Hey guys! I'm Ansgar (https://github.com/gruns). I built Pep because I believe Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are the future. They turn websites into apps that load quickly, work offline, and can be installed like native apps.
But they they can be a lot of work. And hard to get right.
We built Pep to solve that.
I'd love to hear your thoughts -- good and bad. Feedback is how good products become great.
What's actually involved in turning your site into a PWA? I don't see why this needs to be a subscription service vs a one-off or javascript library I can manage myself.
Our goal is for you drop Pep in your website and Pep does everything it can to make your website the best it can be. That includes all aspects of speed: minified assets, responsive images, global CDN (Google), etc. The subscription covers those, as they incur ongoing costs for processing and distribution.
This is interesting, though. Would you be more interested in Pep without all the additional, ongoing improvements? Akin mto a client side only version of Pep?
I just added pep.dev/pep-sw.js to my site and am digging into the minified javascript. Confirmed my images are on the CDN and resized for the device, which should save a ton of bandwidth.
The offline native feature seems super cool, going to try it out...
Sorry, I understand you want this to be done for every website, but personally I hope this will not get wide spread. It reminds me of browser notifications and newsletter signups. Another thing I have to click away: 'please install our website as PWA NOW'.
We think every site knows their audience best and leave it up to sites to decide how lightly, or heavily, they want to encourage their users to install their PWA.
Great stuff man. Even if it is that simple some documentation (and/or a video) is still nice. It appears for the target audience the offer sounds much to good to be true.
How does this work with complex frameworks like React? Does it manipulate components themselves to allow them to work offline, or does it just check for/cache the production JS/HTML/CSS? If so, how would it compare to a server-side rendering framework like Next.js?
How is it different from modern browsers' built-in `turn a site in a PWA` feature? Chrome allows to install several sites as PWAs, Yandex Browser allows that for any site.
Our goal is for you drop Pep in your website and Pep does everything it can to make your website the best it can be. That includes all aspects of performance: minified assets, responsive images, global CDN (Google), etc.
So Pep goes far beyond just adding a shortcut to a website to open in its own window.
Another thing, as evidenced by the confusion in this thread:
The homepage is kind of lacking. I’d suggest linking to some docs that explain the things you have in this thread so potential users can evaluate the product better.
Right now your homepage is:
- company name
- sign up button (which looks weird for me on mobile FYI)
- what is a PWA
- benefits of PWA
- companies using PWAs that don’t use our product for their PWAs
- sign up button
- team
- contact
Include a docs section or something near the top seems like a good idea IMO
But they they can be a lot of work. And hard to get right.
We built Pep to solve that.
I'd love to hear your thoughts -- good and bad. Feedback is how good products become great.