> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need...
Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
Assuming that users only use 20% of the program and that the usage is evenly distributed, which would be a really big assumption right there, then there is still a finite number of users before you will have used up every part of program functionality between your user base and that any users past that amount will be repeating an actual and specific percentage of program functionality already assigned to some other user, unless you want to argue that functionality can be reduced infinitesimally in a sort of Zeno-like process.
If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development.
And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.
I think a successful product strategy can be "build something you love, see if others love it too". If that's enough customers, you can judiciously expand out from there. The "fail honestly" method.
This is the best way to build products imo. I'm like this, and I've been accused of being very "vibes-based." However, that's a way more tractable way of shipping stuff instead of "well Jim said he wants X, but Amy said she wants Y" so you end up just kind of half-assing features because you think they might get you users, instead of just being passionately all-in into a very defined product vision (which is a very Jobsian way of doing things).
It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway.
If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
Good taste is an incredibly powerful differentiator in competitive markets like software. Seems like there’s 3-5 decent choices for darn near anything I need, and usually 1 smaller team has the product that stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever.
That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
If you want to do the proverbial “moving upmarket” then yeah you’re going to have this and a lot of other problems. Taste does not sell (let’s be nice and add “on its own”) in that segment.
If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.
That is the alternative timeline for software I always wanted to live in, both as a user and as a developer. Make it 100 different tools instead to make it even more likely that there is a close enough match.
Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.
If you give people a limited set of tools they quickly improve until then they need (well, want) different tools. In order to keep your customers you'll inevitably end up adding new things.
I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.
Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.
Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.
No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
I dunno. I get that we have different needs, but I enjoy testing out new productivity tools. I'm sort of a productivity-software-junkie. I don't use almost any of the things I try, but I enjoy exploring the market.
Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.
You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try.
Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better.
Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
This post is about some highly interactive software with a lot of design decisions, and this thread is about finding whether or not your 20% feature niche is supported.
Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.
Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle.
You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine.
Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.
Every now and then I stumble on video game developers who have been chugging along for many years, even decades with a handful of dedicated fans. They make obscure niche games that play so well into that niche that they can sustain themselves. Honestly this is something I'd aspire to get to eventually, building a niche product that I love and that just enough people love that I could live sustainably on it, not trying to please anyone but a little collective of people who all agree on what the product should be.
This is a far bigger small world than some might expect. The number of devs and games he's referring to numbers well into the thousands. A quick search [1] shows more than 4 games are released per day on Steam which will go on to earn more than $50k in revenue, so about 1500 per year.
It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year.
A quick web search suggests that you are probably paraphrasing a newsletter [1] that Joel Spolsky published in 2001. He was talking about software like Excel (of which he was the Product Manager) and Word. Maybe a tool that is more focused on a narrower task (like UI design) can be less "bloated"?
Not just that, it was Excel a quarter of a century ago.
I am not even sure it was still true by the time her wrote it. It think that there is a set of core features (laying out stuff in a table, simple formulae) and some very commonly used features (e.g. graphs, data filtering) and a long tail of less commonly used advanced features (pivot tables, database like formulae like VLOOKUP).
Its more like 80% of users only use the same subset. Less commonly used stiff is important to the people who do use them, so you need it to sustain the network effects and enterprise sales.
Agree. This quote is being used out of context here. Niche software can and does succeed especially when it’s only supporting a single dev. This isn’t trying to dethrone an adobe product, or doesn’t need to.
A tool focusing on design is not “niche software” - every company of any size has designers. It’s trying to get professionals to use their software instead of Figma. Why would I move my team from an industry standard that they know or would be willing to learn because they know it will be important at their n+1 job?
Why did they move to figma from adobe? There’s tons of purpose built design software. I use a few different tools just for pixel art recently as I’m designing a game. I could use adobe or probably figma but this purpose built software made it super easy to focus on my one single design goal.
