Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design
csspro.com
csspro.com
Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)
In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses and maybe offer them a deal based on the amount of developers they have. So sell it do a dev shop with 10 developers at $20/developer / per month. Businesses understand the time/money tradeoff and are not cheap.
Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
if I wanted to make my life easier I'd stop using emacs and arch linux
and no I won't
They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.
If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyone and certainly doesn’t strike me as the audience being targeted by the landing page.
On the other hand, it was free and more important to get people to use it and be more productive then generate revenue.
Were way more efficient than any other place I've worked, all because we're empowered to buy little $10/month plugins that save boatloads of time.
Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem.
Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation.
Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc.
My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer.
I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly.
What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so.
Rant over.
I think you make a lot of insulting assumptions about other people. I'm sure there are many who are more frugal than me for their personal reasons, but it's not some personal failure not to be persuaded to rent a particular product.
We spend. Intelligently.
If this was a $400/$600 (or even into the thousands of USD) lifetime license, they may see wider adoption.
>but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.
Your post is insulting and it really seems like it is an ad for this product.
I’m sure if you asked a trained chef if they’d buy some overpriced gourmet food at a chic place, they’d say no. They’re making exactly the same choice as a developer when it comes to visualising how much effort it takes to make a similar tool/food.
Since developers know (broadly) how the sausage is made, it’s going to be hard to get them to spring for basic sausage dressed well and slickly presented.
30 USD here, 30 USD there, soon enough your bills go in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.
* I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway
* Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.
Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.
I happily pay a lot of money for nice things, but only if I get to own them. I am not cheap, I'm picky. I'm not picky by choice, I'm picky by experience. I already know I can't trust subscriptions.
If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.
> If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.
At $900, it's not so easy of a sell. edit: Especially because, do I own it?
> License for 3 activations
OK. What happens when the activation server goes down? For software I really own, there is no concern here.
It's just not that simple in practice. Then again, that's not unique to software: imagine being a car company and looking for suppliers. You're not gonna rely on some new unknown company for components that you need in your long-term planning. But if you do, you pay them so that they can survive.
My main gripe with subs is that there's no central place to manage them and it's easy to forget how many you have. That is the one thing that Apple did well in the App Store.
It's said that 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, and 50% in the first five.
https://nationalsoftwareescrow.com/what-is-software-escrow/
https://softwareresilience.nccgroup.com/software-escrow-serv...
Like it or not, this is the kind of response from an engineer that falls into the category of emotionally cheapo.
The original comment did exactly the same thing the person you're replying to did. They just pulled a vague feeling about the product out of their ass. That "3-4hr/week" saving is exactly as founded as this commenter's "$30 total".
That they wrote more and did math with their vague feeling is less logical not more. It's masking an emotional hunch with the sort of language people use when they actually are being logical.
The problem here is everyone thinks their product is so damn valuable. I happily pay $20/mo for OpenAI because it genuinely speeds up my work every day. I would easily pay twice that. In terms of saved time this product will maybe save me 20-30 minutes per month? It's individual for everyone, but judging by other responses I'm hardly alone here in this sentiment.
This isn't targeting you specifically though, most comments in this thread are stereotypical developers too.
I think a perfect example of this for me is IDA Pro, for which I own a license. When Hex-Rays switched over to a subscription model, I did not renew. I still use the old version today, and it works perfectly fine for my needs.
The difference between buying it on subscription and not is whether or not I own it. I really own this copy; it's mine whether or not I'm connected to the Internet, and it will work in perpetuity until the sun burns out. That's how exchanging money for software is supposed to work.
I wouldn't have brought this up if you weren't trying to give the impression that money is a factor.
I interpreted it as "I still wouldn't pay $120 because even though it returns more value than that, it isn't worth that."
Edit: (that being said, the one time purchase cost of this for a "lifetime" license is $900, which seems more like a way to push subscriptions than a serious attempt at selling a one time purchase)
>just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.
The truth is that I don't even consider paying for new subscriptions anymore unless there's a good reason for it to be a subscription. I don't want to have to "trust" someone. Will they exist in a year? Will the software get worse and leave me with no choice but to use the "new" version? The test here is that I genuinely don't think I would use software that asked for a $0.05/month subscription either. That's just not how I want to use software.
