Carnival: An unobtrusive, developer-friendly way to add comments to any site

From the plans page: Business plan, 100 comments per month, $49 per month. That seems ridiculously expensive to me - ¢49 per comment! Is this a typo for "100k comments per month" perhaps?

- Asks me to sign in with github or gmail before telling me what the project is about

- Paying money so that people can leave comments on my site?

- No screenshots or graphics showing what it looks like on landing page of https://carnivalapp.io/

- Oh, It's an app? It's just a script isn't it?

- You put the whole thing on Github, yet, you ask for a monthly fee?

- So, this is basically like gitter, but for any site?

You would think they would have at least some sort of copy on site explaining deeper about what this is and the benefits of using it... i see nothing. All I can see is that this is some sort of comment thing, great. Right now, if I wanted comments on a site I would integrate Disqus.

If you find this confusing--especially the pricing and the minimal functionality--consider that ThoughtBot is a contract shop that also happens to package up some of their client work into side products and educational materials. They probably developed this as functionality for a client.

That's probably also the pattern with: "FormKeep is a form backend for your static sites. No need for iframes, JS embeds, and CSS overrides." https://formkeep.com/

Take the example of Pivotal Labs developing Pivotal Tracker for their in-house work and starting to sell it on the side over time.

What about http://hypothes.is/?

Further information is here: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-carnival-for-your-s...

It seems expensive for service provided. However they've established a lot of credibility on various Github projects so this may be a first iteration of something that will be better as it matures.

It'd be nice if there was a demo on the site to play with. Or, at least some screenshots to see what it looks like.

Maybe there is something after signing in, but I didn't want to sign in with Github or Google, and so I moved on.

Edit: Oh, there is, but I didn't notice them. Those light gray caption bubbles on the homepage.

Mobile? Strikes me there's been remarkably little innovation around bringing comment and forum-like functionality to mobile.

Given that typing hurts on mobile but you have easier access to other types of input (voice, camera, location, motion etc.) there's a need to reinvent the concept of comments

This is really poorly explained and man those prices are ridiculous. A free personal site gets you only 10 comments!? There isn't even a list of features that I could compare to other commenting systems.

Honestly, I've never really liked these kinds of per-paragraph/section commenting systems (I'm guessing that's what this is by the landing page) as you can't really have lengthy comments and it's cramped off to the side (possibly only this implementation is on the side, not sure)

Why doesn't my browser offer the ability to comment on any site?

Looks really good. Some questions:

1. It looks like google or github login is required. Any plans for anonymous comments? Or maintaining local user accounts, or connections to existing login systems? 2. There is no moderation. Any plans for editorial review options?

Thanks.