What you’re saying is basically a majority of SaaS shouldn’t exist because it could just be an excel spreadsheet. Why would anyone pay for a subscription or something when they already pay for excel right? Problem is spreadsheets are a blank canvas and can be difficult for people to build. Just like a design software like adobes and figma. This product is trying to focus on one particular use case of design software and simplify it. It’s not a horrible idea and can exist in the market. I’m not sure it will succeed but conceptually it’s not destined to fail for the this reason. I think you need to also define what success means. For a single dev, could just be a thousand paying users. He’s not necessarily trying to be figma.
My most successful company was a tool that focused on 10% of a ERP feature. One that I had used and implemented at corporates but knew ERP vendors were selling hard for having 100s of features of which I only cared about 20%. Not everyone cared about those same 20% but I found enough people that did and liked my opinionated take on the software. It would have never worked if I had this mindset.
Figma was a completely fresh take on UI design software and it was the best thing available at the time. It made incumbents look lazy.
Vecti looks like a Figma clone if its landing page is anything to go by. You're not going to have an easy time convincing people to migrate from Figma to a clone.
In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.
Maybe the problem with software is feeling the need to satisfy 100% of users instead of being OK with "only" 20%. Not everything needs to be a min/max problem.
As long as the 20% is enough to sustain your company, sure. You might have to charge more, however. Luxury brands do this, for instance (fewer consumers is actually a strategic choice to make the product more exclusive). “Pro” products also do this (though often “pro” means more features, not fewer).
The point is that 20% of features doesn't satisfy even 20% of users. It's going to be only a tiny fraction of that because something like 99% of potential users are going to need at least one feature outside the 20%. And if a competitor has all the features they need, but you don't, then you lose the sale.
He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.
> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need?
I think this is a weird question. Sure he can't be the only soul in the world to need only those features. Those 20% people need gotta overlap. So I think a more generous way to read your question would be "what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that the mass audience need?". If that's what you meant then I'd ask why appealing to the mass audience so important? Why maximize sales and risk making your product worse if the core of your product is to make things you care about?
> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.
> everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%
This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution.
We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them.
This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.
Could you elaborate a little bit more, how a sole developer should do these things in a meaningful way, if even larger companies and start-ups fail with this?
The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important.
Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches.
To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself.
And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.
Could it be more people want Instagram instead of Photoshop? Take a picture, choose from one of 10 filters. Have a ~12 adjustable settings. Vs Photoshop's 1000s of options.
Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market
> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need?
Good question, what's the pitch:
“Vecti is a browser-based UI design tool built from the ground up with one core belief, that creators deserve tools built specifically for them. Better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with their actual needs. A tool that just works, built by someone who genuinely cares about the people using it.”
Hmm. Did founders of Balsamiq or Figma not care about the people using it? And who if not creators were they built for?
“Share & Present - Set viewer and editor permissions at the team or project level. When it's time to present … let your work shine.”
VIM does this perfectly. Not a single feature is exposed to the user. Every feature the user might ever want is supported, they need just Google for which keyboard incantation to invoke it.
Makes me wish more apps followed the UNIX model of separating every feature into separate applications with well documented interfaces that only change when new features absolutely require it and otherwise are only updated for security patches.
One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.
There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.
Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.
I'm not sure you understood what I mean. I'm talking about applications like Krita using FFMPEG to export their data as video. Sometimes they include their own FFMPEG instead of using FFMPEG installed in the system. Each of them has its own dialog. The only way to input custom settings for FFMPEG would be to export in a lossless video format and then reencode using FFMPEG, when you should be able to just "connect" a data stream to an FFMPEG frontend as the input and the frontend has all the options you might want to customize how that data is turned into a .mp4 file or .mov file.
Since this is a commercial product, I'm naturally inclined to compare it to other competing commercial products.
Why would I want to use this over figma? The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit). Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face. Whiteboard, presentations, dev mode are all hidden behind menus. "no plugin support" seems like a very odd thing to flaunt as a feature. Many of the most popular use-cases of figma, such as interactive prototypes, svg creation, html/css exports are all impossible in this tool.
