Show HN: Stencils.io – Graffletopia alternative for free OmniGraffle stencils | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stencils.io – Graffletopia alternative for free OmniGraffle stencils

stencils.io

29 pointssubbu12 comments

I'm one of the authors. We hope it's a good start of a collection for OmniGraffle users. Requesting everyone to contribute; submit more stencils and make this place great.

This is a great idea! I was shocked to see the stunt pulled by graffletopia given the community goodwill it had. Hopefully you can fill the void left by their dickish move.

FYI, clicking on "Submit a free stencil" takes me to a warning:

> We're sorry. This document is not published.

"Dickish move" is a strange way to put that. Do you think their service is free to operate?

If you're an Omnigraffle user, you've already paid for a professional-grade application, and the stencils offered by Graffletopia are inarguably huge time savers.

$24/year, even if you only use one stencil in one project, should be an expense not even worth mentioning (15-30 billable minutes?) for most professionals. Certainly when compared to the time required to create all those assets yourself instead.

Anyhow, to each their own, but I don't understand this kind of angry reaction when a free service becomes very popular and decides to start charging a completely reasonable fee for their offering.

Especially from an entrepreneurial community like HN.

The problem is that they are charging money for things that are free to distribute. I think most of the Graffle creators would be upset with this development if they were aware of how disingenuous this was. In fact, they (Graffletopia) are taking advantage of the fact that most of the items are not licensed in any way. For example: https://www.graffletopia.com/stencils/1197

This guy could very easily put his graffle on github (as Viget has done here: https://github.com/vigetlabs/Twitter-Bootstrap-for-Omnigraff... and License it as MIT, GPL, whatever.

$36 is not a reasonable amount to ask for. Nor is $24, especially in the days of Amazon S3 hosting, or even putting a slick static page up and pointing contributors and downloaders to Github. I respect the marketplace aspect, letting posters set a price on their work and taking something off the top. That's not dissimilar at all to what the Tuts+ and Medialoot marketplaces do. But they don't charge you to download their freebies, and charging someone for a membership to download more than one free item a month is total bullshit.

stencils.io is actually a static webpage with direct links to the stencil's original locations.

Thumbs up to you for doing it the right way.

Changed the privacy settings of the form. You should be able to submit a new stencil now.

What are the pro/cons as compared to Graffletopia?

Graffletopia seemed to be perfectly functional to me.

Graffletopia used to be completely free. You could download as many stencils as you wished. Now its $24/year; you can download only one free stencil a month. $24 isn't a problem. But charging for community contributed stencils is disgraceful. As someone on Quora (http://qr.ae/nm6Vf) said: Actually, most of the good new stencils on Omnigraffle are no longer free. But the problem is these are not included with the subscription = lame. After downloading so many free stencils over the years, I don't mind paying a small annual fee. But what's the point if I still have to pay $20-50 for any of the good ones?

Now if only there were a free omnigraffle alternative that can read these stencils

There are a few: draw.io, Google drawing, LibreOffice drawing etc. But nothing comes close to omnigraffle.

Looks good! I might give it a spin.

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