Yes, I would recommend showing two images (before/after) instead of the video.
You could do more interactive stuff, like the common interface of moving a slider on the "before" image to reveal the "after" image. And that's nice, but it should be supplemental to the two images.
But take this advice with a grain of salt - after all, the video did cause me to spend more time on your site than if two images had immediately answered the question I was curious about.
OP here. Thanks for the advice. I have been considering a few different options. Perhaps I could have a preloaded screenshot with the UI already initialised, so I immediately can show off the functionality? I don't know what is the best approach.
Yeah, I don't want to upload my data to a random website I've never heard of, just to see what the heck it does. You NEED a few examples, otherwise users will just close tab.
You sound so cool when you start a sentence with "yeah" for no grammatical reason, as though answering a question that no one asked. I bet you're really laid back and were probably smoking a blunt and exhaling a massive cloud while you typed your comment. Did you personally innovate this conversational technique?
Do you think I give a shit about what you think of my superfluous words? Huh?
Do you have anything substantive to say about the comments themselves as opposed to a hyperfixated diatribe based on a single superfluous word? Because everyone and their grandmothers is bored of your “holier than thou” soapbox ramblings about how you perceive random people on the internet.
And just because you clearly don’t get it, the word “even” can be used for emphasis when something you are reacting to is absurd. Crazy thing, English, eh?
Nobody’s ass is hanging out except the whiny pedant who has nothing better to do than to go on ad hominem-filled diatribes based on nothing that is grounded in reality. And who’s comments are clearly absurd enough to get downvoted and flagged. Because they in no way shape or form are about the topic at hand.
I wonder who that person is in this conversation.
Once again, and for the last time, do you have anything to say about the comments themselves, or are you just going to keep breaking the guidelines to get your rocks off on insulting others and their grammar over a single word?
OP here. I understand this instinct. In this case it doesn't actually get transferred, but stays on the client, as stated in the footer: "Image processing is done in the browser. No image data is stored or transmitted."
You should make that much clearer, maybe even by running it in a codesandbox, and submitting that link to HN. I think it might be received better than when marketed as a service (and also, if the process is client-side, why is there a subscription offering?)
Think about Figma. They don't charge for
how many drawings you make - that would seem ludicrous, especially since most of the compute power required to use the product is expended during client-side code execution. So instead, Figma charges you for using the app itself, but only once you want to add another collaborator to your private projects (at which point you're obviously happy with the product and probably willing to pay).
If you want to monetize this, I would encourage you to think along those same lines. You are building a product for somebody - but for whom? You can answer that question by letting people use it for free and seeing who likes it the most - marketers? news article editors? - and then building more features to focus the product on their use case.
Don't think about charging by volume - think about getting consistent usage from users who face this problem often, and then figure out how to integrate into their existing workflows. Then charge them money to do that.
OP here. Valid point! I find it hard to strike a good balance between demonstrating value and cutting to the chase. I wanted it to come off as a utility that lets you take action immediately.
I had the same response. And beyond the motivation factor, the second response was, "I suppose I could test it myself, but I'm not uploading a picture of my screen to a strange website"
When I wanted to export the result in highest available resolution, it asked me to subscribe for $5/month. I only need 1 single screenshot, so I’m not going to subscribe, but I can see this being used by big newspaper companies. Good luck with your project!
OP here. Thanks, that's good to hear. I got journalists at a couple of the big newspaper players here in my country (Norway) to purchase subscriptions, and after seeing these pop up in articles rather often, I felt that I had sold myself short with the $5 monthly fee. One of them (VG.no), is like the 2nd biggest site in Norway, with 70 million visits a month. I guess I'm bad at business.
You probably should make a personal account which limits the amount of images you can generate a month (10?) and a business account which offers unlimited generation but for a steep price.
Or maybe allow free usage with an added watermark. So that people can try it out on their own screenshot, eventually distribute them internally, and pay when they need to remove the watermark for public distribution.
> so it's really unfortunate that I can barely tell what this really does or why we should care
It takes an image as input and produces a "dramatic" copy of that image in which "dramatic" is defined as being angled away from the viewer on two planes and having a blur somewhat consistent with it having been photographed with a shallow depth of field.