Then, there is the problem of this being maintained by a single person. Components are essential to any serious figma user, good svg and image handling is important (svg is buggy in my testing), selection colors is vital, color palette is important. When can users expect to see these features if the maintainer is busy hunting down bugs?
This is a technically impressive product, but I struggle to see the market plan. I personally hate distractions in software, I go to great lengths to debloat and disable features to make my computer interactions smoother, yet figma is possibly the last program I would want to clean up.
Thanks for your input. I'm happy that Figma works for you, and I'm not trying to put Figma out of business :)
I’m sincerely humbled to be compared to such an iconic product as Figma.
I started this project as a personal endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic, out of a personal desire to contribute to the field of UX design that I’ve always been passionate about, but at the same time I don’t intend on working as a solo developer for much longer.
Some of the features you’ve listed, are currently being worked on, which are going to be launched very soon.
I applaud your effort, and I love to see others practice the love of building. Though my original comment didn't suggest this, I would love to see your project succeed and gather a user base. Competition is always good, and this is a very solid start for a project.
> endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic
Was this an "itch to build something", or an itch as in an annoyance you had with an existing tool? I'm skeptic of whether bloated UI is an itch many users have with figma or similar, which is why I'm critical of presenting this as the selling point for Vecti. If you manage to find an itch many people do have, and you provide the salve, you'll attract paying users.
> The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit)
No, a company can’t sue you (well they can try, but it has no legal standing) because you rip off their side panel design. Thank god the industry doesn’t work like this.
Not relevant. Figma v. Motif was over allegations of stealing source code, apparently including known Figma bugs.
The design of the UI wouldn't be covered by copyright anyway; Figma would have had to file and be granted a patent, which has a much higher bar (IMO not high enough, but that's a different discussion).
This. As a heavy Figma user, I don't see why people want to pay $12/month for this product when Figma is as competitive in pricing and much more widely used
I think you’re missing the point a bit. Not every tool needs to be Figma, and honestly, that’s a good thing.
I’ve been using Figma for a while, and true, it’s powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall. Simple tasks now require navigating through multiple menus, and the learning curve for new users is steep (took me a while to understand it, and the same experience had it acquaintances of mine). Sometimes I just want to sketch out an idea or make a task without dealing with all that overhead.
The no plugin support thing actually makes sense to me. I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins. Having a tool that just works, consistently, without worrying about plugin compatibility or security issues? That’s valuable.
And yeah, it’s a solo developer versus a massive company (that’s my understanding) but that is why it’s beautiful. Also it’s an uneven comparison if you ask me (but didn’t :)) ).
However, the fact that this is even being compared to Figma shows the quality of what’s been built. Not everyone needs enterprise features. Some of us just want a clean, fast canvas without the friction. Every new feature of Figma feels like an attempt to monopolize the entire market.
I think he did an incredible job. Good work. This has value.
> Simple tasks now require navigating through multiple menus
I'm curious which simple tasks you're referring to?
> I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins
Why not uninstall those plugins? Is no plugin support really the best solution to this problem? Was there not a reason that you originally installed those plugins?
People ship stuff that doesn't make sense at first blush all the time. But how are they ever supposed to even get into the space if they don't try something? Try to get some customers, see what people want. On day one, he's not saying he's going to compete with Figma. He's just getting it out there. Your comment—You could say you're just asking questions or giving constructive criticism, but it just assumes the negative on so many levels. I can criticize your viewpoint. Why do you think someone should have a product that's ready to compete with Figma on day one? Do you seriously expect him to have an answer for that?
I initially wanted to write a comment applauding the effort (making a performant web-based wireframe editor is a technically challenging task). But after testing the site, I got the impression that this is a commercial product trying to get a foothold (as opposed to a hobby project for the sake of learning).
At the time of posting, there were no other comments with criticism, so I thought it better to contribute some of my thoughts.
My main concern for this project is not that it doesn't have feature parity with figma, but that I don't see a well-thought out business model. Vecti sells a seat-based subscription model (same as figma), has almost directly ripped much of figma's design (a proclaimed ex-figma employee pointed out that this may be cause for a lawsuit in another comment), and the only distinguishing selling point is that it has less features than figma (the tool it's trying to emulate).