If we want to talk about money, though, then there are still good reasons to not buy a $5/mo subscription. It sounds like it's a good enough deal, and in fact, I might even agree with you. But there is absolutely nothing that guarantees that this will stay the price forever in perpetuity. In fact, even a literal guarantee that enforces this would be worth toilet paper because if it ever came to a head, if the company went bankrupt, it would take down the activation servers and potentially leave you without your software.
So playing it from the top, let's say you get a new-fangled productivity software. Everything's great and you're only paying $5/mo.
- Then they release a "new" version. The new version breaks all of your workflows and you have to relearn everything. It's now awkward for the way you were using it.
- Then they add new features that are only available on a new $20/mo subscription. Turns out $5/mo wasn't really sustainable after all, so they need to adjust the price. Slowly over time, pressure mounts on the grandfathered old accounts to do something that will push them up to a higher tier.
- Then it all goes badly: Some venture capital and/or acquisitions later, and the software goes broke. Now what? Well, if you own it, nothing. If you don't, tough luck: All of your workflows are broken again, and you have to go back to doing things the old way.
For tools that are core to the stuff I work on, I do not play games like this. I do not care how sure you are that this won't be you. I don't want re-assurances, I want control over it.
But it's also why when I run across a company that shockingly lets you buy their product outright I fully support their efforts and invest in a purchase. It really is cool to sometimes be off WiFi somewhere and use software to your heart's content.
With a subscription, you’re agreeing to let a company tax you to do your job in the hope that it pays off instead paying upfront one time for a product.
You can cancel a subscription
Which reminds me I have a few airline card to cancel.
This is why it’s often better as a solo dev to not rely on these tools in case you have to jettison them and break your workflow.
Uh... then keep it, because that means it's providing value to you.
Switching software has a cost. Avoiding that cost is not value.
Y'all are twisting yourselves into pretzels trying to justify why you can't easily cancel a subscription.
That's what people are doing!
They're saying that there are many pieces of software that could be helpful, but with that potential switching cost looming in the distance they won't buy a subscription at any price because it can't be relied on.
They're not saying it's hard to stop paying, they're saying it's hard to stop using, so permanent license or bust.
That's exactly why people selling products love subscriptions so much. It's not JUST reliable income. It's sticky. If I own something for real, as in it works offline with no activation garbage needed, I can just not pay for the new version if I don't like it. Maybe the old one becomes obsolete eventually, so it's not risk-free, but nonetheless. But, if a subscription fee increases, my options are typically 1. Go to hell.
Am I exaggerating? Well, yes and no. For one thing, I have really truly experienced the rugpull. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it can be as simple as "company disappears". The more established and trustworthy a company has proven to be, the more willing I am to put up with some loss of control. But monthly subscriptions to random products I see on HN? No thanks.
I'm not even asking for a perpetual lifetime license, which I already find sketchy from a sustainability standpoint. I am fine with the old-school "upgrade license" concept employed by say, VMWare and friends, and the less DRM-heavy the solution is, the better.
I can either 1) pay for it out of my own pocket, 2) expense it monthly which after wasting time in expense reports basically goes back to 1 where I pay for it myself, or 3) go through the software procurement process. I've done all 3, and none of these really yield a personal benefit. 1+2 are annoying, and 3 takes time away from your main job and it's hard to get the licensing right. And at scale I think game theory does well at modeling behavior for why developers wouldn't want to go through any of these options.
For a freelance developer I'll speculate that for a dev that bills hourly the benefit aren't great, but it's still value passed on to the customer so it might be worthwhile.
If I ran my own freelance business and charged a flat fee I would 100% buy this tool if I did a lot of CSS work.
Otherwise I think the only subscription I have left at the moment is Humble Choice. And that's kind of a weird one since you don't need to keep the subscription active to keep the rewards, and you can in fact to choose whether or not to pay month-to-month.
Doesn’t that option completely remove your concerns with this product?
People seem to forget what the cost of a perpetual license use to be.
Licenses would easily equate to 3-years (36-months) or more, of what a monthly subscription would cost.
Case in point:
$439, you can buy a perpetual license of Microsoft Office
$7/mo, you can get the same functionality + hosting + storage as a monthly subscription
It'd take over 5-years to breakeven.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
As opposed to super lumpy revenue due to bursts of revenue coming in after a new version release.
There's also a lot of business risk because if you have a new version people don't like, they don't have to upgrade and now you don't get that burst of revenue your company needs to stay afloat.
