[jimbisenius]

Howdy everyone!

I'm Jim, co-founder of Singlelink. We're a three-man team based in Raleigh, NC that loves open-source software.

Our goal is to bridge the gap between micro-sites and websites by creating an open-source micro-site platform with the ease of tools like Linktree and the plugins/themes & extensibility of WordPress.

Some context for why we built Singlelink. Previous to this, we were a WordPress development & hosting agency that built countless amounts of custom websites just for them to all become "plugin spaghetti". This lead us to originally trying to build a custom WordPress installation image we called Neutron that was simpler & leaner while retaining the ability to "do anything", but it never quite worked out.

After extensive feedback from our early adopters, we transitioned to building an open-source & extensible platform that allows you to build simple micro-sites while also allowing you to modify the codebase and add new themes/plugins where needed. For us, that meant building on top of technology like TailwindCSS, NuxtJS, NodeJS, and Postgres to encourage community contributions, opening up a marketplace for users to build & sell their themes & plugins, and to genericize the platform so users can build on top of Singlelink rather than that with it (platform vs tool).

We're currently 100% free (pre-revenue) & open-source , and are only planning on making billing closed-source in the future so that Singlelink is accessible as possible for self-hosted users. If you choose to use our freemium cloud-hosted service, billing starts at $8/Month for power users, but we plan for our primary source of revenue to be marketplace commissions from community plugin/theme sales so we can keep our feature-set as accessible as possible.

It's still in beta while we're ironing out bugs and adding plugins & monetization, but we hope you can find it useful.

Please, let us know your thoughts! We love feedback :)

[pm]

What exactly is a "micro-site"?

[jimbisenius]

In general, it's a small website built to complement an existing website/set of websites. Traditionally, these have been used for Instagram/Twitter profiles to fit more than the one allotted link in a bio, but our users use them for a so much more! (ex: internal team bookmarks archive, simple product page/checkouts, adding a paywall to a small page/item, or simply using them as their website for ease of use)

Hope I explained myself well! :)

[panic]

This is a cool idea -- giving people a way to grow their site from a list of links to something more complex makes a lot of sense. That said, and I know criticisms like this are a bit of a cliché at this point on HN, but why does a static list of links need to download 18MB of JavaScript, show a progress bar, and modify the scrolling behavior of the page? I assume at some point in the future this JS will be useful for adding more advanced features to people's sites, but it might be worth paring it down to just what's actually necessary for the kind of page it is.

[jimbisenius]

Thanks for the comment, and GREAT point!!

Unfortunately, we've been adding features in left and right on demand and just haven't had time to optimize profile delivery yet since it hasn't been in high-demand, but that's next on our roadmap.

We're about to add in our one-click export to static, which will cut out all the existing Javascript on the page and optimize all assets before delivery, and then trigger re-builds on every change to your site.

There will ultimately have to be a user-set balance between performance and feature-set however, as just like WordPress not all plugins will be able to be pre-compiled.

[pwdisswordfish0]

Typo on /pricing "we plans for".

(Aside from that, I'm continually astounded when I see services like these and notice that the prices listed are per month rather than per year. I'd expect this to be $10–20/yr or thereabouts, tops, but then I see that the non-free tiers start at $8/month and wonder to myself, "Who actually pays these kinds of prices, especially for these kinds of services?")

All the screenshots on the neutron.so landing page are blown out of scale (>1×). I'm browsing with the window on the right half of the screen. The image https://neutron.so/git-websites.png for example is 520px × 340px, but it's scaled to 768px × 502px, so it's not nice to look at because of how fuzzy it is.

Openstack is confusingly named, colliding with OpenStack.

[jimbisenius]

Hey! A few things if I may add...

1. Singlelink is 100% open-source, meaning if you'd prefer to self-host it and not pay the $8/Month to us, you can! :)

2. Thanks for the notifications about Neutron.so and Openstack. We sunsetted these awhile back internally, but never put out a proper notification so that's something I'm going back to do now since it's not clear.

Thanks for the comment (and notification about that typo), I really appreciate it!

[pwdisswordfish0]

> Singlelink is 100% open-source, meaning if you'd prefer to self-host it and not pay the $8/Month to us, you can!

That hadn't gone unnoticed. (Good choice of a license, btw.)

The comment about the prices was not a specific complaint, just an observation about a trend that has always been surprising.

[jimbisenius]

Thanks, we're big fans of GPL too :) And fair enough, appreciate the clarification!

[smoldesu]

What separates Singlelink from other CMS platforms? Why should I use it if you'll impose "limited advertising" on my microsite?

[jimbisenius]

In regards to "limited advertising" (an optional watermark on your site, and a "Singlelink" watermark in your SEO title), we only add this for our "cloud-hosted" customers that use our free tier.

Just like WordPress & wordpress.com, you can self-host Singlelink with a platform like DigitalOcean or AWS to get instant access to our paid features! (singlelink.co is 100% open-source at the moment, and the only thing we plan to close-source is billing)

I hope I answered your question! Appreciate the comment :)

[jffry]

I was also confused by this when looking at your pricing page: https://singlelink.co/pricing/

My thought process: "Oh, they'll show ad-network ads on the free tier, I guess that's OK. How much is the tier that removes ads?" and then I couldn't find a tier that mentioned it.

I think it'd be much clearer if the free tier said something like "shows Singlelink watermark/logo", and the next tier up said something like "no Singlelink watermark/logo"

[jimbisenius]

Lol, I need sleep! I could've sworn I had no ads listed as the top feature for the paid tiers, what a huge oversight.

I've just added this to the website now, I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention!!