check this right away!

Quick question if you are still around: does it happen consistently?

The page eats all of my CPU on firefox.

Thank you for letting me know. It looks like the lazy-loaded videos are not performing very well. I'll fix it asap.

Thank you for not having a monthly subscription price.

You're welcome! :)

Neat website (and useful app) but scrolling is _extremely_ laggy on Firefox on windows. Seems smooth on Brave.

Hi, thank you for letting me know. It looks like the lazy-load videos are not performing well on Firefox, I'll take a look at this ASAP. Thanks again!

I bought it a while ago. Love it!

Thank you, @damechen!

Does anyone know of something similar for Windows?

Looking for something like this on linux.

What about a local running instance of cyberchef ? https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Check out DevBox https://www.dev-box.app/ (I'm the developer) It has most of the utilities of DevUtils and actually more :)

I haven’t tried DevUtils, but a lot of the features on the landing page look like a more polished version of CyberChef:

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Wow, just discovered CyberChef, thanks for the link!

DevUtils has a comparison page at [1] describing the differences between both tools. To their credit (I reckon it is rare on such "comparison" pages), they even highlight the features of their competitor that they don't match.

[1] https://devutils.app/devutils_vs_cyberchef/

I still keep Notepad++ around on my Windows machines because of the all the plugins.

I regularly use the JSTool (for Javascript/JSON), MIME tools (for Base64 and URL encode/decode) and Markdown++ plugins. There is also a NppCalc calculator app.

A Microsoft engineer moonlights on a similar app for Windows. https://github.com/veler/DevToys

Looks quite nice.

Most of these functionalities are easy to find as online apps (formatting JSON, regex validator, color picker, minifiers, etc) or can be done in REPL in one line.

Those sites could be just storing that stuff in their internal databases, breaching privacy. This app is open source, and nothing goes up to any servers.

Online apps, yur paying with yur info devutils, yur paying with money but preserving privacy.

Choose as you must :)

Wait? It’s open source? I thought I would check the claim about no connection, but couldn’t find anything.

I think parent might have meant "offline". Definitely doesn't look like devutils or devbox are open source.

Actually, it looks like it is paid source available: https://github.com/DevUtilsApp/DevUtils-app

But I could not find anywhere on the site that linked to this repo.

Convenience and saving time. I don't need these functionalities on a daily basis because I don't code on a daily basis but I totally see the point of and appeal of this app. Yes there are free online versions available for all of these things, but having them all in one place is helpful. Being from India, prices are a tad too high but not unaffordable. If I needed it, I would pay for it.

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