I understand why early stage products don't list pricing (the least of which is that they are in flux) but it makes me sad when I see interesting products that don't give me pricing.
I end up having to writeoff/ignore the product because I don't have the mental space to remember it without pricing. and these days ill never sign up for someone's newsletter if I can help it!
We're looking to make Dynaboard really affordable, especially for smaller teams, and entirely usage-based (no per-seat cost). Our goal is to price it more like a cloud infrastructure product and not charge for things that do not cost us money. We don't want to post something and promise something that we can't deliver on, and so we decided to table announcing the prices until we figure it out over the next 2 months. You can find the approximate structure of the pricing on the pricing page.
Pricing is a required signal for me to understand if the product is even worth the time to try. I don't want to spend hours or more tinkering and then find out the pricing is bonkers.
Seeing "coming soon" and "enterprise" on the pricing page is a guaranteed pass from me (but not a permanent one).
It's not only unclear at first glance who the audience is, but what the tool actually does. It seems like some kind of no-code tool at first, but then it mentions pair programming? I'm confused, and don't want to wade through a swamp of marketing text.
We're decidedly a "low-code" or even “yes-code” tool. You use the drag-and-drop interface to design the app, while all of the app's logic is written in an in-browser text editor environment. Everything is multiplayer from day 1. It's an IDE in the style of VB6 / MS Access / FileMaker Pro, but built with modern web technologies at the foundation.
We're building for early-stage technical teams and independent developers that want to reduce the iteration time on prototype -> production apps.
So multiplayer bubble but more industrial/data-centric, real database (operated out of band) for full data modeling power & operational scale, and use javascript to define business rules with control flow and loops?
One note: we have some lightweight persistent data stores built-in for convenience, like a key/value store. However, you're always able to build on top of your own database / API and most of our early users do.
Why would a person use this over salesforce, Wordpress, or the dozen other CMS systems out there? I watched the 5 minute demo, it is doing nothing complex. How many one off sites we all seen that are written by a tool that ended up not able to handle the complexity. Tools like this need a huge "never" been done before hook, and this one does not readily have it.
Hey HN, Dynaboard founder here. Sharing a bit more about how we built Dynaboard, since I think this audience will appreciate it. More will be shared in future blogs :)
Multiplayer: We used the YJS project (https://github.com/yjs/yjs) as the baseline for our multiplayer system. We created a thin harness around the client and ended up implementing our own server-side architecture to handle relaying between the various WebSocket servers. More on how we do this soon.
WebAssembly: Rather than running your custom code in an iframe, we run it inside a wasm-based sandbox, a compiled version of the QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS). This approach gives you synchronous access to most of the DOM APIs without sacrificing safety. We do some fancy ES6 Proxy management to implement the FRP-like data binding system inside the VM. In production, the browser runs the project's precompiled bytecode. In the future, we plan to support other languages with a similar architecture (Python via Pyodide, Rust, Go, etc.).
Code editing: We use Monaco, the same editor that VS Code uses. We've had to create a handful of custom extensions, including a few custom language servers, to get it to be aware of the VM environment. I'm a vim-er so we will definitely have a vim mode.
> we run [your custom code] inside a wasm-based sandbox, a compiled version of the QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS).
I'm curious about why. Is sychronicity the only reason? (And is it really worth it? `await` makes asynchronous code paths pretty unobtrusive.) Mirrors[1][2] are pretty interesting.
(Not sure that I agree that compile-to-WASM makes for JS-in-JS. WASM isn't JS. Why do people keep conflating them?[3])
I imagine that part of it is for security. Figma has a good overview of the different approaches they considered for their JavaScript plugin system, and JS-in-JS was one of them:
Sure, that much is clear. But we're discussing it in contrast with other security-preserving approaches. "For security" only really makes sense we were asking, "Why do any of these things at all?", but we're past that. What we're asking is "Why this thing specifically?"—especially where that thing is expensive.
