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Comment by Dystopian | Hacker News Reader

I'm a designer and developer - love the idea of both WebFlow and Macaw are up to.

I can see how this can be a huge time saver for me on the front-end - even if just another level of high-fidelity mockups (vs. production).

I find it really hard to justify dropping the money and then my time if I'm working through a web-based cloud service though (vs. a desktop app - even like the ones that call home like Creative Cloud).

We've seen a lot of web-based essential services go out of business. If I've mocked up 100 sites in WebFlow, the company goes out of business, and suddenly I don't have those resource files - it would be an even larger loss to me than any amount of money I had paid to purchase the software.

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Completely understand your concern. However, a couple of points to clarify:

- Webflow is meant for production site implementation, so your actual "source" files would be on your computer (in Photoshop, etc). You'd still need to use PS to slice images, optimize them, etc - we're not trying to replace Photoshop wholesale, just improve the workflow around the actual creation of the live site (something for which Photoshop was never intended).

- All your work completed in Webflow (to implement the initial design, and make it responsive), can be easily exported to a full HTML/CSS/JS bundle that can be run hosted anywhere you wish. A good practice could be to download completed sites and archive them in source control as a contingency.

I don't think your post addressed Dystopian's question: as I understand, your organization keeps not only your compiler proprietary but even the source code (preferred data structures for making changes) for your clients' websites (their flows, templates, etc.).

While use of the compiled output of your service may be a fallback, it's certainly not a good contingency. In particular, wouldn't consider the complied output "source code" any more than I'd consider assembler language output "source code".

I totally agree, personally, I would still use a product like this but store exports of each site design in git.

worse case scenario you have to go back to hand coding.

This is a massive, massive concern for us. We're an agency. We can't trust software like this for something as fundamental as our creative mockups.

We totally understand you concerns, however, the output of your creative work on Webflow is still the standards of the internet: HTML+CSS. As such, you aren't committing to a a resource file by using Webflow, as you would be if you were to use Flash/ColdFusion, whose outputs are proprietary.

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