EDIT: also, perpetual licenses create the wrong incentives. We've all complained about software bloat before. With a perpetual license, you only get paid on upgrades ... creating a situation where the software vendor jams in more (unneeded) functionality in order to justify creating a new version release.
I suspect the second is a bigger driver; companies don’t like people not choking down whatever idiotic change they’ve made in the latest version because it makes whichever exec pushed it look bad. With subscriptions you usually HAVE to keep updating.
If I buy a month, and never renew, it means I'm done using it or I didn't find it valuable. Don't send me emails reminding me, don't notify me. I'll find out when I open the thing up again and see my sub is gone. If I want it back, I'll buy another month.
The value in a sub for the end user is that I don't have to sign my soul away for a program I'll use once or twice a year. But the common pattern tries to hide that away and fool me out of money. Frankly, it's offensive and gross, hence, fuck subscriptions.
It sounds like you want usage based pricing where for example, you pay $X for each day you use the tool and then get billed at the end of the month accordingly.
Similar in concept to how AWS bills for most of it's services.
Perpetual: instal MS Word on the device.
“hosting” may supports subscription tech needs but doesn’t affect my experience asside from a new point of failure.
Storage is nice but I already have my HDD, USB key, Google Drive and it’s works great. I understand MS has interests to make me store my stuff in their cloud. I don’t. Bonus point: you own your data in addition to the soft (not with g-drive of course)
There is a perpetual licence listed on a page; Life-time $900
> Monthly subscriptions suck.
They do. But for a SaaS biz that has to pay the bills for infra it is hard to get around it.
It's been working, I purchased a license time ago, no updates and it works.
This year they changed the business model and the new licenses expire every 1/2 years in exchange of a feature i don't even care about.
I'll keep using the old version obviously.
Why on earth a complete software had to resume development and charge me yearly?
For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools.
For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!
In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”.
It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.
Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple.
I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these.
I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar.
Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now.
Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature.
I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no).
"to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier".
My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.
A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.
Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software.
Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what?
('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.)
Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)
Hobbies are hugely important to a healthy life.
We're not all making 100k+/yr, $30/mo is a significant amount.
Developers who spend their time commenting about how something is too expensives are cheap.
Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.
I don’t own the product when subscribing, I am only leasing it for as long as I pay. I don’t like that, I prefer to own my products.
Everything is slowly turning into a subscription, sure this is only 30$ a month, but if all my products were subscription based, I would go bankrupt.
To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap.
Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc.
I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to.
I love "subs" like JetBrains though.
For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.
Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time.
I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it.
Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources.
Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.
Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons.
Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.
They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing.
Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.
1. You don't own the software. Company decides to turn off the license server you're SOL.
2. Managing subscriptions is hard. So hard that multiple companies have popped up that purport to save you money by finding subscriptions you forgot about. I can think of a few that I have that I forget about until I see the invoice every month (and then forget it again).
3. Canceling subscriptions can be hard but it's impossible to know until you try. Some companies let you sign up with 2 clicks but make you call a phone number (that's only open odd hours) to cancel, and other well-known dark patterns. Aversion to that is aversion to subscriptions.
Anyway, people have different risk profiles than companies. Interest-rate based present day adjustments are meaningless, because they don't have the same opportunities on monetary markets; existential risks are well, really existential, instead of what they are for companies; power relations are extremely important, because people don't get any power; and so on.
Again, if you insist on fixing it, it's a "you" problem that will lead to well deserve failures.
Personal anecdote:
Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment.
I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away.
So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).
It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours.
My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.
I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration.
I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO).
I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation.
I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.
Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS.
And if you calculate:
* At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers.
* At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.
Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.
It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.
For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc..
When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old.
Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it.
I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right?
I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal.
The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value.
Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.
Devs aren't cheap, tools like this are useless. "Don't write code - use our GUI!" has been a winning proposition almost never.
I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.
How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count.
Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs.
I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh.
I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though.
So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here).
That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me".
> At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000,
Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0.
> My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses
I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools.
> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.
Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in.
This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week.
Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m.
It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision.
I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.
They certainly should but it takes time to get a new tool approved and the hassle is rarely worth it.
I said that.
Either that math is wrong, or we're eating different dinners.
If your a developer business owner(not hourly freelancer) than absolutely makes financial sense.
If your an hourly freelancer your customers probably aren't going to offer you more money for your time.
