$ teebot.dev – from terminal to tee in 6 seconds | Hacker News Reader

$ teebot.dev – from terminal to tee in 6 seconds

teebot.dev

33 pointsfoxpress39 comments

Btw, this has nothing to do with the "tee" shell command.

It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure this out. The association between a terminal and `tee` is just too strong.

Yeah I've been hearing that a lot today. Lesson learned, updating the copy to say t-shirt.

That would be funny if people started printing off log crap onto shirts because they did | tee to them

Ha, fair point. A few people have mentioned the confusion. Going with "t-shirt" going forward.

Came here to say that I can use `tee(1)` as soon as my terminal opens. I guess this is just another case of really, really bad naming.

Why does it take 20 seconds to composite a string onto a shirt? Are you using generative AI for something that can be done in milliseconds with traditional techniques?

that's the Printful API. Once a phrase has been generated it's cached so it's instant next time. Do you have any suggestions on how to make it faster?

it's often faster than that, that's just the longest it ever takes so I set the countdown timer to 20 seconds. if you can think of a better way to present that I'd love to hear it.

It cannot be that, surely since the page prior to the CTA actually shows the shirt with the string composited. So is it perhaps doing some live pricing based on a collection of vendors on the backend? Better to show an initial price and then a progress bar that moves up as the vendors return prices I think. Either way, I reflexively almost clicked away as soon as the 20 s started.

Damn, ok. Good feedback. I heard that from someone else, too. Our attention spans are fried, lol. Can't wait 20 seconds for a shirt preview! It's true though. So the first "preview" is just rendering text on top of a blank shirt mockup, and the the second one (after you click and go to /preview) actually sends the text to the Printful API to get a render of how the shirt will actually appear. That's the delay, waiting for the final image to come back from Printful.

I've tried to type in non-ASCII (Ukrainian) and preview shows it correctly. Does it guarantee it would print it properly?

Yes! You can thank my mom for that :) She wanted a shirt with some extra unicode characters yesterday so I added support for that.

Your site supports Hebrew, but it looks like Printful doesn't for most fonts. They all come back with placeholder characters. The letters do show up with at least some of the fonts if I design directly on Printful.

Which font and characters are you looking for, I can add them.

What print on demand supplier are you using? I'm building a merch builder website for startups and most PODs (Gelato, Printify, Printful) all have their own issues.

Printful. It has its issues for sure but the API is solid and fulfillment has been reliable so far. What are you running into with them?

I was having some issues with creating assets using their API across the different products they sell. They weren't make or break though.

I cannot click on "Preview and price" - I'm in a country you're currently not shipping to so it maybe a feature more than a bug.

If we can't ship to your country yet the button is disabled so you don't go through the whole flow and hit a dead end. Working on expanding shipping though. Where are you located? Would help me prioritize.

I've added a few requested countries and am adding a bunch more right now. Give me a few minutes and I should have most places that Printful ships to (sorry Russian, UAE and Pakistan)

Ok I just added support for 204 additional countries and currencies. Can you try it now and let me know if you're one of them :)

i built teebot.dev because every time i wanted to put text on a shirt, i got lost in some enshitified print companies design flow. i just wanted to get words on a shirt.

So i made teebot.dev. type your text and ship it. that's it.

here's the CLI:

npx teebot "wtf?"

what material are the shirts made of?

Good question, I need to surface this on the site. Currently it's a Bella+Canvas 3001 (ring-spun cotton, midweight). Adding product specs to the preview page.

I’ll never buy cotton shirts on principle. Tri-blend only for me. I have far too many conference shirts that have shrunk.

Curious. I always prefer 100% cotton, and nothing ever shrinks noticeably. I thought shrinking clothes were a historical oddity from my childhood, honestly.

A couple things that might make the difference:

  - Conference swag shirts might be a lower quality/more shrinkable weave? I don't buy anything special.
  - I wash on medium or cold temp, never hot (except full loads of towels), and dry on medium. Everything always comes clean.

Ime, some shrinkage is inevitably if you wash with reasonably hot temperatures. Reasonable ~ following the washing instructions. Most mid to high end tshirts are pre-shrunk however which helps a lot, low end shirts (maybe some conference swag?) can skip this step for cost reasons.

too easily confused with the terminal command tee

Literally just say T-shirt. Nobody calls this a tee. Except if you are in a clothing store I guess

+1, I was a bit confused as I was wondering about tee command too.

OP, Just say T-shirt please ,instead of terminal to tee, say terminal to t-shirt in 6 seconds!

ok, will do. t-shirt going forward. I thought the tee command connection was cute but clearly I missed the mark on that one

Great.

aside from that, I read the comments and I see that you are having no extra charge-up and this just feels like a passion project!

and I am grateful for that, Its actually really great and actually cheap.

Is there anything similar to this but for clocks for example? Niche, I know but I would love to have customized clocks perhaps via the same mechanism

Another suggestion I would love to have is if there could be a way that I can "gift" someone a t-shirt/credits ykwim

So I am thinking that if I ever do anything business related, I would love to give customers some good t-shirts with some text related to a business as a thank you for-example if they are using my service or as a giveaway,

But with your product I realize that I can also give them both the above option but also the fact that they can also customize it if they might not like it, I find that option of freedom for the end user somewhat even more respecting, and I can maybe give them many options to choose any one shirt to begin with, the possibilities are endless!

Great project actually. You should do a Show HN!

Aw, thanks Imustaskforhelp! It really is a passion project. And I am a very passionate person ;p

Clocks?! Why Not! :) I like the gift idea, going to lean into that.

The possibilities really are endless, the framework could be repurposed for any/many products.

shoot me your email at feedback@teebot.dev, I wanna give you a free shirt ;)

Saw your message, I appreciate that you liked my message and I have sent you an email now!

> It really is a passion project. And I am a very passionate person ;p

Great to hear that, The world needs more people who build things because of passion so kudos!

Yep, hearing this loud and clear. Updating the copy to say t-shirt.

Especially as the picture literally has a command prompt saying "$ tee <command>"

Banner says "custom tees, delivered at cost" but then the preview page shows a price that is double what I get going to their drop shipper directly (printful). No detailed product info on shirt type or quality. No company info. Hard pass.

The pricing includes printing, shipping, and handling. There's no markup on top of Printful's base cost. If you're comparing against going to Printful directly yourself, the price should be the same. If you're seeing a difference, mind sharing what product/shipping you were comparing? Could be a regional shipping rate thing.

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