Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

[vecti]

Hello everyone!

I'm a solo developer who's been doing UI/UX work since 2007. Over the years, I watched design tools evolve from lightweight products into bloated feature-heavy platforms. 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: pixel-perfect grid snapping, a performant canvas renderer, shared asset libraries, and export/presentation features. No collaborative whiteboarding. No plugin ecosystem. No enterprise features. Just the design loop.

Four years later, I can proudly show it off. Built and hosted in the EU with European privacy regulations. Free tier available (no credit card, one editor forever).

On privacy: 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.

If you're a solo designer or small team who wants a tool that stays out of your way, I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback: https://vecti.com

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, architecture decisions, why certain features didn't make the cut, or what's next.

[crazygringo]

> 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?

[nielsbot]

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.

I think the Apple II is one example of this.

[cosmic_cheese]

> 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.

[TheGRS]

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.

[Alex63]

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"?

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

[PeterStuer]

"everyone is using a different 20%"

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.

[vitaflo]

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.

[zaidf]

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.

[gchamonlive]

> 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?

[esperent]

> 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.

[bryanrasmussen]

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.

[socalgal2]

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

[kkkqkqkqkqlqlql]

> 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++.

[james2doyle]

Makes me wish more apps had feature toggles

[Aldipower]

"customer research and market validation".

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?

[Terretta]

> 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.”

Oh, right, for the people who pay the creator.

[phyzix5761]

Assuming a big enough audience, that 20% can still be significant enough to build a business around.

[dlcarrier]

I feel like HTML and CSS could remove 90% of the functionality and only affect 1% of developers, then we could get some actually good web browsers.

[FridgeSeal]

I for one, would certainly prefer a wider ecosystem of _more refined_, less bloated tools.

The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.

[TonyStr]

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.

[vecti]

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.

[gyomu]

> 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.

[johnwheeler]

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?

[g947o]

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

[popalchemist]

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.

[fastThinking]

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.

[alsetmusic]

> The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit).

This is sort of ridiculous. Apple tried to sue Microsoft for the look-and-feel of their GUI and lost. I think they might have tried to go after Samsung for copying the iPhone GUI? It certainly didn't work if they tried.

We all know Oracle tried to sue Google about API endpoints and lost. That's different from GUI elements, but a more concrete argument and it still failed.

You're just crapping on someone's hard work. If you don't want it, don't use it.

[danielvaughn]

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.

[vecti]

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 :)

[cobertos]

Are any of your prototypes published or available to view?

[karhuton]

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?

[vecti]

Hi karhuton,

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 [e-mail] with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.

[raw_anon_1111]

Isn’t this exactly the problem that Joel Spolsky wrote about a quarter of a century ago?

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.

[shawabawa3]

Trello was a successful product despite having way less than 20% of jira's features

[conductr]

> and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

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.

[jonnycoder]

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.

[catapart]

Godspeed! This is the software design philosophy that I support! As someone building my own design utility, I'm impressed by the quality of yours.

[tarcon]

How does it compare to https://github.com/penpot/penpot?

[vecti]

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.

[cobertos]

Any chance this will be open-sourced or have a self-hosted version available?

I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs

[uxcolumbo]

If you're looking for an open-source and self-host option then you might to checkout https://penpot.app/

[contrast]

Maybe its obvious but I can't tell it this is an image editor, a React builder, an HTML/CSS designer, ...? What does it make?

[TonyStr]

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

[codethief]

Congrats on your launch! My impression is that this looks quite polished. Can you elaborate on your tech stack?

[vecti]

Thanks!

On the frontend: typescript, react, webgl with an emscripten/c++/wasm engine

On the backend: Python, postgres, redis

[aerzen]

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.

[aabhay]

Sketch is offline first but has a really stellar online app as well.

[rkagerer]

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

Take my upvote

[drcongo]

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.

[jmkni]

Congrats on launching, looks cool for sure, I'll certainly check it out!

Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just

[vecti]

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!

[phmagic]

Congrats! I tried it and some feedback:

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.

[pier25]

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.

[designerarvid]

Figma has an isolation mode for individual vectors, press enter while it’s selected.

Not what you’re after, but working with groups in Figma can be handy.

Try cmd+click to select elements inside groups directly. Then shift+enter to select the parent group. You can do enter again to select all elements in the group. You can cycle selection in the group with tab. All of this works with multi-select, which can be very efficient.

IMO working with groups in Figma is much more powerful than illustrator Depends what you are trying to do, of course.

[replwoacause]

Congratulations on shipping a beautiful product

[ramon156]

Comparing this to penpot, which is free as long as you self-host.

Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.

[joduplessis]

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!

[tuhgdetzhh]

I wait for someone to comment that he could pull it off with an Opus 4.6 agent team in 24h of so.

[willparks]

Beautiful design! (makes sense for someone that does UI design). Congrats, I'll check it out.

[amadeuspagel]

Trying to login with google I got a social auth error: https://app.vecti.com/dashboard/social-auth-error/

[dsnr]

Thanks for reporting, I'm looking into it.

[popalchemist]

It's beautiful. Great job. Congrats on having the persistence to see this through.

[vecti]

Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. It’s been quite a journey.

[econ]

I press the button on the website and it wasn't even animated, worse, it didn't have an active state.

Not that I like to see that stuff but you did animate the text and feedback does help usability.

[AnonHP]

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.

[ranger_danger]

Reminds me of https://bootstrapstudio.io/

[alluro2]

Looks great and congrats on building and shipping a well-rounded and usable product. Looking forward to trying it out this evening.

[xyortuc]

Hi, that's a great tool. It gave me great inspiration, I am working on my tool now. Let's see how it goes

[grougnax]

Why Webassembly for the renderer? Why not just JS? Nowadays performance is similar if not better than native

[haute_cuisine]

Amazing work! Congrats on the launch. I’ll definitely give it a try

[kevintayong]

Thanks for sharing! Reminds me of Figma.

Btw, your LinkedIn and Email icons on the footer are not linked.

[pawelwentpawel]

Great job, congrats on the launch!

[averrous]

Any tips for ensuring quality across features when you working with urself?

[falloutx]

Just tested a few things and I gotta say its fairly easy to pick up and do things. UI does feel like Figma for better or worse.

Congrats on completing this project and good luck.

[dhumph]

Your pricing makes it seem like $12 for a year.

[AnonHP]

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.

[vecti]

Fixed

[NoSalt]

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.

[mettamage]

Fun submission, will have a look :)

[jjcm]

Ex-Figma.

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.

[vitaflo]

Wasn't Figma's side panel just a ripoff of Sketch's? Always felt that way.

[gyomu]

> 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.

[lejalv]

> a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive

The Penpot WASM renderer is entering open beta any time now.

[RobRivera]

Bravo

[th3o6a1d]

Congrats on launching!

[jasonsb]

Love the domain name. How did you manage to snag it?

[vecti]

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 :)

[thrownaway561]

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.

[augustk]

With so many ready meals to choose from I don't understand why anyone nowadays would cook anything from scratch.