If you work for someone else they should pay for it.
If you are fixed bid or some variation on that then probably makes sense because your time is money.
Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that.
Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap."
Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.
Just because developers in US in San Fran make $350k a year doesn't mean everyone does. And it's incredibly short sighted to assume that.
But ignoring all of that, your only recommendation is to sell it cheaper B2B... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of keeping the $30 price?
I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.
FWIW, if it were a 1-time price I would have paid probably $50 - $99 for that.
Here's a good interview with Adam Wathan from Tailwind about lifetime pricing:
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
Congrats on making it to the homepage of HN!
At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments:
1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered)
2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever.
3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick.
This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth.
Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.
And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial.
Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool.
If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right?
But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer.
When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial.
> $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year
Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month.
edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS
I have a job to do and can't afford to create the computing world from scratch just to be cheappy.
Likewise I want the folks that provide the tools I enjoy using, to also afford the same lifestyle I can enjoy having.
This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year.
As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on?
And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?
That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.
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.
If a developer/designer is using this 1 day in 5 then they can justify the subscription.
To those suggesting this shouldn't be a subscription, keep in mind that CSS is going through a period of rapid improvements, this enables them to add support for new features without having to either eat the cost on a sold product or charge for upgrades multiple times a year.
VC backed business setting low prices for rapid growth has unfortunately damaged the ability for small indie developers to price their products sustainably.
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.
The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.
JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.
I'll try it because of hype/marketing/good Show HN/etc, and then never really adopt it. So my thought is it's better to just make it easy to cancel the subscription otherwise I'd probably never even try it.
And it isn’t because I’m cheap — I spend lots of money on lots of stuff — or that I don’t value indie development (same), but this pricing puts this utility in the same class as things like Figma, the Adobe Suite, a lot of CMSes (Webflow, Craft, etc.) for a utility that might be useful, but doesn’t strike me as $360 a year (or even $180 a year) useful.
The value prop just isn’t here for me, even tho I like what this is trying to do. At $5 a month/$50 a year, I think you’d get more traction and much better volume than what you can get at $30 a month/$180 a year prepaid.
And I have to say, when I see prices this high, I’m hesitant to prepay from unknown companies because I don’t have any expectation about how long it will be in business or continue to update the product, because I don’t see how you get sustainable development at this price point. Figma and Adobe can charge what they charge because they’ve earned it and because those are tools where you feel like you get your money’s worth.
$30 a month for something that will improve but not fundamentally change the way I do web dev, I’m sorry but no.
That said, don't I need to know how to use devtools (chrome/ff/safari) to do my job in the first place? It feels like this product is trying to inject itself into a process that isn't super refined but works fine.
The real problem is the dependency it creates. If I only know how to do frontend work with handheld UI controls, then I have to use them and am locked into this product. It doesn't promote me learning the css rules or understanding how to actually fix things, so then I'm back to the devtools and why am I using this?
Looking at the code, you can indeed run it as a bookmarklet. I went to https://www.example.com and typed this in the browser console:
s1=document.createElement('script'); s1.src='https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.7.0.slim.min.js'; document.head.appendChild(s1); s2=document.createElement('script'); s2.onload=()=>window.cssProReady(); s2.src='https://csspro.com/demo-build/mainnewnew.js'; document.head.appendChild(s2);
So prefixing that line with "javascript:" and putting it into a bookmark would let you use it on any site you wish, simply by clicking the bookmark. Without having to install an extension.
Would be a good alternative the author could offer imho.
However it may work as a UserScript depending on the UserScript engine.
1. I am struggling to understand the value proposition of this. Demo is cool but most developers working in an organization will not use most of the features shown here. No, no rotation or fancy fonts or colors. The only thing they will do is to use the standard font or color. And most elements don't use any backgrounds, and if they do they use one of the three predefined colors as the background. Gradient color? Maybe once a year. You can already do spacing stuff and text modification in the chrome devtools. I know this tool seems to make it easier, but is it worth paying money for it? I just don't see myself or any medium/large organization (e.g. Microsoft) paying $30/month. Figma is expensive but that is a whole product by itself. It enables new workflow and is irreplaceable in many ways, but I don't see this tool being the same. 2. Demo does not seem to tackle one of the biggest pain points -- layout. Based on stackoverflow questions and their upvote numbers plus what I see in my company, many people (including new and experienced developers) have trouble handling various methods of layout and arranging items. That is where this tool could help -- if done correctly. 3. What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day? Can this compete at all? I'll be surprised if something doesn't already exist today.
