[qiller]

Hard agree. I like the converter idea, but having used similar tools in the past (Avocode and others), there are always some kind of minor but annoying issues. Having a preview or a trial would be good to have to avoid surprises later.

[kgoedecke]

Appreciate the honest feedback. We get that a lot actually, if you reach out to our customer support team we can convert a small file for free for you. Our converter literally almost everything, prototyping, components and what not. Maybe we should add a free trial tho.

[latexr]

> We get that a lot actually

Now think of all the people who never tell you and just move on. They don’t get to use a useful tool and you don’t get the customer. Lose-lose.

> if you reach out to our customer support team we can convert a small file for free for you.

Which costs you money via the time spent on support.

> Maybe we should add a free trial tho.

From your grandparent comment, it seems you offer different prices based on the number of artboards. Maybe the trial is instead a free tier which only works on files up to X MB in size with at most Y artboards.

[justsomehnguy]

> Now think of all the people who never tell you and just move on.

This.

> Which costs you money via the time spent on support

And this.

But the most important thing is what for any (we based) service I expect a zero amount of friction.

Contacting support is way too much for my 21sr century ass.

Edit: I leave the typos as a reminder not to drink and comment.

[eurasiantiger]

But then you can’t test the conversion on realistic ”production” files, and you may miss something. Better not limit features, only amount of files and speed of conversion (the queue / progress bar is a good place to remind free users of the fact.)

This also nets the company lots of good karma by letting many others out of one-off binds where they are stuck with a file they cannot open.

Getting the company name out there as a dependable savior will make your brand stand out in casual conversations.

Then it will be an easy sell to agencies that actually use these kinds of products and are willing to pay for them.

However, don’t try to upsell from the free tier, and don’t make it annoying to use. It will make people avoid the free service. You want users to tell others of the great service that saved their bum just before the looming deadline.

And with that particular name, the company could even base its marketing on literally that.

[qiller]

I think most concerns come a lot from the point of view of trust that the converter does the right thing. If I take a designer XD file, convert it to Figma and give it to a developer for implementation, I want to be sure that they don’t waste billable hours making a wrong gradient or battle some odd masking issue. As a consulting shop, we tried some tools, for example Avocode - but ultimately cancelled it. Tools were usually 95% correct, but because of the remaining 5% we’d end up still paying for the zoo of Figma/Sketch/Adobe/Invision. Oh, and still needed those cause designers would forget to mark assets as exportable and Zeplin can’t pull assets unless that’s done. </rant> :)

Sooo, a preview or a trial or some recourse like easier refunds (even back into credits) would be to improve the perception

[nbzso]

I have a gripe with all the design tools that don't offer interoperability. You can import Sketch file in Figma, but you cannot export to Sketch.

I understand the reasons behind this decision-making process, but all of this "silo" mentality is pushing me to use more code and less design tools for my clients DS.