My opinion (which may be wrong) is that figma is already very good at stripping away features, hiding them behind modes, toggles or contextual menus. I'm a figma power user, but I have held a course in figma and managed to get 20 non-technical people to grok the tool and be able to create their own interactive designs in half an hour.
There is space for this. The things you list as negatives are positives. Feature parity or similarity to a big competitor? A plus. Single developer? For a certain kind of consumer, a plus.
Great work. As a European designer, really happy to see competition. Figma is slowly jacking up prices and companies are starting to lean on seats.
Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.
So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.
Your pricing is way too high.
World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!
How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.
P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:
- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)
- components
- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support
Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.
Edit:
I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?
Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and I’m working on releasing them shortly.
Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.
With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50
Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.
They won’t see value unless they try. And by lowering price (maybe for a year or two?) you will compete strongly with figma and other design tools. Then you can increase price and see who sees value and who doesn’t.
Congrats on launching. I spent a decade trying to build a design tool. I think I built almost 40 prototypes, to various degrees of completion. Never got to a point where I felt it was good enough to share. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, so kudos to you for sticking with it.
Thank you, and I know exactly what you mean. I myself have rewritten the entire engine ar least three times until I was happy with the performance and the overall outcome. It’s been a long learning experience. As a developer at heart, this project scratched every itch I had from a software engineering perspective :)
there are various little things scattered around the github org - a js framework, a treesitter grammar, some old docs, a vscode extension, a vim-style editor, an AI-powered code editor geared towards design, etc.
Are you still working on this? Because I like the words I see on your GitHub -- vim-style bindings, keyboard driven, sounds like you write a definition language for your designs, basically?
Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?
Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!
I don’t know enough about CAD products to evaluate that comparison, but the core idea was to expose language as a design tool. First through code, then through keyboard commands (hence the vim idea). It’s still pretty fun, but LLMs have changed the conversation around what a designer even is, and I’m currently re-evaluating.
Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
And there are hundreds if not thousands of Show HNs and YC funded companies that have disappeared in a whimper trying to be the “smaller lightweight version of $x”
This is the key to that quote. If you resolve to selling less, you can still have a multimillion dollar product. If you resolve to it being a billion dollar product, then yeah you need every thing for everyone.
The quote is taken out of context, he’s arguing just the opposite. Everyone has a different 20% and that 20% is an overlapping Venn diagram. It’s almost impossible to find the “right” 20%.
It’s just like the RAD tools - or Java or any of the other cross platform frameworks - there is always something that you need to use that the vendor doesn’t support.
There is no “right”. You build what you want based on what product vision or user pattern you’re aware of and you sell that. You can still build a healthy sized business on it if you tap into the right niche and have gotten close enough.
This space specifically is tough. Figma and adobe products are similarly cheap.
1. Where does this fit in Gartner’s Magic Square? No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce/ServiceNow/Workday/well known company
2. “What if I don’t need feature $y now. But I might need it in the future?”
3. “Everyone in my industry already knows how to use $x, so it will be easier to onboard new employees. Even if they don’t know it, there are courses available”
In today’s world for any SaaS to be taken seriously, it has to have Slack/Teams integration and SSO logins with the company’s IDP - there is an industry standard so if you support one, it’s relatively painless to support all of them. So what is your enterprise sales story - even for small startups?
Even if you work at a company that gives everyone a yearly stipend to get almost anything they want that will improve their work, you still have to get approval for any tool where the company’s info is sent to a third party.
These are all things that most people don’t think about when they want to turn their passion product into a business
This is being built by a single dev. He only needs a couple thousand users to likely make this a meaningfully successful product to him. You guys are really blowing this out of proportion if you think there’s no room for stuff like this. There’s tons of potential users out there. His challenge will be reaching them but it’s totally possible he’s on to something decent here. Even if he shuns enterprise altogether. If he’s solved this problem in a way that is simplistic and approachable then he’s maybe onto something. Pro designer likely are not his target user.