Basically, this is all interesting stuff but I can't see how it is a viable business if you charge $30/month.
It’s not like a random person paying for Netflix. $30 is a reasonable ask.
> What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this, or the core features that people actually use every day
In the video there’s a serious amount of functionality, that would take someone doing this as a hobby a very long time. And most OSS design-wise typically doesn’t look as good or polished (designers care about that). That’s usually the difference, the time/effort a commercial company can put in vs volunteer OSS teams.
Would you need to mount it locally with curlftpfs if you're on Linux?
Not only does it provide means for visual editing (for Tailwind only), but it also saves all changes to your code.
Free and open source.
It'd have to ask you for the FS permissions again though since the active FS handle is stored in the IndexDB which of course is separate in incognito.
We used to have full WYSIWYG editors in browsers as far back as the 90s (including deployment via FTP). Specialized editors just seem to have always been the preference for developers.
In this case, you would press "export changes to git" and then somehow apply them to your local repo, and bam, all the changes transferred without having to actually change any files.
One problem with this is that the changes in the browser are done on the distribution (bundled) files. Maybe using source-maps it could still be possible.
Triplex has some of that 2-way sync for frontend to code: https://triplex.dev/docs/overview
One note of interest to me was the real-time measurements of image contents, I'd be interested to know how this is being done and what model's returning image-coordinate data
My tool is for back-end devs who don’t want anything to do with front-end, but want to build UI faster. https://www.snipcss.com
I’ve always wondered how CSSPro works at extracting/scoping CSS because that’s supposed to be a feature. But I’ve never been willing to pay $30/mon just to see how well a competitor works. Anyone who pays - do you think it recreates a carbon copy of any section of a website well?
I've had a bunch of perpetual licenses I've acquired over a lifetime, and nearly every one of them have said "we have no record of you" after 5+ years. I know, I know...save the receipts and all that. But it's just frustrating.
Don't put yourself and your customer in a potentially problematic position of he-said-she-said. When you have recurring revenue with a more mature product (and a way to track those subscriptions that you won't end up scrapping), re-consider the perpetual license.
OP: Consider hobbyists and generalist who aren’t full time. There might be a market segment for short term access for hobbyists or generalists.
I would be easily willing to pay $2/day to have this while redoing my personal website, but $30 seems steep for a short term use. Doing a daily price could work to bring in users by serving as a low-cost demo.
Amazing work! Ignore the critics.
So, I will say default `main div` margin will be 2rem. While default padding on those blocks will be 1rem, how will this help me visualise adjusting these? It looks like all I am doing is changing individual elements.
Also, figma has figjams which is similar to Miro for many use cases.
Do you have a GitHub or place where we can see more of your work? Thank you for laboring in obscurity until you produced this magnum opus masterpiece. This guy is example of why you should never give up. :) ;p xx ;p
If this were a truly must have app & I could get past the price, I'd enjoy it with the concern that most features could be incorporated into devtools directly, by browser makers or by other extensions that expand what devtools can do, although many features of this tool already can be achieved. In fact, I think that's the real missing feature in this service: it could be an web extension for augmenting CSS work devtools.
Lastly, what if the price started at $15/month and for every 250,000 (maybe less, maybe more) new users everyone's price was dropped by a $0.50/month but could never drop below $3/month. By the time the price hits $5/month there are at least 5 million subscribers ... (with no annual plans & no life time bananas plan) that seems pretty good.
* devtools is pretty awesome & pretty consistent in every browser.
(Oh, and I'm super cheap, too.)
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.
Not only is it easy to use (IMO), but it's also more powerful than what design tools offered today, with new color spaces being one of my favorite features.
Intro: https://twitter.com/argyleink/status/1649124742463623169
* Ruler - Dimensions for Chrome * Assets - Easily get from network tab * Eyedropper - Digital color meter on MacOS * Custom CSS - Stylebot for Chrome
The only tool that I personally don't know is the color palette from the page - but then Eyedropper itself can do it.
And thus comes the question, why should I pay $30 per month for tools that are available for free to a developer?
> 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
The most common question I'm always asking myself is: Why is this like this? For many properties the browser can tell you which CSS selector "won" a property such as "font-family".
