Moqups Premium
blog.moqups.com
blog.moqups.com
I made my own library instead to simply control state in an HTML page using simple, logical class names and IDs. This, combined with Bootstrap, made an HTML mockup a very fast and easy way to do exactly what we needed.
Is there some new feature in Moqups that helps with interactive state such as this? Or do you have any suggestions on what the "best practice" for interactive UI mockups should be?
Or is this something people don't usually do? Is it seen as "too realistic" or unuseful? So far we've found the interactive mockup invaluable in honing generic UIs and determining which direction to go, so I can't believe it's so difficult in most tools to control and easily switch component states.
I've used this on a single project so far to show off interactivity by creating a mockup, duplicating it, adding in the interactivity changes (say, a popup or other state changes), and then create a button to link off to the duplicated page with the extras. It made for a pretty nice mockup with demo-ability.
The current version has moved this into the hotspot feature, which appears to allow arbitrary hotspot creation and the same ability to link to other mockup pages. There is now no need for a button as far as I can tell.
Does this allow for incremental refinement/iteration of the mockup? My problem with duplicating pages is basically having a bunch of shared components on the same page, and then having to make a change to one of them... across the dozen different pages representing the states... so it was still an insufficient method for me.
Congratulations getting to this stage! The price levels seem reasonable to me. I personally wouldn't have a problem paying for it.
Is there integration with Basecamp or similar? That would be nice.
We're also planning many more integrations and Basecamp is close our radar. We're seeing huge amounts of traffic coming from tools like Aptana, Trello or Basecamp so this makes a lot of sense.
Stay tuned!
I'm certainly not paying a monthly recurring fee for a mock up tool to play with side projects! I could see upgrading it for the collaboration aspect for clients, but for toy and hobby projects you've seemingly just killed the tool.
Calling it 'using in a casual manner' is bad, how is having a project per idea and being limited to 2 ideas 'casual'? A helpful compromise?!?
Personally I think you've focused on completely the wrong thing to go premium for. I'm surprised you didn't go private projects & apps/dropbox integration (standard) > revision control & master pages (pro) > collaboration (ultimate) or something like that. But that's just the programmer in me I guess, we all know that multiple projects won't add to your costs, just massive inconvenience to the free users.
Still, it's your product so do what you want and you're allowed to change your mind, just don't expect a lot of people cheering you on. I'm just personally sad I probably won't use it any more as I'm not going to faff around trying to organise multiple thoughts into one humongous project.
As a reminder of what you originally said when you introduced it to HN:
We'll keep the main functionality free (with some reasonable limitations). We plan on adding some really cool collaboration and annotation/feedback features soon that we'll probably ask a buck or two for.
I just don't see 2 projects as reasonable at all but I always suspected something like this would happen as the tool was just too well done. Note that I would probably buy it for a reasonable fixed price (like $50-70) but obviously the storage, etc. will constantly be a drain on you. It is better than balsamiq, but not better enough to be dipping into my pocket every month for the rest of my life. The problem with saas I guess.
EDIT: I guess this is the problem with an online tool being useful to both individuals and corporations. I can see real value from a recurring fee from dropbox as an individual, but a mock up tool? For what (should) be a desktop app that's gone to a sass model, are individuals really going to pay a recurring fee for this? On the other hand, it's a perfectly reasonable price for businesses, even small and micro ones if you use it regularly. I would definitely sign up if I do more consultancy again. Perhaps I'm cheap as an individual, but to me it's just far too expensive for my personal use case.
My point actually was that it's pretty much non-sense to complain about a free tool. You probably did the right thing, as a developer, you built your own system.
In case you weren't aware it's $10 per month. Per month. Say your $20 pen lasts 5 years. Add maybe another $30 in refills. That's $50. In the same time moqups would cost you $500.
And also if you stopped paying they might take away everything you'd 'written'.
I certainly think it's worth the money for companies. Just not for individuals.
And I think that it's not about companies vs. individuals. It doesn't matter if you're a company or not. What it matters is that the products does a job for you and you benefit from it somehow. There is a profit you gain from using the product. You should accept the idea of making a little investment in order to get that profit. You don't get free coffee at Starbucks, or free chips or McDonalds or free breakfast at a gas station, just like that. You pay for everything in the real world.
Software should be cheap, but not free. My opinionated 2 cents. :)
It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial.
Let me try to shed some more light about the free version: - We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind.
- There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period.
- All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects.
- On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans.
- We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans.
Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about.
Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business.
Thanks again!
Edit: line breaks
If you give public mockups a publicly accessible page and create a base representation that is indexable by Google, it might be an interesting source of additional incoming traffic (and leaves you open to become something like SpeakerDeck for Mockups.)
I prototyped our startup's entire user flow with Moqups and I couldn't be happier ... their way of configuring elements from a plain textfield with a Markdown-inspired philosophy works really well for me.
I literally asked them when I would finally be able to pay them for privacy controls a while ago ... they haven't mailed me yet though ;)
Just a simple gripe on blog design. A few months ago someone posted an article about an all-to-common problem [1] in company blogs. Your site doesn't have any link to your actual product. Luckily this article has a link, but unless every article links to the product, you are losing business every time. You're forcing your readers to manually type in the URL instead of having a simple link in the header of every page. It's a simple fix, but it could pay off big time.
Like 60% of blog posts on HN make this mistake. It surprises me quite a bit, but I guess it should make you feel better that apparently everyone makes this mistake.