I’m not making assessments of whether it is or not, but it sure as hell could be. There’s room for all this and he can choose to add features or choose to stay feature light.
I like your website design, especially the two-column layout in most sections once I get past the hero image (full size screenshot). I found myself looking at all the images. The downside is that I did not really get any motivation to try it out or really understand how it could help me.
I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.
A Figma competitor is a really good thing - many people are waiting to jump ship for a decent competitor. However, for the sake of longevity & lawsuits, maybe tweak the UI a little bit. Just to make it not look exactly like Figma. Well done though!
Thanks for this question. I'm humbled by the comparison. I have been following penpot for a while and I appreciate the work they've been doing.
The main difference lies in the rendering engine. Penpot relies on an SVG engine, which limits performance as project complexity grows.
Vecti is built on canvas and WebAssembly (the same architecture used by Figma). This gives us raw performance advantages, allowing you to handle complex, heavy design systems without the lag you might experience in SVG-based tools.
It's a wireframing tool akin to figma. You create the design for your website/app there, then hand it over to a programmer who implementd it in html/react/flutter/wpf/etc
This is always the piece that disappoints me when seeing this and other similar tools.
Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?
Otherwise you spend days, weeks, months crafting your perfect design down to the pixel, and then someone else has to start again from scratch with a totally different approach. Maybe I’m missing something, but that feels incredibly inefficient and regressive.
> Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?
These UI frameworks do not really operate in a "down to the pixel" way and so getting correspondance between a bitmap design and a representation in the UI framework is far from an "obvious next step" (if it were trivial to add such a feature, then of course the developers of these tools would add it).
Various concerns that aren't captured in the bitmap design - like how your screens transition from one to another, etc - can dramatically affect how the UI is implemented in a target framework. This is the job of UI engineers.
Well, used to be. Now it's vibe code all the way down.
1. Every action seems slower than Figma and Sketch-my main tool
2. Some short cuts didn't seem to to work, like how I can't copy and paste a canvas. It was hard for me to forego muscle memory
3. Is there a way to try it without signing up for an account? Like a sandbox? I tried to delete my account but because I logged in via Google and it requires me to enter a password (I don't know), I can't delete.
Nice. My gripe with designer apps is that they are online first. I'd want to save designs to files, close to other files of the project. I'd want to open each file in their own window, not in browser tabs.
Except they have a very annoying 2 machine limit and their license manager is a pain to get to. On a weekly basis I am deactivating/reactivating license keys between my home computer, work laptop, travel laptop. Super frustrating.
On top of that, their recent redesign comes with a number of boneheaded decisions that would make a Sketch alternative a gift from the heavens above...
My biggest issue with Figma and most vector apps is how they handle groups. Only Illustrator seems to offer group isolation. You can double click on a group, enter the group and just edit the elements inside that group.
It's such a simple feature but it massively improves the workflow of working with vectors. Never understood why Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer never implemented it.
An MCP server is definitely on my radar. I've seen some really cool workflows coming out of Figma too. Being a one-man show though, prioritizing what to build next is always the tough part. But it's on the list, appreciate your suggestion!
I have one observation that doesn’t seem to be reported on this thread. The home page is very heavy, loading several MBs of images. It took half a minute to load completely for me on mobile.
I use some basic analytics (page views, referrers) but zero tracking inside the app itself. No session recordings, no behavior analytics, no third-party scripts beyond the essentials
When I started the project I was having a hard time finding a good domain name for the project. Some time later, I came up with this name, and found it for sale on some website for ~800€. I figured it was something I could do, but fortunately I ended up on dynadot's website where it was for sale for a fraction of the price.
I think I got lucky while doing all the work :)
I have a rolling doc of the various US tech we're gradually untangling ourselves from, just added this to the design section - looks really interesting.
That’s exactly what I thought too when I saw “$12 annually”. Then I read the “$15 when billed monthly” and realized this is a monthly price. OP, please correct this.
It looks really nice, but it is subscription based, so ... no thanks. I refuse to give in to this horrible cycle started by Adobe, lo so many years ago.
