Comment by bdcravens
16 days ago
For sure, and I definitely like the visual eye of designers, which is why I'm referring to designs created by humans (and to be honest, LLMs do an amazing job of creating decent looking designs).
I guess the bigger question is even ignoring the LLM angle is why this project is worth 10-30x than another design also created by a human. I feel like the Ruby gem and integration is worth a premium, but I'm not sure that the premium matches what you're charging. I've purchased third party themes and paid someone on Upwork to "Railsify" them, leaving me with ownership of the code, and I'm pretty sure I paid less than you're charging for the team level. (I hope you don't take this as a personal attack on your business model, and simply an analysis of X vs Y)
Hello fellow Houstonian! As someone who has used Stimulus and Hotwire since the early days of Rails 7, I don't really agree that it's 10-30x, because I wouldn't compare it to some $30 theme. Having Rails-ified components (and themes) saves a lot of time so this would more than pay for itself within a few hours of consulting work on a project in the USA. I've worked on projects that had talented designers, but I also know the feeling of being a solo dev who doesn't want to figure out how to make it look and behave nicely, so for someone like that it's extra awesome!
I hear you. I'd say the value prop is drop-in integration and customization with Rails, time-saving design (useful for 0-1 or early-stage ideas for non-design-savvy folks), and fewer headaches compared to adapting other components or themes in the wild into a Rails app.
No matter what you choose, there's work to be done to adapt to each app's use case, branding, copywriting, etc. Rails UI definitely isn't "complete" and is a constant work in progress, hence the subscription model.
Whether that's valuable to you is definitely up to you. Some folks don't want to be beholden to an AI for design and prefer a ready-made human-engineered system to refer back to and evolve as their app does.
I use this project for my own stuff. That's why I originally built it; however, I'm biased and am deeply on the Rails bandwagon. Ultimately, it saves me a bunch of time, which to me is the most valuable thing there is.