Show HN: My new SaaS side-project, after years of open source

[artf]

Hi guys, I've created an open source web builder framework (https://grapesjs.com) years ago, which I'm still maintaining, and now I'm excited to publish a side project based on it, Grapedrop (https://grapedrop.com). It's a simple web page builder which allows you to design and publish your web pages very quickly. The project is still in beta with a lot of stuff to improve but I'd really like to share it and hear what people think about it and maybe also get some constructive feedback.

[simplify]

Since GrapesJS is already open source I would seriously consider pointing users to that for the free plan instead of providing free hosting. Your service provides hosting; free is a little too much as it costs you money for likely little gain.

Alternatively you could put a time limit. "Free 30 day trial" or something.

[matt_the_bass]

I concur. Use the open source as “proof the product is solid”. It’s a badge of honor and could allow enterprise customers to check off the “ensure we can support it ourselves if needed box”. Likely they would never do that, but they could from a risk management POV.

[benatkin]

I like the idea of freemium for this. There are many page builders out there, and many of them have limited plans that are free or very cheap, especially the WordPress ones. Having a free plan distinguishes this, and I think the limit of 50 form submissions is enough to encourage people who should be paying for it to pay.

[schneidmaster]

You should charge more :) Especially for your business plan -- any service targeted at enterprises should get you bare-minimum three figures of revenue per month, and you should look for a way to make it four or five, or have it scale up for large enterprises.

There are a few reasons for this:

1) The difference between $35 a month and $250 a month is a rounding error to most enterprises -- but for you, aggregated across all your business customers, it will make it much, much easier to grow and achieve profitability.

2) It's easy to lower your prices if you receive consistent feedback that people really want your product but think it's 30% too expensive or whatever. It's very difficult to raise your prices once people are locked in at a lower monthly rate (especially if the rate is an order of magnitude lower than what you end up really needing to charge).

3) Businesses are used to paying a lot of money for software (sometimes up to seven or eight figures annually). For large enterprises, there is a counterintuitive psychological factor: they don't trust something that costs $XX a month to reliably store their data and scale to their needs, and you'll actually close more customers at $XXX or $XXXX a month.

4) Selling to enterprises is very costly -- they will (try to) run you through procurement, legal reviews, security reviews, terms of service negotiations, and a litany of other things. Your price point needs to take that cost into account -- you simply can't make a profit from large enterprises if you have to spend a few thousand dollars of time/resources getting them closed, and then you have to make it up $35 at a time.

Also, I agree with the other comment saying you shouldn't offer a free plan, especially since your product is open source and they could self-host if they really wanted it. There's an inversion of value -- free users still expect you to support them, and users in free/cheap plans are often actually the noisiest for whatever reason. If I were you, I'd charge about $25/mo for the basic feature set (maybe without the branding and with more than 50 form submissions); $99/mo for the "premium" feature set; and "call me" for enterprises (hundreds to thousands a month depending on scale and commitment).

[jv22222]

I agree with everything you say BUT when first starting out I see no harm in starting with lower prices. You need to build up confidence in yourself and your product at the very beginning.

Then, after you're all tested and things are working well, then raise prices (maybe after 2-4 weeks in).

Does it really matter about having high prices for those first few customers? No, they get a reward for taking a risk on you!

I know because I did exactly what you said, and I can tell you your point #2 "It's easy to lower prices" is not quite right.

It really sucks to lower prices. Here's what that looks like:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/nugget.one/academy/nugget-down.png

Conversely, it's easy to raise prices and grandfather the first few customers that took a risk on you.

[inthewoods]

1. Not clear why you think this is a solution for enterprises. Business <> Enterprise. Not many large enterprises are going to take a chance on a small company given the large number of CMS systems available. If I were an enterprise looking for a CMS, I'd either being looking for something like Adobe or go the opposite way and go with an open source solution that is well adopted.

2. While you may be right that you can raise prices, you have to remember the competition - I'd compare this to, say, Wix or Wordpress or Squarespace. It may be 200% better than those tools but price matters to the people buying and they will be comparing them.

[matt_the_bass]

You have some great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to be so thorough. I’m not the OP, but I still think your comments are valuable in general, not just this one case.

[bjohnso5]

Your subheading text "Build and publish instantly your projects online" reads a little strangely to me. I'd recommend re-wording that to "Build and instantly publish your projects online".

Looks neat, though!

[jwdunne]

I reckon "Build online. Publish instantly" has a nice ring to it.

[swlkr]

How about "Instantly build and publish your projects online" ?

[ummonk]

Or better yet, "Build your projects and instantly publish them online", for ease of parsing.

[artf]

Thanks to everyone for the advice, what do you think about "Build your projects and publish them instantly online"?

[encoderer]

1. Your homepage should give me a better sales pitch about what I can do with your product and why I need it, not just how I do it. Explain your value.

2. All content is focused at English audience except the pricing details. Use a dot decimal sign $12.34 not $12,34

3. I would make the connection to your open source project explicit. It’s an asset. Sentry.io does this well

Congrats on shipping!

[Agnosco]

Great feedback. I was just about to write a comment regarding 1. above - it feels like you might have brought a bit too much of your open source roots into the presentation and too little of your business oriented foundation.

Of course this depends also on who you want to target as potential customers - who do you want to target?

[artf]

Thanks for such a good feedback. Honestly, I'm a still bit confused how exactly to proceed with the point 1 but I'll try to figure that out. Thanks

[hardwaresofton]

Grapesjs is awesome software thanks for making it! I've been looking for a chance to use grapesjs in some projects but haven't had the chance to yet but it looks fantastic -- it's been bookmarked for a long time :).

