Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mindvirus 2136 days ago
Beautiful! I'm going to use a few of these for my project.

For monetization - maybe start with ads and add a https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ link or similar? I'm not convinced subscriptions would work, since I imagine that a lot of people need a gradient once and that's it, but you can always ask people.

In terms of feature suggestions:

- I like the edit colors feature - but can you make it global? i.e. I have my colors in mind, and want to see with various gradients.

- Can you convert this to code for non-CSS apps? For example, Flutter has a LinearGradient class that it seems like most of these should translate to in a straightforward way.

3 comments

May I ask where you live? pixelarity.com has a hundred-or-so (I haven't counted) Bootstrap templates that save me time whenever somebody wants me to set up a small website (for free - I hate that), and for the $5/month or $20/year or whatever it is - it's worth it to me.

I've notice that a lot of people on HN don't want to pay $20/month (or whatever) for things that save them hours and hours of work. I don't understand this unless they don't make much per hour (and this is a global community - so that may be real!).

How would one go about pricing for a global community? I'm assuming that my laziness drives my willingness to pay $20/month for something that is essentially outside of my cone-of-expertise, and I find value in that, but others done? (I also value time over money - which I have learned is not universal).

OK. That was a meandering comment - I apologize. Thought?

In NYC. That's a fair point - thinking in terms of annual access makes more sense.

For me it's more adversion to subscriptions for things I use once. I'm always happy to pay for things I use, but if I subscribe for $10/month and forget I don't find out until years later that I spent $100s on a thing. That said for anything like these gradients, for $10-$15/year I wouldn't hesitate.

I have a little of that with O'Reilly Safari. (Currently) they only charge me $199/year, but are thinking to raising the price to $499. I'm thinking I would rather buy their books one-off.

But I buy a shit-ton of stuff at ~10/months (maybe $5, maybe $20), but if they jack their rates I will go one-off again.

I don't know if I am unique (and thank you for answering the question), at a certain level like JetBrains IDEs or Sublime or O'Reilly - I just pay it. It starts to wear on one over time....

Apple kills me. I tend to release things on Linux or Windows. Maybe Windows. But iOS - You have to have a Mac and a Development platform and subscription. I think they must hate developers. I would pay them for product sold - but can you at least make dev tools a little cheaper? I run into this issue in university dev-camp conversations a lot..

I second the idea of the being able to export for non web/css, these gradients are too good and could be used for graphic design as well. Also the idea of adding tip jar/non invasive monetization.
Yeah, thats my concern with subscriptions as well. I'm not sure many people would need to come back that often. Maybe more premium features (like what you highlight below) would work? Instead of just being a hub for gradients, it becomes your first stop anytime you need a cool image.

I'd be curious as to what other non-css formats would be helpful. You mention Flutter LinearGradient, are there others? SVG certainly, is there a way to make images export friendly for Sketch or Figma?

My two cents would be to stay focused - there are a ton of general image search resources online. unsplash.com for example seems hard to beat. One place to consider expanding to would be CSS animated gradients though.

In terms of generating code: - Android - iOS (objective-c + swift) - React Native - Flutter

seem like the most popular non-CSS based mobile frameworks.

I’d love to see these paired with css animations for subtle background changes between gradients.

Maybe that’s premium content. I’m not sure how useful it is to designers since I am not one.