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Show HN: We built a realtime design feedback tool using Node.js

framebench.com

32 pointsroh26it47 comments

Not stoked on pricing on any of these. not gonna pay that If one pays say $15 / month for flexible hosting products, these kinds of services are comparatively overpriced. Does the realtime feedback matter? My experience is its better to wait for your stakeholders to complete their round of feedback to weed out redundancy. Realtime is just a distraction

There is a stand-out feature which is video, not all these services have that.

Cant wait for the self-hosted version of these to be created for a onetime price. makes way more sense to me.

If you think that $19 / month is over-priced, you are not in anybody's market.

If you think that the service is not as good as your current solutions, that is a different critique and discussion altogether.

I would actually advise to get rid of the $19/month option, because as all of the successful SaaS operators say it will result in the unhappiest customers and the lowest profit margin.

"all of the successful SaaS operators say it will result in the unhappiest customers and the lowest profit margin."

Yes all those Dropbox users with their free 2gb are constantly complaining and unhappy. They can't contain their rage.

Thats the debate between giving it for free and charging a small amount..

You do have a point there! We kept it to be a good starting point of low resistance.

We kept pricing irrespective of the number of users just due to that. Would love to hear your thoughts at rohit AT framebench DOT com though.

Thanks for checking out Video! We even have superior PDF support in comparison to all others. Zoom in. ;)

We want to maintain it for sometime till its stable enough to be available as a self hosted solution. Btw, how much would you pay for a self hosted version?

If it worked the way I wanted, I'd probably pay $70 for a self-hosted solution. If it were absolutely what I needed with upgrades included for 2-3 years, maybe I'd pay up to $150. And if certain feature updates were intriguing enough I might pay another amount to get 2.0 version and so forth.

I use pancakeapp, I love it. I bought it and then bought the upgrade a year later. The price is fair, the software is great, very useful.

Bump your prices up.

Imagine if some senior design guy in some digital agency making 8 figures in profit per year wants to use it. Do you think that he wouldn't get approval for, say, $500 / month if he thought it would help him work with the designers he manages or the stakeholders he reports to?

Capping out at $99 / month is leaving a ton of potential money on the table, IMO.

Thanks a lot for this oneye! You're right we've had people sign up for our enterprise plans more than we'd expected. But we felt that this is the rift price point today because we want to make this available to every creator whos collaborating.

We go after the high net worth users with our enterprise plans that offer a higher degree of customization and integration.

500 a month. Yeah right. you know how companies and freelancers make that kind of profit? They control their expenses.

"whats up, my god, this image has been, screwed up, faggots"

Is all I see posted in the chat on your live demo[1]. You might want to have a little more control over this, seems like you've been infected with a few teenagers/morons already.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/uunBhwX.png

Hey, sorry about this. we figure that while we could do something about an XSS attack, this is something we'd leave. We did clean a lot of comments and chat messages which were extreme. Framebench is meant to be private, so while this may happen in a demo, it certainly won't when within an organization. Thanks for pointing it out though! :)

Looks great, just as long as there's a verification process to ensure that only designers are giving design feedback.

You wouldn't want your MBA boss looking over your code and suggesting you "break that method out into a new class," why would you want someone who's not a designer telling you to "make the logo bigger."

Joking, but seriously.

Haha, yes! This is actually supposed to be a private feedback tool so only the people you invite give you feedback. Just opened up this workspace for public. Thanks for liking it!

designers need feedback from non-designers. a designers title doesnt suddenly give them encompassing knowledge over a business and how to treat every part of a project.

The designer should have received all relevant context prior to starting the task. There will be exceptions, where a piece of context is missed, and in these cases where feedback is necessary the format of the feedback is important.

Rather than, "do it this way because businessReasons."

Instead, try, "We must not have properly conveyed this aspect of our business, here is the relevant context. Knowing this, how do we solve this design problem?"

If the designer is incapable of translating business requirements into design solutions then perhaps they're not a product/ux designer, maybe just a visual/graphic designer.

"there will be exceptions"

Yes like every project that gets designed.

Start thinking real world. Feedback comes from everywhere. A website for example can represent every aspect of a company and stakeholders who will view the early phases, either for suggestions or out of team respect will provide feedback. Doesn't mean a designer responds, but sometimes they have to suck it up and change it, even when they don't think it's better.

And stop talking like just because UX is in front of a title gives somebody special power. It doesn't. Work with a few of them and you'll realize it.

Often times, designers have to get feedback from the business guys because we do have a tendency to go with the flow. Especially if its not a full time job.

Absolutely, feedback is just more input for finding the right solution, and is valuable from any source.

Except you said earlier

"just as long as there's a verification process to ensure that only designers are giving design feedback"

You can't have it both ways.

Really cool product. If I may suggest, as your target audience is mainly designers, you should I think polish the design of the app. The tool is about refining design, but the app design could benefit from some love ( fonts alignment, shadows, color palette,.. ). There is some room for improvements, and by itself it's a great news ( btw, i'd gladly help ;) )

We should do that! Can I get your email address? I'm ar rohit AT framebench DOT com

You can contact me at this address : jm at producture dot com

Someone has taken it down. They managed to use an xss attack to inject a couple of alerts and then said they would try something else. Now you just get a JS 'hi' alert and it closes.

Yes, someone just cleared the DOM using an XSS. Should be up now atleast. Found the vulnerability.

Excellent! Very cool tool.

Thanks!

Done. It should work now.

I like it - does it have keyboard shortcuts? It's a pain to draw a circle, then click comment, then place the comment. I'd like to (d)raw then (c)omment.

It does have keyboard shortcuts. B is for brush, T for comment. Try it out.. We should put up tooltips for these. Thanks!

Ah yes, excellent. It wasn't obvious to me I had to roll over to get the shortcuts.

ALSO OW MY EARS

Yes. Noted. :)

Cool, but the question for me is what advantage this has over screen sharing. Perhaps this is meeting a need that I don't know, though.

What after the screen sharing session? Framebench makes sure that all your comments, files etc stay here. Also allows for asynchronous feedback so you could check the comments left at your convenience. This is why we say Framebench has the good parts of email and screensharing. And we have a fully functional asset management with versioning system built in..

Btw, did I mention...much lower bandwidth costs. :)

Deleted comment

Yep, we did check it for many text boxes. Someone found a loophole! x|

On it now.

And security loop plugged.

Awesome tool, used it for collaborating on my last website project. Thumbs up for the founders!

Thanks a ton! :)

This is pretty cool, I think its going to be a hit. Great job!

Woah, thanks a lot! Would really appreciate if you tell your friends about it. Thanks again!

Isn't this very similar to mural.ly?

Isn't mural.ly a whiteboard where you can collect stuff and yes collaborate? Framebench is probably more for online reviews and feedback. Did you notice the voice call feature?

Yes the starting idea is not the same, but in the end it looks you could use mural.ly to a very similar effect, that's why I was asking :)

Anyway, good job and good luck!

Thats true, in fact I love their sense of UI design. Thanks a lot for pointing it out.

Thanks again!

Comments welcome!

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