I'm surprised to read this — while the examples could be more cleanly presented, I felt like the title for this post and the initial gif on landing show what this does reasonably clearly. I do see what you mean about the PRO part.
you mean aside from the fact that it requires downloading a huge multi-purpose program that starts at $21/mo which is built for significantly more than just those features and the user must use a lot more brain space for what they want to be a simple task?
Or gimp. "Photoshop" is the all encompassing term for these editors. This task is actually quite trivial, but there is a bit of a learning curve for someone who knows absolutely nothing about photo editing.
My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. mih in a sibling thread added a link to actually useful IM scripts however, one of which supports variable blur using a mask (scroll below the table and parameters for example pictures): http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/variableblur/index.ph...
That was my thought as well and you can go even further by just making it a script. Which begs the question: why is this a subscription service and not the script.
I can see how this is useful for laypeople. Those with a DIY attitude might resort to popular image editing tools. My choice would be trying to achieve this with Imagemagick. Fred Weinhaus' script http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/skew/index.php and maybe adding a blur later.
Wow! What a great find! I wish more documentation looked like this. There are a few other (feature-rich) command line utilities that could benefit from a similar approach.
One can make so many fun things as client-side web tools by compiling ImageMagick to Wasm!
One thing I played around with because I needed it myself was turning pictures into things that look like they've been scanned. Made for documents, but I suppose one could use it for screenshots as well. :) https://photocopy.fuglede.dk
I have no idea how hard it would be, but this would be great as an effect for Final Cut, Da Vinci, etc. I don’t think the video world has a plug-in standard like the photo kinda does (eventually lots of apps implemented Photoshop's API).
A version that pops out the video on the site could be cool (like, takes in a screenshot but then tilts and zooms it as a video clip). Very “nightly news.”
Based on the GIF, I thought it created an animated video.
Even when the .PNG downloaded I thought for sure it’d be an animated PNG.
If I’m doing some content creation, I probably already have an image editor, in which case I can create this effect myself or would prefer an integrated plugin to do it.
Motion graphics is much harder, and there’s more demand there to add some sparkle to a static image. OP, have you considered that angle?
OP here. Sorry to disappoint you with the lack of animation. I have definitely entertained the idea of creating a video variant of this app. I fear it will remain a pipe dream due to the demands of my day job and family life.
I think they mean to say that the animated gif[0] your site is misleading as it shows an animated transition that doesn't actually occur in the product.
I would consider the value to the consumer and use a value based pricing model.
The value you're offering is overcoming a few challenges.
First, the technical challenges of designing these graphics yourself - you have to pay for potentially expensive software suites (Photoshop, etc.) to get this kind of work done, and then you have to learn how-to do it. There is a financial and educational curve to climb there.
Then the second challenge is time. It takes time to sit and fiddle with a complex piece of software to make a screenshot do what your utility does.
So your value is you provide a single piece of software that does one job very well, and it's near instant and requires little to no learning curve whatsoever.
Further, you need to consider your own personal objectives with this software. I'm not in this field, so I do not have the foresight to see the potential growth with this software, therefore from my perspective it's a cute tool that does one thing. You might know different and can see potentially big markets.
Anyway. I would likely price this as a $15 one time purchase at the non-commercial level (targeting everyday Joe Blogs) with one year of upgrades, and around $50/year/user at the commercial end.
It really depends on the market and the user's pain points, Jobs To be Done, etc.
Maybe a couple of freebies (with watermarks with link to your site for viral growth and license for personal use), then upsell with credits. You mentioned newspapers - I think you could charge a bit more for a full commercial license for the outputs - but it is fairly trivial for a graphic designer to replicate this in photoshop in 2 mins so there is probably a limit to the max fee.
Subscriptions are good for recurring revenue but maybe offer that as one option, not the only option? A lot of people drop off at that point.
I used to do these tilted 3D dof screenshots in After Effects a lot for videos - that is a use case I would pay for, if it’s quick enough - it was always a bit time consuming in AE and also a lot of people need videos but not everyone can use AE.
For my own app https://screenrun.app/ that also produces outputs, I was thinking credits: eg $5 gives you 50 screenshots (or videos in my case). No subscription and people get debited only when they use the tool. Would be nice to add referrals so they could earn credits when others sign up?
While the tool is extremely simple to replace with something more low level. I think there is no better way than what he chose to actually monetize something like this. Consider the target markets.
Individual bloggers. Too cheap to pay sub. Also too cheap to pay a $10 onetime.