> Figma has a good overview of the different approaches they considered for their JavaScript plugin system, and JS-in-JS was one of them
First: to reiterate, JS-in-WASM is not JS-in-JS.
Secondly: Mirrors, notably, are not among the approaches they evaluated. I advocated for an evaluation of a similar Mirrors-based approach in the HN thread at the time that the Figma post was published:
It sounds very interesting and I hope you will be successful.
How realistic hosting on-premise / in a private cloud without breaking the bank is? The price is "contact us" right now. I sometimes need to develop applications where privacy and GDPR is critical.
The current pricing per developer/user is not announced and I see that as a risk for me. I have been priced out of Retool, they wanted more money than two good full-stack senior developers, so I would like to know if your product is going to make sense for me before I invest time and resources in it. I'm currently using AppSmith.
We will not be pricing per developer or per user, but rather usage-based. We aim to be affordable for applications at scale, because we believe the cost of an internal app should not increase linearly with your headcount.
We’ve designed the system for a few deployment configurations, with independent single-tenant and multi-tenant support on the control plane and data plane. The goal is flexible on-prem deployments that balance customer convenience with regulatory / privacy requirements. At the moment though, we’re focused on our multi-tenant cloud environment and making that as top-notch as possible.
You’ll also be able to eject your app out of Dynaboard. The code is yours, we aim to have the best editor available and convenient serverless hosting so that’s why you’ll stick with us.
Hi speedgoose; I'm founder @ Retool. I'm sorry you were priced out of Retool; we don't want anybody to be that way. We're trying a few pricing experiments now (including self-serve on-prem, not billing per-user, etc.). I tried shooting you an email to a) fix the issue, and b) gather some feedback, but I don't think you have an email listed. Do you mind reaching out to me at david AT retool? Thanks!
Hi, I tried Retool hosted on-prem and I was satisfied with that. My issue was the "per-user" billing, as I can have many users that use the application very seldomly. I will send you an email.
Hi there, I'm a co-founder of Appsmith. I was happy to hear that you use Appsmith. How do you like it so far? Are there features that you are missing today?
Yes I like AppSmith. I can always wish for more features or better things, but between all the no-code/low-code tools I tried recently, AppSmith is the one I decided to use.
Thanks for the report. We're now shipping a polyfill for ResizeObserver on the landing page. Drop me a line at alex AT dynaboard DOT com if you're still running into trouble.
Nitpick: the font on the landing page is really weird (Linux Chrome) -- the baselines of the letters don't line up, giving it a really strange appearance.
Hey, do you have any more info about your distro/chrome version? I am running PopOS 21.10 with chrome 96.0.4664.93 and everything looks normal here. We are working with the designers to fix the ResizeObserver issue, but can't seem to recreate this one.
Disclaimer: I am an engineer working for Dynaboard. Seeing this post get so much traction here inspired me to quickly build out a simple hacker news clone in-app as a small demo. Welcome to HNCeption! https://i.imgur.com/73CPaKC.png
Yes we do — everything in the editor interface and the apps you build with it have light-and-dark modes by default. We didn't have the bandwidth to make the landing page have a light-theme, but the product itself supports both modes already.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI end up having to writeoff/ignore the product because I don't have the mental space to remember it without pricing. and these days ill never sign up for someone's newsletter if I can help it!
We're looking to make Dynaboard really affordable, especially for smaller teams, and entirely usage-based (no per-seat cost). Our goal is to price it more like a cloud infrastructure product and not charge for things that do not cost us money. We don't want to post something and promise something that we can't deliver on, and so we decided to table announcing the prices until we figure it out over the next 2 months. You can find the approximate structure of the pricing on the pricing page.
b) bad products: it’s an extortion play and they will get what they can.
solution:
a) if you need their product buy it, and plan how to migrate away from it
b)buy their stock and hope that not much people plan how to migrate away.
Seeing "coming soon" and "enterprise" on the pricing page is a guaranteed pass from me (but not a permanent one).
