Comment by harrisreynolds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harrisreynolds | Hacker News Reader

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Hey guys! I've spent the past three months rewriting the WeBase front-end based on TailwindCSS!

The original front-end was built with Bootstrap, a tool I still very much appreciate, but as I really started to "get" Tailwind I started to see its power and wanted non-developers to get to experience it.

The WeBase website editor only supports around 70% of Tailwind (the full surface area of Tailwind is pretty BIG!), but I am happy with how it has turned out.

There are still some UX issues I need to improve but I wanted to start getting some feedback as soon as possible to I'm making if generally available today!

I'm running a deal for HN users... 80% off of the Lifetime deal ($49 instead of $249). Just use the coupon code: HN4LYFE

The pro version allows you to publish to websites to custom domains with a Netlify integration as well access to a ChatGPT AI Assistant for generating content.

If you've every wanted to launch a personal or any other kind of website this is a pretty good deal! :-)

The coupon code will expire after Monday, April 10, 2023.

Feedback welcome!

After browsing the landing page I decided to see what the pricing was. I clicked the navigation and the only link was to get started. This link brought me to a signup screen. There was no indication if I register will I have access to the service. Is it free. Are you going to ask for my credit card number after I sign up for a newsletter, that I don’t want. I’d include the pricing in either the landing page or have a link in the nav. It’s currently tucked away in the footer. Be upfront with what you’re selling. Also, you’re selling a single purchase for $99 but there is no trial. There has to be a trial or nobody is going to purchase a product based on the landing page and no extensive docs on the service. Possibly create a directory of steps on how to use the service and that might help. Kind of like the docs for tailwind. It gives a detailed overview of tailwind and includes examples.

Great feedback. The general flow of describing the product and onboarding needs to be improved.

I like the idea of a "directory of steps" to make it easy!

Also really need to finishing building out the site with more info etc!

This piqued my curiosity, but there are so many apparently broken links on the site. What components are there? What’s the accessibility story? What does it actually do (SOUNDS like a GUI editor to configure Tailwind class names for a component, but can’t confirm that, nor tell whether I can only configure YOUR components or add my own). Hard to motivate myself to spend even $50 to find out what I’m getting.

I do not like lifetime deals. There might not be enough incentive for the builder / publisher to maintain the service. It might be gone again in a few years or even months once a lot of ppl signed up and revenue stream is going down.

I'm fine with lifetime as long as there's also a subscription option that some customers use. The former supports early product development and the latter encourages ongoing developer commitment. As long as their customers don't weight too heavily toward lifetime then it should be good for everyone.

Are you able to download your site as HTML? Preferably in a git repo with a history of changes?

This would be the leading feature against other CSS UI builders.

You can download the site as HTML... it bundles the HTML and CSS in a zip file; but it does not integrate with git in any way.

That is an interesting idea for a feature... I've built stuff on top of the Github API before but never to push code to a repo.

I wonder if people would pay for that feature?!?

The Webase bootstrap editor was replaced? What about ppl that had websites built with that tool?

It will exists... I will add some links and make it easy to still use the older tool... it is at /workspace if you want to check it out.

The first version is honestly a more complete No Code tool supporting custom databases (like Airtable) and customer websites/views (like Webflow) in one tool.

And that is the ultimate vision, but I honestly believe the UI has to be a LOT better for it to be really useful. That is why we've re-written the front-end with a completely new approach that is more powerful and flexible.

Will there still be an option to use it with Bootstrap?

I could see something like this being helpful to a team I work with, but they're pretty strongly in on Bootstrap and there are human reasons I wouldn't want to pick up the challenge of changing that.

Yes... I built the original version on Bootstrap and have some abstractions in place to allow using a different CSS framework.

One of the goals for the platform is to make it incredibly simple to create new templates that could be sold on other sites like WrapBoostrap etc.

If I can help people make money by using WeBase I believe there will be plenty of opportunity for WeBase to make money.

Thanks for the comment!

Well, I would not recommend this tool to a development team which wants to speed-up the design part of building applications, unless it provides some kind of version control.

Ideally that would be what they use already, which is probably git. Note that I'm not saying GitHub, but just Git.

Congrats on the launch!

It seems[0] that the current lifetime deal is $99, not $249.

Also, to what extent can we try it without paying upfront?

[0] https://www.webase.com/launch-deal

It is completely free to try out and use. The deal gives you the integration with Netlify to publish to custom domains, the use of the AI Assistant, and the ability to download the source code.

Actually we haven't put the download behind the customer features yet so you can do that today, but at some point that will be a pro-feature. Of course developers can just inspect the source and copy anyway so it kind of is always "downloadable". :-)

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