Hackers. Would happily spend whole day implementing the same with a less polished npm package and would never pay for anything anyway.
Professional designers. Can get the same or even better results in the tools they already use with both hands tied behind their back. They don’t need this even if it’s free.
Now to the last and only viable market. Journalists who are lacking tech skills and no designer to back them up. They don’t care how simple the tech behind is, as long as it gives them value. It’s just cheap enough that they don’t have to blink and the recurring revenue from these will offset any non-existent $10 one-off purchases from individuals.
Yeah fair, I'm one one today. I genuinely thought this was a joke at first. But you're right, I should just put my money where my mouth is and make a github pages or similar that replicates this functionality as something that you can download and keep forever, how hard can it be?
It's utterly disgraceful to charge money for something like this as a service, but that doesn't excuse my conduct in response. The implications of validating this sort of rent collecting are insidious and serve. We really need to re-evaluate what our definition of 'value' is as a society.
I can think of a number of reasons that make this valuable:
If someone just wants an image like this and doesn't even know what css is, it's cheaper to pay 5 bucks than to even consider hiring someone to do this.
If someone does know how this is done... Why would they purchase the service?
Also, what if someone wants this but it's not for a website? They make pamphlets or something.
My only complaint is that from the example I thought it would return an animation, not a still image.
> It's utterly disgraceful to charge money for something like this as a service
Why?
> We really need to re-evaluate what our definition of 'value' is as a society.
If this saves me about half an hour a year it's valuable because it's cheaper. If it's easy to make, other people will come along to profit at lower price points.
Are you new here? Perhaps I can introduce you to one of our heros, patio11 who made an entire business out of making bingo cards. I don't particularly think this is a great business but my gosh, this is the right audience to "show it off"
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
I'd pay for one-time pro features. I don't want a subscription, but I'm willing to pay to use this service a few times a year maybe. There are probably more like me.
I think this would be a tough one. FWIW, I think your question highlights a great example of why so many companies don't offer the pricing you want, even though it's probably true that the majority of users would prefer this pricing.
My bet is that selling "10 pro edits or something like that" would nearly completely cannibalize any subscription sales. Thus, I think OP is probably likely to make a lot more money by only offering a subscription than by offering one-off pricing that kills subscription sales.
I see where you're coming from, and I don't really have the market experience to argue with you.
In my case 10 pro edits would be way too much, it could expire at the end of the year too, to make it even more profitable. First of all it would be more expensive than one month of subscription, and second of all they would expire.
But a person like me who sucks at graphic design would still be willing to fork over like 10 bucks for 10 pro edits even if I only use a few of them.
Because once that rare moment comes where I want this, I really want it!
Interestingly, I REALLY want the exact OPPOSITE of this.
Many times it's just so frustratingly difficult to take a screenshot of something on a computer screen and send it over one of the several mobile messaging apps that don't have a good desktop client, so I end up just taking a picture of the physical computer screen with my mobile phone. It looks like shit but I'm lazy. I really wish a piece of software could recognize what I just took a picture of and then pull the actual data from that portion of the screen, send the screen data over bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever to the phone, and "fix" the screenshot.
On Apple devices ”Universal Clipboard” (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460) works fairly well for that (’fairly’ because, in my experience, it doesn’t always work in one go)
'KDE connect' has a similar shared clipboard, also very low friction local network file sharing IME, works on Android with either Windows or Linux (and maybe other systems too?).
I had a similar problem a decade ago. Had a lot of paper bureaucracy in my life, didn't have a scanner on me at all times obviously. So I wrote an app that undoes the perspective: https://github.com/akalenuk/Docam
OP here. I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon. It's a grind to get the word out in the first place, for one. The SaaS model covers some of the cost of running it, but it isn't a viable product on it's own just yet. I have other projects that generate income to cover cloud services, accounting costs and other fees.
Why would this be a subscription? It could just be a standalone app for $10 bucks and you'll probably get more lifetime revenue that way compared to having a subscription, because in a year more people will buy for $10 than will subscribe and stay subscribed for long enough to overcome that revenue.
Could also make it hard to unsubscribe. Like swedish insurance, where it needs 3+ hours waiting on the line to get to some supporter who can unsubscribe.
Right. I (reluctantly) accept subscriptions if there is something the company does for me every month - in this case it's a javascript app that runs in my browser. There is no countervalue per month, making it unattractive.