I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right. While there are differences between your implementation and Figma's, it's close enough that things are very clearly Figma-inspired. There've been a lot of Figma copycats, and Figma does have a track record of successful lawsuits against them.
Great work with the backend architecture (a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive), but you're in dangerous territory with the UI.
> I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right
I wouldn't, because such a lawsuit would trivially get dismissed. There are no intellectual claims to be had on app architecture or the design of a property panel, otherwise the whole industry would be a bloodbath.
Heavily influenced by Sketch's UX for sure. Sketch paved the way for the new wave of design tools. There were some significant architectural differences between the approaches though.
I think you're 4 years too late bro. With AI, you can pretty much get 80% of the way there in a minute. I don't understand why anyone nowadays would build anything from scratch.
Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development.
And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.
I think the Apple II is one example of this.
It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway.
If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
First let’s look at B2B, there the “user is not the buyer”. The buyer doesn’t care about “good taste” they care about a lot of other things.
(“Where is my SSO support for multiple users, I’m not going to have my IT department worry about tracking down usernames when Bob leaves)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794
Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever.
That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.
I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.
Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.
Are your customers selecting one of five features in your product, or choosing any twenty from among a hundred?
Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.
No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.
Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better. Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.
Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle.
You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
Hopefully you can afford to say "No" a lot.
To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine.
Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.
It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year.
[1] - https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-gam...
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
I am not even sure it was still true by the time her wrote it. It think that there is a set of core features (laying out stuff in a table, simple formulae) and some very commonly used features (e.g. graphs, data filtering) and a long tail of less commonly used advanced features (pivot tables, database like formulae like VLOOKUP).
Its more like 80% of users only use the same subset. Less commonly used stiff is important to the people who do use them, so you need it to sustain the network effects and enterprise sales.
What you’re saying is basically a majority of SaaS shouldn’t exist because it could just be an excel spreadsheet. Why would anyone pay for a subscription or something when they already pay for excel right? Problem is spreadsheets are a blank canvas and can be difficult for people to build. Just like a design software like adobes and figma. This product is trying to focus on one particular use case of design software and simplify it. It’s not a horrible idea and can exist in the market. I’m not sure it will succeed but conceptually it’s not destined to fail for the this reason. I think you need to also define what success means. For a single dev, could just be a thousand paying users. He’s not necessarily trying to be figma.
My most successful company was a tool that focused on 10% of a ERP feature. One that I had used and implemented at corporates but knew ERP vendors were selling hard for having 100s of features of which I only cared about 20%. Not everyone cared about those same 20% but I found enough people that did and liked my opinionated take on the software. It would have never worked if I had this mindset.
Vecti looks like a Figma clone if its landing page is anything to go by. You're not going to have an easy time convincing people to migrate from Figma to a clone.
In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.
I think this is a weird question. Sure he can't be the only soul in the world to need only those features. Those 20% people need gotta overlap. So I think a more generous way to read your question would be "what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that the mass audience need?". If that's what you meant then I'd ask why appealing to the mass audience so important? Why maximize sales and risk making your product worse if the core of your product is to make things you care about?
I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.
This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution.
We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them.
This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.
This is a provocative joke, isn't it?
Could you elaborate a little bit more, how a sole developer should do these things in a meaningful way, if even larger companies and start-ups fail with this?
The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important.
Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches.
To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself.
And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.
Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market
Good question, what's the pitch:
“Vecti is a browser-based UI design tool built from the ground up with one core belief, that creators deserve tools built specifically for them. Better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with their actual needs. A tool that just works, built by someone who genuinely cares about the people using it.”
Hmm. Did founders of Balsamiq or Figma not care about the people using it? And who if not creators were they built for?
“Share & Present - Set viewer and editor permissions at the team or project level. When it's time to present … let your work shine.”
Oh, right, for the people who pay the creator.
I don't think that's really true, unless the behavior of each toggle is tightly coupled to the behavior each other toggle.
Case in point - most mature apps nowadays do have hundreds of toggles for various settings and features.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.
