14 comments

  • Ollie BarkerOllie Barker, 4 years ago

    Really great idea but damn $12 a month for this? No chance. One of payment, or Sketch style? Maybe but it's just Chrome underneath..

    9 points
  • Mitch WarrenMitch Warren, 4 years ago

    This is $12 a month if you're paying YEARLY. It's $22.08 if billed monthly. In Aussie dollars here, that's $31. You're dreaming.

    3 points
  • John Gat, 4 years ago

    Fuck that pricing. This is extremely expensive for what is doing, honestly. If they can do more, maybe the pricing would make sense, but this is just Chromium with concurrent viewports with different widths in the same window.

    3 points
  • Thomas Michael SemmlerThomas Michael Semmler, 4 years ago

    this is way too expensive for something that could also easily be solved with a browser extension. I think you overestimate the time it takes do interact with the chrome dev tools.

    3 points
  • Matt KMatt K, 4 years ago

    Nice idea, but blimey that's expensive for a skinned version of Chrome. If it was a brand-new rendering engine or something, that pricing might make sense.

    Think I can continue pressing ctrl-apple-r to enter responsive design mode for $12-$19+ per month.

    3 points
    • Kilian Valkhof, 4 years ago

      Hi Matt,

      I think you underestimate the time you save by simply not having to switch back and forth to retest previous breakpoints. And that's not even mentioning the other features like breakpoint detection and layout debugging. I'm obviously biased but I've been using Polypane for myself for a long time and I've had similar websites taking half the time with Polypane compared to Chrome. Even if you're 10% more efficient at your job that's a pretty good deal I'd say.

      There is a 7 day trial and if you cancel any time during those 7 days you can still use it until the 7 days are up, that's a pretty low-risk way of trying it out. Give it a try, you might be surprised!

      0 points
      • Chris Rosenau, 4 years ago

        Hi Kilian,

        I think you underestimate how many services we are charged $9.99 or more a month and have way more uses. I think you are over confident and really haven't tested your market. Most of us won't do a 7 day free trial that you have give out payment info for. Why? Because we know we forget and then get charged.

        Really any skilled designer/developer doesn't even need your tool. We have already found solutions, we don't want another browser. I can see myself trusting your browser only to find out my design is broken in Firefox and Chrome. Yes I know you are using the Chrome browser base, but I can tell you I use Vivaldi and every so often my designs in Vivaldi don't appear right in Chrome.

        Sounds like a hard sell to me. I would offer your product for free and have users pay for addons. That always gets me to buy stuff. Only being able to view iphone, ipad and desktop would be enough. Then we pay for all the other tablets and cell phones. 99cents a month per additional device or now charge me $12 a month for all of them.

        Your current approach has many users walk away before they have even tried the product because they think they are going to get locked into something they might not want or like. The free trial doesn't resolve this.

        Chris

        6 points
      • Matt KMatt K, 4 years ago

        Hi Kilian, thanks for your reply.

        I don't want to dump on your idea because fundamentally it's a good one – being able to preview all breakpoints at once would be really handy.

        However it's just that: handy.

        In comparison, Sketch only costs $8.25 per month, and Marvel $12. These are my essential design tools, and your product is more expensive than them.

        I do understand a lot of work has gone into it and you want to make a viable business, but those prices, even with a free trial are offputting.

        About the trial: 7 days is very short – even Sketch and Marvel offer at least 14 days. It needs to be enough time for the product to be fully embedded into people's workflows, so doing without would be difficult – and therefore find the motivation to put together a business case and get the spend authorised.

        More thought on pricing: The features for team and enterprise plans, which are more expensive than the single user plans, seem to be solely around billing or licence management. There doesn't seem to be any features that would make me or my team's lives better, for example collaboration or cloud sync.

        For desktop software, which this is, rather than a cloud-based SaaS, which the pricing structure is emulating, I'd expect a volume licensing programme, where the cost is reduced depending on the number of licences bought.

        4 points
        • Kilian Valkhof, 4 years ago

          Hi Matt, thanks for this thoughtful reply!

          These are all good points and I'll think about them. Making it a viable business is what's most important to me and that means making sure that people understand and agree with the proposition, and find the price acceptable. It seems so far enough people do, but obviously here on Designer news I've been getting more pushback and that's a signal I'll take into consideration.

          0 points
  • Jim SilvermanJim Silverman, 4 years ago

    what does this offer that http://re-view.emmet.io/ doesn't cover?

    2 points
  • Aaron Wears Many HatsAaron Wears Many Hats, 4 years ago

    Personally I love seeing people's development projects up on here, it's really great that the community is constantly building new tools. However, some level of market research never goes astray... and unfortunately your paid product already exists for free.

    This appears to just be a skinned chromium release, and most of the features listed are straight-out-of-the-box dev tool features, like dragging to adjust the size of your viewport ('focus mode'), turning on frame edges, listing the Chrome dev tools as a feature.... The two 'killer features' are then the multi-frame view, and screenshots. Both are things achievable with free chrome extensions.

    http://re-view.emmet.io/ - Emmet Re:View - choose whatever devices, etc etc. Literally the same as this.

    https://mrcoles.com/full-page-screen-capture-chrome-extension/ - Full Page Screen Capture - one of a plethora of various tools that do this.

    Now don't get me wrong - Polypane looks like a cool little project - but to charge monthly for what is essentially two free plugins bundled in a free browser?

    Uuugh.

    2 points
  • Frédéric AudetFrédéric Audet, 4 years ago

    Interesting idea. I think the product is about.. 12$/month too expensive. There are millions of free Chrome plugins out there that all do the same. And if I wanted to give it a serious test, 7 days isn't enough.

    You should survey the industry—understand the reality of freelancers vs. agencies vs. product companies. It's not about features, it's about solving meaningful problems for us.

    Think this: - We might be paying for Github - We might be paying for Adobe Products - We might be paying for Framer - We might be paying for Jira - We might be paying for Principle - We might be paying for Sketch - We might be paying for Slack - We might be paying for InVision - We might be paying for Marvel - We might be paying for Abstract

    All of the above are more complex products and are costing roughly the same.

    Think about it.

    1 point