I think it might be a good idea to further limit your free tier to a time trial (a week?) maybe rather than # of projects, and maybe adding a cheaper tier -- the ability to make a website with only drag and drop.

Some that you might consider competitors:

- https://www.launchaco.com/

- http://macaw.co/ (not really)

- https://landingi.com/pricing

Also, I'm not sure who your main audience is, but using ',' for a decimal point is not commonplace in the USA. I doubt any worthwhile customer would think it was $1,490 a month, but just saying.

[artf]

Thank you very much, really appreciate your kind words. BTW I'd rather prefer to keep the "forever free" tier, there you have to use the subdomain and there also "Made with Grapedrop" label, so more people will use the free tier more visibility I gain, at least this is what I think.

ps. the price format should be solved :)

[artworx]

FYI I got a "Suspicious link" popup from google when I clicked verify my email address.

"Malicious emails often link to this site. Are you sure you want to proceed to go.sparkpostmail1.com?"

[artf]

I use Sparkpost to send emails, seems just like their links got a bad reputation, so in this case, it's just a false positive. I submitted a ticket

[artf]

Should be fixed now

[epaga]

Yay for upfront pricing!!! Reminds me of how much I HATE it when I arrive at a site only for them to be super coy about their pricing model. You did it the way I wish everyone did.

[artf]

Thank you, now I know what I should not change :)

[gboone]

Regarding the "number 1" value proposition, and given your audience is the small-business type, creating the "why" from the "what" is normally a small step.

For example, the "what" is "free forever", so the "why" is "save money and not increase monthly software subscription fees, keep my budget in line with the size of my business, grow with you, etc." Just change the point of view, and you'll get your why.

The "what": super cool features that provide enough flexibility for the credit, but simple interface. The "why": because small business is about ideas, and ideas need a voice and a face. And sometimes the idea is a quick one and I only have a few hours this weekend and the site needs to be done ASAP. Hope this helps you get the wheels turning.

My other feedback is styling: make the text not be aligned or sized so one word is left hanging below a full line. Check different phone screen layouts maybe? Just bugs me to look at. But I do like the overall color a lot. Nice!

[artf]

Thanks for your feedback, especially for the what/why approach, it's somehow natural to think about it but showing it more explicitly might be a great point for the potential customer

[martinpinto]

This looks amazing! This is how a side-project should look like!

[artf]

Thank you :)

[dhumph]

One quick bit of feedback - i'm not as likely to try it out if i have to register first. Create a demo area where i can play, but not save and use that as bait for registration.

[ehnto]

I was always pretty proud of my now defunct side project's flow. You could build the whole page right from the homepage, but to save it you had to register (otherwise who would the page belong to). It had a really great conversion rate from click to account, but a poor rate from account to paid customer hence why it didn't work out.

[artf]

I put it on my to-do list :) Thanks

[lordldx]

Same opinion here. Was going to try it out, but got scared away by the registration form

[philprx]

I've used it to build a very small landing page for a project, and here is the gist:

1. Very nice, fluid, rich way to edit.

2. When using Command + <- (back arrow) on mac, equivalent to Alt Back Arrow, you should ask if you want to leave project, regardless if it was saved. First time users wont understand at first that you need to click many times in a text box to select THEN edit it, therefore they will not go to top of word/sentence but instead they will leave the current project and go back to project creation or dashboardm, therefore creating frustation.

3. I had a very bad UX case: I went back to dashboard, and came back to upload logo, just to find that my text had been erased and replaced by the original LOREM IPSUM text (effectively, I LOST my write-up work). I believe this is a history navigation issue, but the result is that I lost my page. I could get around this and correct the damage because I had published the evolved version earlier and did not refresh my published page, but you need to check this as this is a deal-breaker when you're authoring.

This is a great tool and if you keep the excellent look and feel, reliability both in UX and hosting if you get it is going to be the make or break part of the equation.

Good luck, and count me in if you need debug and assistance.

[artf]

Thanks for the great feedback, I'll try to fix issues you mentioned and make it more reliable

[goddamnsteve]

This is beautiful, and love the concept. Of course, the sales pitch and the product design could be improved.

Might want to add them here: https://hellonext.co

[factsaresacred]

Nice work. But the font on Chrome is painful to read. Font-weight 500 instead of 200 and 16.5px font-size (for example) would be an improvement.

Also a example page showing the awesome stuff people can build would be nice.

[burnt1ce]

Great product. I love the fact it's free and open source. Thank you!

[burnt1ce]

*I love the fact you're offering GrapeJS as a free and open source project

[milanmot]

I really like the website and the concept. All the best for it.

Just one feedback. The font on the pricing section is too blurred and not readable.

[artf]

Thank you very much. About the font, can you share what browser/device/OS do you use?

[Aeolun]

I think it might be a good idea to increase your business/enterprise pricing. As it is, it feels to cheap (e.g. too close to the first paid plan) to be any good.

Besides, business users going for the business instead of premium plan are going to be mostly price insensitive anyway (who needs more than 50 websites?!)

[stanislavb]

Good job and good luck, mate! I've submitted it to SaaSHub. Who would you name as your top competitors?

[nwsm]

There are tons of quick site makers.

Wix, Wordpress, Mendix, Microsoft Dynamics, etc

[realty_geek]

Awesome, congratulations. Really like what you've done with grapesjs - thanks for all the hard work!!!

[artf]

Thank you very much, glad to hear that :)

[matt_the_bass]

Following up on the comments of many people about not offering a free tier, would it be possible to make your system easy to clone on github AND run from a GitHub hosted site? If so, this could solve the question of you paying to host free accounts.