Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
I think the Apple II is one example of this.
It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway.
If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle.
You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine.
Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.
In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
I don't think that's really true, unless the behavior of each toggle is tightly coupled to the behavior each other toggle.
Case in point - most mature apps nowadays do have hundreds of toggles for various settings and features.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Why would I want to use this over figma? The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit). Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face. Whiteboard, presentations, dev mode are all hidden behind menus. "no plugin support" seems like a very odd thing to flaunt as a feature. Many of the most popular use-cases of figma, such as interactive prototypes, svg creation, html/css exports are all impossible in this tool.
Then, there is the problem of this being maintained by a single person. Components are essential to any serious figma user, good svg and image handling is important (svg is buggy in my testing), selection colors is vital, color palette is important. When can users expect to see these features if the maintainer is busy hunting down bugs?
This is a technically impressive product, but I struggle to see the market plan. I personally hate distractions in software, I go to great lengths to debloat and disable features to make my computer interactions smoother, yet figma is possibly the last program I would want to clean up.
I started this project as a personal endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic, out of a personal desire to contribute to the field of UX design that I’ve always been passionate about, but at the same time I don’t intend on working as a solo developer for much longer.
Some of the features you’ve listed, are currently being worked on, which are going to be launched very soon.
Wishing you the best of success, really like seeing your vision and hope it bears out.
I’ve been using Figma for a while, and true, it’s powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall. Simple tasks now require navigating through multiple menus, and the learning curve for new users is steep (took me a while to understand it, and the same experience had it acquaintances of mine). Sometimes I just want to sketch out an idea or make a task without dealing with all that overhead.
The no plugin support thing actually makes sense to me. I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins. Having a tool that just works, consistently, without worrying about plugin compatibility or security issues? That’s valuable. And yeah, it’s a solo developer versus a massive company (that’s my understanding) but that is why it’s beautiful. Also it’s an uneven comparison if you ask me (but didn’t :)) ).
However, the fact that this is even being compared to Figma shows the quality of what’s been built. Not everyone needs enterprise features. Some of us just want a clean, fast canvas without the friction. Every new feature of Figma feels like an attempt to monopolize the entire market.
I think he did an incredible job. Good work. This has value.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?
Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!
Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.
I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs
I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right. While there are differences between your implementation and Figma's, it's close enough that things are very clearly Figma-inspired. There've been a lot of Figma copycats, and Figma does have a track record of successful lawsuits against them.
Great work with the backend architecture (a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive), but you're in dangerous territory with the UI.
Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.
Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just
The main difference lies in the rendering engine. Penpot relies on an SVG engine, which limits performance as project complexity grows.
Vecti is built on canvas and WebAssembly (the same architecture used by Figma). This gives us raw performance advantages, allowing you to handle complex, heavy design systems without the lag you might experience in SVG-based tools.
Congrats on completing this project and good luck.