With all due and sincere respect to mikaelaast's effort and ambition, I can't believe we're at a point where the implementation of an image filter can ask for a automatically renewing $5 per month subscription and nobody blinks.
There are a whole bunch of repetitive comments about this already and it's not, by itself, all that on-topic in a Show HN, especially with the added meta.
At this point I believe that this is only a snowflake on an enormous iceberg of opportunities that we are missing, because “come on, everyone could open a shell and <insert your convoluted pipeline here>”. It’s probably a trillions dollars industry that doesn’t exist due to professional deformation and being conditioned to sit and work for someone else’s profit.
This feels like something that's too expensive for a random individual (I've become allergic over time to simple things that insist on subscription as opposed to pay once). But too cheap for enterprise use.
Consider putting together few more simple tools, build a quick pipeline, and offer per seat and enterprise licensing.
If the author was that serious about this as a business they would've done it server side -- or better yet sold the unburdened source code at a one-time price.
If you are running someone else's code on your computer you are entitled to change it, morally. The fact that most other programs make this hard to meaningfully do is another problem.
I appreciate the reveal. I come to HN to see things exactly like this. And if someone is going to “show HN”, well hacker is right in the title of the site so expect people are interested in that kind of thing so best take minimal steps to secure your stuff.
“Business”? This is a weekend toy project, and good for them for trying to explore monetization as part of the exercise.
But reverse engineering the implementation, even trivially, is more intellectually interesting than the effort itself. It’s good content for HN and a really valuable beginner’s lesson for the author.
The conditional in the code _is_ a protection. It is not fair of you to consider it non-existent just because _you_ can easily bypass it.
Using your argument, it would be fair to circumvent any protection as long as a specialist can trivially bypass it? Remember that 99% of internet users have no idea what "Show page source" actually does, much less what "javascript" is. You are the top 1 percentile power user here.
Arguably a lot of things are not strongly protected per se but rely on specialists not trying to actively trick the system, much less posting their techniques on public forums.
> Arguably a lot of things are not strongly protected per se but rely on specialists not trying to actively trick the system
If a system has a vulnerability, it is the system's fault, not the specialist's. I'm a bit sensitive to this line of argument because it and arguments like it have been used in the past to try and demonize the efforts of security researchers. However, I also believe we should have good norms around responsible disclosure.
> much less posting their techniques on public forums.
Perhaps it could've been more responsibly disclosed to the OP, agreed. However, the public internet is a public forum. OP posted his code there, and it was found. Any number of web crawlers have probably already found it. Not the least painful way to learn this lesson, but hopefully it was learned.
263 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadYou could do more interactive stuff, like the common interface of moving a slider on the "before" image to reveal the "after" image. And that's nice, but it should be supplemental to the two images.
But take this advice with a grain of salt - after all, the video did cause me to spend more time on your site than if two images had immediately answered the question I was curious about.
https://i.imgur.com/aTqN3qA.png
You sound so cool when you start a sentence with "yeah" for no grammatical reason, as though answering a question that no one asked. I bet you're really laid back and were probably smoking a blunt and exhaling a massive cloud while you typed your comment. Did you personally innovate this conversational technique?
An ad hominem attack based on a single word and your extreme displeasure of it?
Do you have anything substantive to say about the comments themselves as opposed to a hyperfixated diatribe based on a single superfluous word? Because everyone and their grandmothers is bored of your “holier than thou” soapbox ramblings about how you perceive random people on the internet.
And just because you clearly don’t get it, the word “even” can be used for emphasis when something you are reacting to is absurd. Crazy thing, English, eh?
I wonder who that person is in this conversation.
Once again, and for the last time, do you have anything to say about the comments themselves, or are you just going to keep breaking the guidelines to get your rocks off on insulting others and their grammar over a single word?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Think about Figma. They don't charge for how many drawings you make - that would seem ludicrous, especially since most of the compute power required to use the product is expended during client-side code execution. So instead, Figma charges you for using the app itself, but only once you want to add another collaborator to your private projects (at which point you're obviously happy with the product and probably willing to pay).
If you want to monetize this, I would encourage you to think along those same lines. You are building a product for somebody - but for whom? You can answer that question by letting people use it for free and seeing who likes it the most - marketers? news article editors? - and then building more features to focus the product on their use case.