Interesting tool, but it seems like it doesn't have a clear audience in mind. The end user seems to be "everybody" and that's a hard sale to make.
We're building for early-stage technical teams and independent developers that want to reduce the iteration time on prototype -> production apps.
One note: we have some lightweight persistent data stores built-in for convenience, like a key/value store. However, you're always able to build on top of your own database / API and most of our early users do.
Why would a person use this over salesforce, Wordpress, or the dozen other CMS systems out there? I watched the 5 minute demo, it is doing nothing complex. How many one off sites we all seen that are written by a tool that ended up not able to handle the complexity. Tools like this need a huge "never" been done before hook, and this one does not readily have it.
Multiplayer: We used the YJS project (https://github.com/yjs/yjs) as the baseline for our multiplayer system. We created a thin harness around the client and ended up implementing our own server-side architecture to handle relaying between the various WebSocket servers. More on how we do this soon.
WebAssembly: Rather than running your custom code in an iframe, we run it inside a wasm-based sandbox, a compiled version of the QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS). This approach gives you synchronous access to most of the DOM APIs without sacrificing safety. We do some fancy ES6 Proxy management to implement the FRP-like data binding system inside the VM. In production, the browser runs the project's precompiled bytecode. In the future, we plan to support other languages with a similar architecture (Python via Pyodide, Rust, Go, etc.).
Code editing: We use Monaco, the same editor that VS Code uses. We've had to create a handful of custom extensions, including a few custom language servers, to get it to be aware of the VM environment. I'm a vim-er so we will definitely have a vim mode.
[1] https://dynaboard.com/images/screenshots/DynaHacker_News.png
I'm curious about why. Is sychronicity the only reason? (And is it really worth it? `await` makes asynchronous code paths pretty unobtrusive.) Mirrors[1][2] are pretty interesting.
(Not sure that I agree that compile-to-WASM makes for JS-in-JS. WASM isn't JS. Why do people keep conflating them?[3])
1. <https://bracha.org/mirrors.pdf>
2. <http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/228>
3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29754432>
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys...
Sure, that much is clear. But we're discussing it in contrast with other security-preserving approaches. "For security" only really makes sense we were asking, "Why do any of these things at all?", but we're past that. What we're asking is "Why this thing specifically?"—especially where that thing is expensive.
> Figma has a good overview of the different approaches they considered for their JavaScript plugin system, and JS-in-JS was one of them
First: to reiterate, JS-in-WASM is not JS-in-JS.
Secondly: Mirrors, notably, are not among the approaches they evaluated. I advocated for an evaluation of a similar Mirrors-based approach in the HN thread at the time that the Figma post was published:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20770105>
I'm curious how this compares to AppGyver (https://www.appgyver.com) which was recently acquired by SAP. (I am not affiliated).
How realistic hosting on-premise / in a private cloud without breaking the bank is? The price is "contact us" right now. I sometimes need to develop applications where privacy and GDPR is critical.
The current pricing per developer/user is not announced and I see that as a risk for me. I have been priced out of Retool, they wanted more money than two good full-stack senior developers, so I would like to know if your product is going to make sense for me before I invest time and resources in it. I'm currently using AppSmith.
We will not be pricing per developer or per user, but rather usage-based. We aim to be affordable for applications at scale, because we believe the cost of an internal app should not increase linearly with your headcount.
We’ve designed the system for a few deployment configurations, with independent single-tenant and multi-tenant support on the control plane and data plane. The goal is flexible on-prem deployments that balance customer convenience with regulatory / privacy requirements. At the moment though, we’re focused on our multi-tenant cloud environment and making that as top-notch as possible.
You’ll also be able to eject your app out of Dynaboard. The code is yours, we aim to have the best editor available and convenient serverless hosting so that’s why you’ll stick with us.
Nice landing page. Looks like you're missing a polyfill for ResizeObserver.
Thanks!
I can't use dark themes comfortably because of vision limitations.