Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours | Hacker News Reader

Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours

draw.io

176 pointsdavidjgraph63 comments

This is great marketing. Tie in your promo to the highly-popular, highly-dubious event as an advertising tie-in to multiply its effectiveness -- as a fringe story involving the event, you're going to have your message repeated automatically by others interested in the event.

You guys just reminded me that a Visio competitor exists, and you got me to try it. You did this by using a marketing message which entertained me -- don't buy now because "tomorrow's doomsday". You gave me some entertainment value in exchange for taking my valuable time. Thanks.

Google Docs also has a drawing program that I regularly substitute for Visio, but I do hope to see these Doomsday sales become a trend today.

Libreoffice Draw or Inkscape can also be used.

Do you use there straight out drawing capabilities? Or is there someway/plugin which allows the drawings to have the semantics of a graph (e.g. Line routing or layout managers.

FYI I use yEd because it deals with all the semantic stuff very well.

Speaking of Google, their Doodle today celebrates the Grimm Fairy Tales. Not sure if they did that on purpose, but it sure ties in to the whole "doomsday" theme going on.

Personally I use LucidChart, mainly because it actually just works better than Visio for creating flowcharts (the connector reflow logic is nicer).

I know I'm missing something, but looking at the landing page, I can't perceive any way to capitalize on this. Is Draw.io always free, so this is a joke, or am I missing something obvious? All I see is the "Don't Sign Up" button at the bottom.

Granted, it's an early day for me today, so I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders

Don't worry it's late in the day here and took me a while to work it out. It's a joke, draw.io is always free.

So how do they generate revenue for hosting and stuff? Donations?

Volume.

Selling indecent pictures of the developers. We're looking for a domain to post them on, humblebundle.com was already taken, sadly.

This way there's no shopping cart to go down. And anyway, it's the end of the world, what we gonna do with the 25%?

Would you be willing to offer a larger discount if I bought multiple seats? I want to roll this out across my company before our fiery doom arrives tomorrow.

To be honest, for the next 24 hours we're focusing pretty much solely on flagrant hedonism. And flame-retardant suits.

My flagrant hedonism is largely dependent on charts so you can see why I'm keen to arrive at some manner of deal. How about "buy one get one free"?

How about I give you the full source code (normal retail price 999,999), you do what you like with it and in return you give me the keys to your car with the boot stocked full of beer?

I think your humor is lost on many users here. Is this normally a product you have to pay for?

Given that the source code is on GitHub I would assume not but, but I'm still confused.

I also don't have a Sign Up button so I can't tell what the deal is with that either.

No, it's always been free, but hopefully that will be buried far down in the comments. There's nothing to sign up to, everything's free. You can link it up to your Google Drive account if you want to use that as storage, but that's just a permissions thing.

ok knowing that, this is actually a lot funnier =)

I decided not to sign-up since they asked me not to.

The sign up/don't sign up button is dynamically generated based on the perceived desirability of the user. I wouldn't take rejection badly, the main thing is to learn from it.

How did they determine the "perceived desirability of the user"? Seems a little presumptious to me - I didn't even know what it was until I clicked the link, and the first thing they say is "we don't want you."

Well guess what - now I don't want you either.

Hello, world is ending, whether you sign up or we all make love, tomorrow it's all in vain...

This almost feels like you're trolling your own post! :)

I took it to mean "instead of buying, try it out."

After hearing the part about the "perceived desirability of the user", I'm thinking maybe they only want to sell to certain people today, perhaps return visitors? Maybe they want all their new visitors to try it out before buying? They could have the button change based on cookies, and they just started an ad campaign that's on HN's front page.

Edit: This comment was unhelpful? If not, why downvote?

Possibly, or given the source to whole thing is on github, you could just look at the HTML of the page there, https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io/blob/master/war/about.html

He's joking. He's the co-creator of draw.io.

Yes I get that now. Unfortunately, it's difficult to hear the ironic twang in his voice on an internet forum.