Don't think about charging by volume - think about getting consistent usage from users who face this problem often, and then figure out how to integrate into their existing workflows. Then charge them money to do that.
modern ken-burns not only slides the image, but does the 2.5D effects as well. much more interesting than just zoom/pan
> much more interesting than just zoom/pan
yes, Ken Burns goes beyond zoom/pan and over into dramatically slanted, at least for what purports to be documentary.
When I wanted to export the result in highest available resolution, it asked me to subscribe for $5/month. I only need 1 single screenshot, so I’m not going to subscribe, but I can see this being used by big newspaper companies. Good luck with your project!
consider the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwXlo9gy_k4 & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWZbWzAyHAE
https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/KnWn0G/ai-flause-for-goog...
You probably should make a personal account which limits the amount of images you can generate a month (10?) and a business account which offers unlimited generation but for a steep price.
Also the "Ready to go pro?" thing seems very rushed and presumptuous. Like, I'm not even sure I'm ready to go "Free" yet
It takes an image as input and produces a "dramatic" copy of that image in which "dramatic" is defined as being angled away from the viewer on two planes and having a blur somewhat consistent with it having been photographed with a shallow depth of field.
Might as well ray trace it....
And this would be just about one of the easiest "Photoshop tutorials" there is to follow.
Wow! What a great find! I wish more documentation looked like this. There are a few other (feature-rich) command line utilities that could benefit from a similar approach.
This is a good idea to add visual novelty to images, especially plain ones.
The problem is the moat is very low: as low as 1 30-second YouTube video on using the transform tool in the case of Gimp.
Doesn't seem very defensible - but maybe if you add versioning & various other features (links for images, etc.) it could be.
One thing I played around with because I needed it myself was turning pictures into things that look like they've been scanned. Made for documents, but I suppose one could use it for screenshots as well. :) https://photocopy.fuglede.dk
I have no idea how hard it would be, but this would be great as an effect for Final Cut, Da Vinci, etc. I don’t think the video world has a plug-in standard like the photo kinda does (eventually lots of apps implemented Photoshop's API).
I wanted a before and after photo. It's a simple concept. The landing page should be equally simple.
[1] https://www.screenstab.com/editor/resources/demo.gif
Even when the .PNG downloaded I thought for sure it’d be an animated PNG.
If I’m doing some content creation, I probably already have an image editor, in which case I can create this effect myself or would prefer an integrated plugin to do it.
Motion graphics is much harder, and there’s more demand there to add some sparkle to a static image. OP, have you considered that angle?
[0] https://www.screenstab.com/editor/resources/demo.gif
No on wants to pay $5/month for a utility.
Just add "more than N screenshots a day are considered corporate usage with an according plan", ask to upgrade, ban.
The value you're offering is overcoming a few challenges.
First, the technical challenges of designing these graphics yourself - you have to pay for potentially expensive software suites (Photoshop, etc.) to get this kind of work done, and then you have to learn how-to do it. There is a financial and educational curve to climb there.
Then the second challenge is time. It takes time to sit and fiddle with a complex piece of software to make a screenshot do what your utility does.
So your value is you provide a single piece of software that does one job very well, and it's near instant and requires little to no learning curve whatsoever.
Further, you need to consider your own personal objectives with this software. I'm not in this field, so I do not have the foresight to see the potential growth with this software, therefore from my perspective it's a cute tool that does one thing. You might know different and can see potentially big markets.
Anyway. I would likely price this as a $15 one time purchase at the non-commercial level (targeting everyday Joe Blogs) with one year of upgrades, and around $50/year/user at the commercial end.
It really depends on the market and the user's pain points, Jobs To be Done, etc.
Subscriptions are good for recurring revenue but maybe offer that as one option, not the only option? A lot of people drop off at that point.
I used to do these tilted 3D dof screenshots in After Effects a lot for videos - that is a use case I would pay for, if it’s quick enough - it was always a bit time consuming in AE and also a lot of people need videos but not everyone can use AE.
Individual bloggers. Too cheap to pay sub. Also too cheap to pay a $10 onetime.
Hackers. Would happily spend whole day implementing the same with a less polished npm package and would never pay for anything anyway.
Professional designers. Can get the same or even better results in the tools they already use with both hands tied behind their back. They don’t need this even if it’s free.
Now to the last and only viable market. Journalists who are lacking tech skills and no designer to back them up. They don’t care how simple the tech behind is, as long as it gives them value. It’s just cheap enough that they don’t have to blink and the recurring revenue from these will offset any non-existent $10 one-off purchases from individuals.