There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.
My favorite frontend is MPV, because I can generally forgo a GUI and just use single keystrokes to do everything.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_elem...
And Gopher support…
The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.
Why would I want to use this over figma? The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit). Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face. Whiteboard, presentations, dev mode are all hidden behind menus. "no plugin support" seems like a very odd thing to flaunt as a feature. Many of the most popular use-cases of figma, such as interactive prototypes, svg creation, html/css exports are all impossible in this tool.
Then, there is the problem of this being maintained by a single person. Components are essential to any serious figma user, good svg and image handling is important (svg is buggy in my testing), selection colors is vital, color palette is important. When can users expect to see these features if the maintainer is busy hunting down bugs?
This is a technically impressive product, but I struggle to see the market plan. I personally hate distractions in software, I go to great lengths to debloat and disable features to make my computer interactions smoother, yet figma is possibly the last program I would want to clean up.
I started this project as a personal endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic, out of a personal desire to contribute to the field of UX design that I’ve always been passionate about, but at the same time I don’t intend on working as a solo developer for much longer.
Some of the features you’ve listed, are currently being worked on, which are going to be launched very soon.
> endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic
Was this an "itch to build something", or an itch as in an annoyance you had with an existing tool? I'm skeptic of whether bloated UI is an itch many users have with figma or similar, which is why I'm critical of presenting this as the selling point for Vecti. If you manage to find an itch many people do have, and you provide the salve, you'll attract paying users.
Wishing you the best of success, really like seeing your vision and hope it bears out.
No, a company can’t sue you (well they can try, but it has no legal standing) because you rip off their side panel design. Thank god the industry doesn’t work like this.
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69166901/figma-inc-v-mo...
The design of the UI wouldn't be covered by copyright anyway; Figma would have had to file and be granted a patent, which has a much higher bar (IMO not high enough, but that's a different discussion).
I’ve been using Figma for a while, and true, it’s powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall. Simple tasks now require navigating through multiple menus, and the learning curve for new users is steep (took me a while to understand it, and the same experience had it acquaintances of mine). Sometimes I just want to sketch out an idea or make a task without dealing with all that overhead.
The no plugin support thing actually makes sense to me. I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins. Having a tool that just works, consistently, without worrying about plugin compatibility or security issues? That’s valuable. And yeah, it’s a solo developer versus a massive company (that’s my understanding) but that is why it’s beautiful. Also it’s an uneven comparison if you ask me (but didn’t :)) ).
However, the fact that this is even being compared to Figma shows the quality of what’s been built. Not everyone needs enterprise features. Some of us just want a clean, fast canvas without the friction. Every new feature of Figma feels like an attempt to monopolize the entire market.
I think he did an incredible job. Good work. This has value.
[1]: http://penpot.app/
I'm curious which simple tasks you're referring to?
> I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins
Why not uninstall those plugins? Is no plugin support really the best solution to this problem? Was there not a reason that you originally installed those plugins?
At the time of posting, there were no other comments with criticism, so I thought it better to contribute some of my thoughts.
My main concern for this project is not that it doesn't have feature parity with figma, but that I don't see a well-thought out business model. Vecti sells a seat-based subscription model (same as figma), has almost directly ripped much of figma's design (a proclaimed ex-figma employee pointed out that this may be cause for a lawsuit in another comment), and the only distinguishing selling point is that it has less features than figma (the tool it's trying to emulate).
My opinion (which may be wrong) is that figma is already very good at stripping away features, hiding them behind modes, toggles or contextual menus. I'm a figma power user, but I have held a course in figma and managed to get 20 non-technical people to grok the tool and be able to create their own interactive designs in half an hour.
Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.
So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.
Your pricing is way too high.
World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!
How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.
P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:
- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)
- components
- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support
Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.
Edit: I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?
Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback.
Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and I’m working on releasing them shortly.
Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.
With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50
Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.
https://github.com/matry
Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?
Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!
Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
MVPs shouldn’t have 100% of features, they need to be small, get feedback and iterate.