But for something like a width, the actual formula being applied is often hard to puzzle out. The browser will tell you its result but now how it arrived at that result.
For example, the element with id "pagespace" on this page. It has width that works out to some px depending on your screen width. But why that width specifically? I can personally figure it out by going up the DOM tree to see that each element is the full width of its parent (and that's how display: table-row, table-row-group and table all work) until we get to the "hnmain" element which is 85% width (of its parent). And then its parent is the body which has 8px margin all around. So the formula is something like: (screen-width - 8px * 2) * 0.85. But that took me how long to figure out manually?
Show your work!
For the pricing, consider adding tiers depending on the type of user. What you're asking for now is perfectly fine for companies. But for individual developers I think it's a bit steep.
Also a demo that you can test out in the wild for maybe a week or so would be interesting, or a generous 7 day refund policy.
Good luck!
Seems much more convenient than diving into dev tools every time you want to quickly check an element’s property. 30/month is a bit excessive for just that one function.
Add an event listener on the entire document.body
Get the event.target and the style and then descend to the children. Put it formatted in the clipboard.
Then do it as a bookmarklet and deregister the click handler when you're done so you can continue interacting with the site
It's probably around 12 lines of modern js.
You can add a fancy graphical outline to know what you're selecting with a few more lines. Just make sure you draw it on top and don't modify the elements. Use a css filter to make it work on all elements.
Modern tooling is pretty great.
I think the same person makes CSS Scan ($95 lifetime): https://getcssscan.com/
- tackling of inconsistent browser behaviour and bugs on top of cross-browser compatibility
- RWD
- pixel perfect implementation of designs
- extending or replacing native input elements
And very little of it has to do with color gradient selectors or pixel to em conversion.
It looks like you can only edit styles on individual elements.
I can see classes, but I don't see a way to change the class of an element, or to change the CSS properties of a class. I even tried applying different changes to the same class — larger font for one element, smaller font for another element with the same class — and CSS Pro is happy to give me contradicting CSS rules.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/qT1y95T
CSS with a separate rule for every element is unworkable. How is the exported CSS supposed to work?
But I echo the other voices concerning the pricing. Right now I have the entire Adobe product suite - everything they make - for only $25/month.
PS: have h/w acceleration disabled.
- Build MVP
- Raise funding
- Build pricing structure
- Eventually die and open source anything for many reason. Pricing is one such reason.
Without free pricing tier, how can you get new users to play with your product ? (if it's not open source).
If you could cut some of the animations, or use transforms instead of absolute positioning or something--whatever to improve performance--I'd be down to try it for a month.
A web designer/developer in a decent, profitable company is probably getting paid $100k at least.
Assuming 250 working days a year with 8 hours a day of paid time, that's roughly $0.8/minute.
If this tool saves that person 90 seconds a day finding and tweaking things in a design then it's saving more than $30/month worth of their time.
It's quite cheap.
The fact Adobe charge waaaaaaay too little for PS is another matter entirely.
In the US maybe. Definitely not here in Italy and probably in most of Europe.
As pointed out elsewhere, it's saving the business more than $30/m, not the developer.
The developer doesn't get to pocket the savings. Their reward for "saving" 4 hours a week is an extra 4 hours of work per week.
At the bottom of the pricing page. It's not a JetBrains type deal.
For me personally I wouldn't use it enough to justify the price tag. Depending on your business plan it might make sense to offer some kind of day/week pass. This would definitely interest me as I would be more of a infrequent user.
If you're going to charge this amount you probably want to target product/design teams in mid to large enterprises, then charge by seat (with limited trial for up-sell).
I might just buy it anyway...
I agree with the concern expressed in other comments re: price, especially considering the lack of a free tier or trial.
The marketing site is great. Congrats on your launch!
Im a simple man, I see a monthly sub, and I move on.
I'd probably pull the trigger on this for $3-$5/mo.
There's "Reset all changes" but Cmd-Z and Ctrl-Z do nothing. Is there a way to undo the last action?
Undo is essential functionality, IMO.
The price won't be for everyone — but you don't need everyone. :)
Having an "inner picture" is helpful but neither necessary nor sufficient to be a designer. You can have a good intuition even when you're physically incapable of having "inner pictures". But yes, the tool is probably less useful if you have a vivid imagination.
Not even going to download it. Good luck though.
good luck.
That music in the video gives me anxiety