There are probably other ways to add value for paying users so they are less likely to just save page as:
Integrating the JS into a WordPress plugin to generate screenshots automatically for posting to social media when a post publishes.
Zapier integration to help people automate these screenshots in their workflows.
It's utterly disgraceful to charge money for something like this as a service, but that doesn't excuse my conduct in response. The implications of validating this sort of rent collecting are insidious and serve. We really need to re-evaluate what our definition of 'value' is as a society.
If someone just wants an image like this and doesn't even know what css is, it's cheaper to pay 5 bucks than to even consider hiring someone to do this.
If someone does know how this is done... Why would they purchase the service?
Also, what if someone wants this but it's not for a website? They make pamphlets or something.
My only complaint is that from the example I thought it would return an animation, not a still image.
Why?
> We really need to re-evaluate what our definition of 'value' is as a society.
If this saves me about half an hour a year it's valuable because it's cheaper. If it's easy to make, other people will come along to profit at lower price points.
> Gorgeous screenshots is just a click away...
should be "Gorgeous screenshots are just a click away...".
Maybe sell 10 pro edits or something like that?
My bet is that selling "10 pro edits or something like that" would nearly completely cannibalize any subscription sales. Thus, I think OP is probably likely to make a lot more money by only offering a subscription than by offering one-off pricing that kills subscription sales.
In my case 10 pro edits would be way too much, it could expire at the end of the year too, to make it even more profitable. First of all it would be more expensive than one month of subscription, and second of all they would expire.
But a person like me who sucks at graphic design would still be willing to fork over like 10 bucks for 10 pro edits even if I only use a few of them.
Because once that rare moment comes where I want this, I really want it!
Many times it's just so frustratingly difficult to take a screenshot of something on a computer screen and send it over one of the several mobile messaging apps that don't have a good desktop client, so I end up just taking a picture of the physical computer screen with my mobile phone. It looks like shit but I'm lazy. I really wish a piece of software could recognize what I just took a picture of and then pull the actual data from that portion of the screen, send the screen data over bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever to the phone, and "fix" the screenshot.
[0] https://www.islandix.com/blog/announcing-1-1 [1] https://www.islandix.com/blog/radar-re-homed
Because more monies.
Could also make it hard to unsubscribe. Like swedish insurance, where it needs 3+ hours waiting on the line to get to some supporter who can unsubscribe.
See how many people are saying the pricing model is wrong? They won't get hooked on a sub because they'll never sign up.
We used to blink, didn't we?
And yes - same comment; awesome tool, but lol - not worth paying for.
If they really want to monatize: Enforce account sign-up, go on a token system for each use, and give a few free for trial maybe.
There are a whole bunch of repetitive comments about this already and it's not, by itself, all that on-topic in a Show HN, especially with the added meta.
This feels like something that's too expensive for a random individual (I've become allergic over time to simple things that insist on subscription as opposed to pay once). But too cheap for enterprise use.
Consider putting together few more simple tools, build a quick pipeline, and offer per seat and enterprise licensing.
(Note: I don't know OP, and have never used their product)
If you are running someone else's code on your computer you are entitled to change it, morally. The fact that most other programs make this hard to meaningfully do is another problem.
But reverse engineering the implementation, even trivially, is more intellectually interesting than the effort itself. It’s good content for HN and a really valuable beginner’s lesson for the author.
That said it’d be unethical to use this to avoid paying.
Using your argument, it would be fair to circumvent any protection as long as a specialist can trivially bypass it? Remember that 99% of internet users have no idea what "Show page source" actually does, much less what "javascript" is. You are the top 1 percentile power user here.
Arguably a lot of things are not strongly protected per se but rely on specialists not trying to actively trick the system, much less posting their techniques on public forums.
If a system has a vulnerability, it is the system's fault, not the specialist's. I'm a bit sensitive to this line of argument because it and arguments like it have been used in the past to try and demonize the efforts of security researchers. However, I also believe we should have good norms around responsible disclosure.
> much less posting their techniques on public forums.
Perhaps it could've been more responsibly disclosed to the OP, agreed. However, the public internet is a public forum. OP posted his code there, and it was found. Any number of web crawlers have probably already found it. Not the least painful way to learn this lesson, but hopefully it was learned.