This is the key to that quote. If you resolve to selling less, you can still have a multimillion dollar product. If you resolve to it being a billion dollar product, then yeah you need every thing for everyone.
It’s just like the RAD tools - or Java or any of the other cross platform frameworks - there is always something that you need to use that the vendor doesn’t support.
This space specifically is tough. Figma and adobe products are similarly cheap.
1. Where does this fit in Gartner’s Magic Square? No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce/ServiceNow/Workday/well known company
2. “What if I don’t need feature $y now. But I might need it in the future?”
3. “Everyone in my industry already knows how to use $x, so it will be easier to onboard new employees. Even if they don’t know it, there are courses available”
In today’s world for any SaaS to be taken seriously, it has to have Slack/Teams integration and SSO logins with the company’s IDP - there is an industry standard so if you support one, it’s relatively painless to support all of them. So what is your enterprise sales story - even for small startups?
Even if you work at a company that gives everyone a yearly stipend to get almost anything they want that will improve their work, you still have to get approval for any tool where the company’s info is sent to a third party.
These are all things that most people don’t think about when they want to turn their passion product into a business
I’m not making assessments of whether it is or not, but it sure as hell could be. There’s room for all this and he can choose to add features or choose to stay feature light.
I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.
The main difference lies in the rendering engine. Penpot relies on an SVG engine, which limits performance as project complexity grows.
Vecti is built on canvas and WebAssembly (the same architecture used by Figma). This gives us raw performance advantages, allowing you to handle complex, heavy design systems without the lag you might experience in SVG-based tools.
Btw, your LinkedIn and Email icons on the footer are not linked.
I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs
Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?
Otherwise you spend days, weeks, months crafting your perfect design down to the pixel, and then someone else has to start again from scratch with a totally different approach. Maybe I’m missing something, but that feels incredibly inefficient and regressive.
> Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?
These UI frameworks do not really operate in a "down to the pixel" way and so getting correspondance between a bitmap design and a representation in the UI framework is far from an "obvious next step" (if it were trivial to add such a feature, then of course the developers of these tools would add it).
Various concerns that aren't captured in the bitmap design - like how your screens transition from one to another, etc - can dramatically affect how the UI is implemented in a target framework. This is the job of UI engineers.
Well, used to be. Now it's vibe code all the way down.
1. Every action seems slower than Figma and Sketch-my main tool
2. Some short cuts didn't seem to to work, like how I can't copy and paste a canvas. It was hard for me to forego muscle memory
3. Is there a way to try it without signing up for an account? Like a sandbox? I tried to delete my account but because I logged in via Google and it requires me to enter a password (I don't know), I can't delete.
On the frontend: typescript, react, webgl with an emscripten/c++/wasm engine
On the backend: Python, postgres, redis
On top of that, their recent redesign comes with a number of boneheaded decisions that would make a Sketch alternative a gift from the heavens above...
It's such a simple feature but it massively improves the workflow of working with vectors. Never understood why Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer never implemented it.
Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just
Not that I like to see that stuff but you did animate the text and feedback does help usability.
Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.
Take my upvote
I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right. While there are differences between your implementation and Figma's, it's close enough that things are very clearly Figma-inspired. There've been a lot of Figma copycats, and Figma does have a track record of successful lawsuits against them.
Great work with the backend architecture (a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive), but you're in dangerous territory with the UI.
I wouldn't, because such a lawsuit would trivially get dismissed. There are no intellectual claims to be had on app architecture or the design of a property panel, otherwise the whole industry would be a bloodbath.
Just for comparison, here's a side by side of each: https://image.non.io/940a433a-3c25-4610-88e8-4eec810f2235.we...
“While there are differences between Figma’s implementation and Sketch, it's close enough that things are very clearly Sketch-inspired.”
Figma doesn’t have patent on side panels. I don’t think worrying about lawsuits is applicable here.
I’m sure Figma will attempt to abuse its power to kill competition regardless. It’s no different than other corporations.
Likely EU has better regulations.
Congrats on completing this project and good luck.