Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use (vecti.com)
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.
61 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 75.2 ms ] threadCongrats on completing this project and good luck.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.
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.
Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just
I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs
Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.
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.
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.
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.