Show HN: Rails UI
railsui.com
railsui.com
Yes, Napster was specifically started for sharing files people didn't have the rights to share, but I still don't think it's a fair comparison because nobody sharing files on Napster ever tried to claim it was their music they were sharing. If people were taking Metallica's music and recording their own versions of it that were 99% identical and then claiming they were the original artist, that would be a closer analogy. Napster also didn't receive the massive PR campaigns, huge institutional investment, the government blind-eye-turning, etc. that AI is enjoying today. Napster was also successfully sued for promoting copyright infringement.
We (developers) were all sold a promise years ago of technology/software being our future. That's changing rapidly, and there's no going back.
I guess the bigger question is even ignoring the LLM angle is why this project is worth 10-30x than another design also created by a human. I feel like the Ruby gem and integration is worth a premium, but I'm not sure that the premium matches what you're charging. I've purchased third party themes and paid someone on Upwork to "Railsify" them, leaving me with ownership of the code, and I'm pretty sure I paid less than you're charging for the team level. (I hope you don't take this as a personal attack on your business model, and simply an analysis of X vs Y)
No matter what you choose, there's work to be done to adapt to each app's use case, branding, copywriting, etc. Rails UI definitely isn't "complete" and is a constant work in progress, hence the subscription model.
Whether that's valuable to you is definitely up to you. Some folks don't want to be beholden to an AI for design and prefer a ready-made human-engineered system to refer back to and evolve as their app does.
I use this project for my own stuff. That's why I originally built it; however, I'm biased and am deeply on the Rails bandwagon. Ultimately, it saves me a bunch of time, which to me is the most valuable thing there is.
Things like this likely need to be AI-first moving forward. This feels built for humans.
In fact, armed with Context7, Claude could recreate this whole business model in a day.
There’s definitely a market for good looking UI that actually works and stands out from the vibe coded junk. Artisanal corn fed UI I guess.
If you know what you're doing it can truly accelerate your work.
None of mine are vibe-coded. They're making a competent engineer like myself - more efficient.
The roadblock for me is the coding part, not the idea part.
For me it's a bandwidth increaser for the tedious parts.
Two things put me off:
1) I have to hunt around to find out whether this would fit into my project, dependency and workflow-wise — turns out it doesn't. I use neither Hotwire nor Tailwind, and "latest Rails point release only" is a rather harsh restriction too.
IMO, this information should replace the fluffy marketing speak in "Who is Rails UI for?" right at the top of railsui.com/docs .
2) Absolutely every paid product should have a pricing link in the top nav, spelled out in large, friendly letters. If the landing page only implicitly implies "paid product" but is then going to be sneaky about that fact, I close the tab and do not come back; in this case, I only stuck around because it's a Show HN.
Oh, and _that_ perennial topic ... a subscription? No thank you. Especially for the kind of money you're asking, I expect a perpetual license for the version at time of purchase, plus at least a year of updates.
All together: not for me. Best of luck to you!
I would make it clear in the landing page that the components are for demonstration purposes by adding a title like "For example" before them.
The above the fold looks a bit packed right now. I would leave the login box out until user presses top right as it's for retentive users only.
I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.
And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.
As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.
You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.
- table background moves left when table is scrolled horizontally
- actions in table and dropdown do nothing on tap
- text on buttons is selectable (really?)
That's where I discovered TW back in 2018 I think. It was even before the Refactoring UI book and videos and the first official version of TW.
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
First things I stress to devs I’m working with are, here are the rules for breakpoints, type sizes, colours, spacing etc. If the designs don’t match the rules, go with the rules, not the designs. If things don’t look right let’s talk about it.
I open https://railsui.com/components.
I click on the different components. They switch to a random component after a while.
My confidence in Rails for UI stays were it was :)
Give me some life and color and personality, damn it.
Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.
Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?
And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.
My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.
Personally though I use rails - I just opt for Bootstrap, otherwise just inertia + PrimeVue
if you really wanna have dope components such as shad whatever - then of course you can always opt for Rails + Inertia React + Component library
"if you really wanna have dope components such as shad whatever - then of course you can always opt for Rails + Inertia React + Component library"
I don't think the target audience of RailsUI are people who want to use a front-end javascript framework.
A more suitable alternative is: https://railsblocks.com/
otherwise looks cool though
One suggestion I'd make is to disable the autorotation of ui elements on your main page, it's unintuitive and has a frustratingly short timeout before cycling to the next ui element.
"Solo" plan is $299/year (1 seat), "Team" plan is $799/year (30 seats), larger plans are "inquire now".
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
A more natural unit for pricing would be per domain, application, environment, or similar.
That said, I'm aware several UI frameworks have moved toward seat-based licensing recently, so it must be working for them in some sense.
Still, does not justify the caustic comment. And I’ll be spending this entire weekend obsessing on how to do better.
Rails defaults use Stimulus.js and Turbo from the Hotwire ecosystem. Rails UI follows these conventions and includes pre-built Stimulus controllers for common UI patterns.
And I've kept my eyes on Rails UI since it was in beta, and I was poking around with it a couple weeks ago and the cool thing is it could be used on a project like the one above without clashing with anything.
i havent used it since 2006 opting for php and django
i might give it another shot, any reason you like this more than django or other frameworks
Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.
Personally, I don't see the point in ever touching rails since bunjs gives me everything I need while being faster and typescript compatible.
Ruby does look pretty, but that's it.
Is there any benefit that would justify giving it a try if you already use typescript?
when will developers learn UI actually matters
bootstrap was a mistake, and lowered the bar for everyone