It told me it doesnt want me to sign up, so I did anyway. out of spite.

I can't even figure out how to sign up.

Crap I already paid $300 for this yesterday before the sale started - can I get a refund?

Yes, I'll get straight onto that. Tomorrow.

How have I never heard of draw.io to begin with? This is glorious.

Great marketing as well :)

Fine, make fools out of those freeloaders (me), making them/us think they will get a product free for the rest of their lives (which is supposed to last to 24 hours, RE: Doomsday).

I get it.

Funny and effective

Little typo in the line: "The full source code to both draw.io and the underlying mxGraph library is available on gituhb"

https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io/pull/7 ?

>gituhb

Minor, but unprofessional in light of the $000,000.00 price :)

Yeah, that's fixed in production now.

The typo is that it says "gituhb"

https://gituhb.com/jgraph/draw.io/pull/7

GraphML export/import would be awesome

We have got that sitting around somewhere, didn't realise anyone wanted it.

+1 I'd love that.

I could use it also. It would help me migrate over from yEd.

https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/tree/master/java/src/com/m... . It's all there in the back-end, I'll switch it on after the break.

I want to give them money just for how good their landing page copy is... hilarious! Great work :D

Tell me, how did you arrive at the 100% off figure without getting a divide-by-zero error?

Trial multiplication.

  try
  {
    // Do something
  }
  catch
  {
    // ignore
  }

puff

  0 / 0 rescue "100%"

Interesting, I just had my company pay 200 bucks for omnigraffle because I was using it to make UML. This would had been perfectly fine.

Thanks for posting

This thing gets guitar tablature notation and I am in for 10 licenses. Either way, great publicity stunt.

Who started this marketing thing? ; )

I have to say this is pure genius: I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off (once the site shall be back up).

Whoever started it it's amazing to see other companies quickly react: I guess seeing servers melt under the load of people ordering products made some able to react fast.

The only thing that is too bad it's that it seems very hard to reproduce: rarely are there such doomsday scenario that gather that many attention :-/

Maybe there's a lesson in this for us: if you can tie your marketing to current events then you'll get greater recognition. I'm no marketing guy, so I bet this is pretty much marketing 101 and I'm probably quoting the already-well-understood.

I don't think you need another doomsday, use any current event; and you don't need to have your product be related to the event in any way. Sitepoint[1] always do a Christmas sale, for example, and web design books and Christmas have nothing in common.

I think anyone could tie anything to themselves:

- "have a look at our Olympic offers"

- "we have Royally stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Royal Wedding]

- "we have stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Christmas / Thanksgiving]

...er...er...you get the idea.

[1] http://www.sitepoint.com/

    I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off

Could you clarify on that? I thought it was a genuine sale. Not sure what the trick is.

Ya, my immediate move to purchase several high quality JetBrains products was purely because of the 75%, not the silly "doomsday" bit. That's cheap.

Oh, I'm sure they're just having fun with it. It's just a silly theme for the sale.

it is a trick to get you to surrender your money in exchange for goods and or services

I don't get it:

http://www.jgraph.com/mxlicense.html is a non-free license, but https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/blob/master/license.txt is non-commercial Creative Commons

Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

https://www.draw.io/about.html says

"As Pro Plus® ++

Unlimited Users Unlimited Drawings Full Source Code

$0 / diagram / cpu / user / hour"

And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page? -- Fortune 500 usually negotiate compensation for using their logos like that, which a vendor of a free product wouldn't have time/incentive to deal with.

> Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

Sure, if you pay for it. mxGraph is dual licensed, being the copyright holders, we can do this.

> And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page?

By having the clause:

"JGraph Ltd is permitted to reference you as a user of the Software in customer lists on the JGraph web-site, in presentations to clients and at trade events."

In the mxGraph commercial license. A few customers remove it, most don't. Some have asked for their logo to be removed, we always comply. But these are all paying customers of ours that have that term in their license.

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