Trianglify.io – Low Poly Pattern Generator
trianglify.io
trianglify.io
The thing that makes that possible is that I'm using a seedable PRNG for the pattern generation and have a custom serialization format for all of the possible pattern parameters. This means that any pattern can be represented by a single short string like `w:1440!h:900!x:random!v:0.63!c:0.06!s:9gjk5s!f:sp!i:0.30` and reproduced with 100% accuracy.
That means instead of a database, I can just store the entire purchased pattern directly within the Stripe transaction within the `client_id` field using this compressed representation. Then it's just a matter of reading it back from the Stripe API when I get the "purchase completed" webhooks in order to build the correct attachments and send the customer their assets via email. This keeps my own service totally stateless & database-free, and also has the very nice property of allowing me to quickly and easily access the pattern by copy-pasting the client-id from the Stripe dashboard if I ever need to grab it for customer service reasons!
1. Someone could generate the same asset for themselves using your open source library. Which is great for someone who has time over budget.
2. You are providing value in your packaging of that time savings.
3. You created a very cheap way to offer this using server less and stateless. Props to you for making something that is financially sustainable for a long time.
Number 3 is the most interesting of the above. That’s no easy feat and I applaud you for it.
Not criticizing your business model, just curious. Thanks for the tool, liked the aesthetics.
a) You (or bots) keep posting this here. b) You are using an open source library without saying as much.
It is fine to share your creation, however at this point it has become spam. Spam where you haven't even credited the source.
Ah, yes, behold the spam: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=trianglify
Looks like it gets shared 0-1 times a year.
> you haven't even credited the source
The source is, uh, themselves. So who cares? But they’ve attributed themselves prominently, anyway. Click FAQ:
> Trianglify.io is a tool I wrote to generate low-poly backgrounds, textures, and vectors. It's based on an open-source library, Trianglify, which I also wrote.
(Or just tell me: Go ahead and learn it, if you want to earn money :|)
the only annoyance is vat taxes / sales tax
I moved from stripe to paddle to avoid that pain
Since there are a lot of questions in the comments that might be answered by prior writing/discussions, here are a couple relevant links:
0. Trianglify.io is a GUI for my GPL-licensed node library of the same name, which is available for use in OSS projects for free: https://qrohlf.com/trianglify/
1. Trianglify (the library) first became popular because of an HN post eight years ago. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578002
2. I've written a short Medium article on why Trianglify.io exists and how I arrived at the current freemium/micropayments model for monetizing it: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...
I don’t think it’s reasonable to call $8 micropayments. Now if you were selling the individual triangles pro rata…
- Generate points on a grid,
- perturb each one by a random (variance-scaled) vector,
- compute Delaunay triangulation,
- color each triangle by some function (pretty clear for Gradient, the others I can't intuit)
...right?
Not meant to diminish the work (it's clean and simple, nice job!), just wondering how close I got.
OP: does that
Hn: no not like that
If you make more than $16/hr and it would take you 30 minutes to put this together triangle-by-triangle, color-swatch-by-color-swatch, then $8 is not too much, correct?
The customers who are this price sensitive are always the worst. They're the most needy, and the most likely to churn.
When a contract is $50,000 all you ever hear from the client is "Invoice paid. Thanks!".
No you wouldn't.
But still, makes me laugh at the stones required for asking $8, for a randomized image, and in the age of Stable Diffusion.
PNG is just a file format.
I now have a set of scripts that downloads the Bing wallpaper of the day for Mac and Linux, and I like those as well, but sometimes miss the gradients and ambiance these generated since (in Windows at least) extrapolating the dominant color in those photos for desktop theme highlights mostly results in… brown.
In terms of additional feature requests, one that springs instantly to mind is a voronoi generator[0,1].
[0]https://georgefrancis.dev/writing/crafting-organic-patterns-... [1]https://github.com/WebSVG/voronoi
Your app has “colour brewer” as a label.
Is this a coincidence? Did Brewer coin the name all those years ago? Or does “colour brewer” predate or exist separately from that website, such as, “brewing up some colours” or something?
Soo... a hybrid of donation button and tax on people who don't know about right-click → save image?
It's part of a series of experiments that I've run on monetizing open source, which you can read about in the article I wrote a while back here: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...
That said, right-click > save as image is supposed to be disabled on that particular DOM element, but I'm guessing you probably have an extension or user-script that re-enables it. Which is fine, you're probably not the target audience for this! Trianglify.io is mostly used by designers working on professional projects for whom $8 to save 20-30min of tedious work in Illustrator is a very good value proposition.
You're right, I do have an extension against common annoyances. Totally forgot about it since I usually screenshot anyways.
FYI, even without an extension, you can bypass it being disabled by holding down the shift key while right-clicking (at least in Firefox).
Having done some of my own monetizing experiments, I was surprised by how often people don’t make any attempts to circumvent what is written on the site. Text appeared to be much stronger than efforts to prevent free service.
Still, it’s kinda funny to me if this works well enough to make any sales. It’s not possible to prevent download of images you serve, there are several ways to save them in all the major browsers without any plugins. Are you serving the full size image?Intentionally?
why
> Yes, as long as your website is open-source and complies with the terms of the GNU General Public License v3. If you're interested in purchasing a commercial license for the Trianglify javascript library, please get in touch.
Bleh. This along with the $8 export fee makes me really tempted to spend the 2 hours building out a similar library and webpage and release it as MIT.