Took the words right out of my mouth. Seriously pricing out freelancers at $20p/m and the freelancer account doesn't get the same privileges as the agency plan.

And subscription is the new Pastel-black

It is pricey, but it's worth pointing out that those tools work on the basis of screenshots/static images whereas this lets you annotate live websites. That's pretty powerful. Something like Bugherd offers similar functionality (at a more reasonable price per seat) but I'm pretty impressed with how simple this is.

Hey Vasiliy! You are right in that commenting and collecting feedback exists! However, we are doing it live in the browser. We need to do a better job of that on our landing page.

Our personal design stack currently is: Invision for our static designs we want to wire up > Zeplin to make it easy to communicate the implementation > Pastel to communicate feedback and polish in the browser

As a designer, I understand that the worry is investing time and energy into a new product with the possibility of it not fitting into the workflow, which is why we are hard at work prioritizing what integrations to have so that picking up and using Pastel is super simple and frictionless.

Sure, but ...

• Not everyone makes $150k a year. There are some google sheets tables with designers providing their early income. Global early freelance income is less than half of what you suggest.
• How do you calculate if this saves you 20 minutes per month? There are lots of comments like yours. If tool saves X than it is totally worth it. But if every tool saved so much time then we would barely have to work. Which in the end is not the case and the time-saving aspect is not as simple as you make it sound.
• "... how difficult it is to build any kind of real SaaS business off less than $20/mo." It might be difficult but not everything has its customers. And this might simply be the case.

Still, good luck with the product!

Hi John! Aloke from Pastel here.

Pastel was born out of our frustrations as designers and devs using email and vague screenshots to capture, comment and act on feedback. We built early prototypes that made the process more collaborative, visual and made prioritizing easier.

The goal is simple for us. Better products come out of better feedback and better decision making of what feedback to act on and what to backlog. We want to make that easier.

Definitely a lot of learning to do! Appreciate your honest feedback though.

Thanks John.

Hey Ken. Thanks for your honest feedback! We hope to make the experience as simple as possible. We think designers and devs don't need to worry about anything more than entering a URL and having it work. It has been a huge challenge for us to maintain feedback status and positioning for live elements in the browser.

From our conversations with freelancers, agencies and product teams, the functionality is super useful. We will continue to simplify.

We want to eventually have our own illustrative brand language that we can call our own. Would love to get your feedback on the tool.

Thanks Matt! Excited to hear about your experience. Please let me know if there is anything we can do to improve your trial experience - aloke@usepastel.com

Best to have timer activated or user activated?

Hey! Aloke from Pastel here.

That's fair! Would love to learn about your feedback process and if we can help improve it. Can we chat? aloke@usepastel.com

Thanks Nick! Excited to see you using Pastel :)

I can see it!

We chose it as our logo because we wanted to show the benefit of feedback. Feedback comes in different shapes and colors, sometimes even competes with each other. Those conversations that happen during design critiques is what produces a better product.

TLDR - a positive color made by two different abstract speech bubbles.

Thanks Emilio.

We look up to Stripe! Hope to make collecting feedback as seamless of a process as they have made payments.

While I agree in general that Stripe is the inspiration for many sites these days, I don't think that applies here. This site has far more white-space and is much more minimalist than Stripe's is.

Hey Umit. Aloke from Pastel here.

What do you not like? How can we improve?