Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

vecti.com

219 points by vecti 6 hours ago


Hello everyone!

I'm a solo developer who's been doing UI/UX work since 2007. Over the years, I watched design tools evolve from lightweight products into bloated feature-heavy platforms. I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way.

So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need: pixel-perfect grid snapping, a performant canvas renderer, shared asset libraries, and export/presentation features. No collaborative whiteboarding. No plugin ecosystem. No enterprise features. Just the design loop.

Four years later, I can proudly show it off. Built and hosted in the EU with European privacy regulations. Free tier available (no credit card, one editor forever).

On privacy: I use some basic analytics (page views, referrers) but zero tracking inside the app itself. No session recordings, no behavior analytics, no third-party scripts beyond the essentials.

If you're a solo designer or small team who wants a tool that stays out of your way, I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback: https://vecti.com

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, architecture decisions, why certain features didn't make the cut, or what's next.

crazygringo - 6 hours ago

> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need...

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?

TonyStr - 5 hours ago

Since this is a commercial product, I'm naturally inclined to compare it to other competing commercial products.

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.

danielvaughn - 6 hours ago

Congrats on launching. I spent a decade trying to build a design tool. I think I built almost 40 prototypes, to various degrees of completion. Never got to a point where I felt it was good enough to share. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, so kudos to you for sticking with it.

raw_anon_1111 - 4 hours ago

Isn’t this exactly the problem that Joel Spolsky wrote about a quarter of a century ago?

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.

jonnycoder - 2 hours ago

I like your website design, especially the two-column layout in most sections once I get past the hero image (full size screenshot). I found myself looking at all the images. The downside is that I did not really get any motivation to try it out or really understand how it could help me.

I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.

catapart - 5 hours ago

Godspeed! This is the software design philosophy that I support! As someone building my own design utility, I'm impressed by the quality of yours.

pier25 - 2 hours ago

My biggest issue with Figma and most vector apps is how they handle groups. Only Illustrator seems to offer group isolation. You can double click on a group, enter the group and just edit the elements inside that group.

It's such a simple feature but it massively improves the workflow of working with vectors. Never understood why Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer never implemented it.

cobertos - 6 hours ago

Any chance this will be open-sourced or have a self-hosted version available?

I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs

tarcon - 6 hours ago

How does it compare to https://github.com/penpot/penpot?

contrast - 6 hours ago

Maybe its obvious but I can't tell it this is an image editor, a React builder, an HTML/CSS designer, ...? What does it make?

codethief - 6 hours ago

Congrats on your launch! My impression is that this looks quite polished. Can you elaborate on your tech stack?

aerzen - 5 hours ago

Nice. My gripe with designer apps is that they are online first. I'd want to save designs to files, close to other files of the project. I'd want to open each file in their own window, not in browser tabs.

jmkni - 6 hours ago

Congrats on launching, looks cool for sure, I'll certainly check it out!

Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just

ramon156 - 5 hours ago

Comparing this to penpot, which is free as long as you self-host.

Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.

replwoacause - 3 hours ago

Congratulations on shipping a beautiful product

NoSalt - 4 hours ago

It looks really nice, but it is subscription based, so ... no thanks. I refuse to give in to this horrible cycle started by Adobe, lo so many years ago.

- 5 hours ago
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amadeuspagel - 5 hours ago

Trying to login with google I got a social auth error: https://app.vecti.com/dashboard/social-auth-error/

tuhgdetzhh - 3 hours ago

I wait for someone to comment that he could pull it off with an Opus 4.6 agent team in 24h of so.

jasonsb - 5 hours ago

Love the domain name. How did you manage to snag it?

- 6 hours ago
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dhumph - 3 hours ago

Your pricing makes it seem like $12 for a year.

willparks - 6 hours ago

Beautiful design! (makes sense for someone that does UI design). Congrats, I'll check it out.

pawelwentpawel - 6 hours ago

Great job, congrats on the launch!

th3o6a1d - 4 hours ago

Congrats on launching!

mettamage - 6 hours ago

Fun submission, will have a look :)

falloutx - 6 hours ago

Just tested a few things and I gotta say its fairly easy to pick up and do things. UI does feel like Figma for better or worse.

Congrats on completing this project and good luck.

popalchemist - 6 hours ago

It's beautiful. Great job. Congrats on having the persistence to see this through.

jjcm - 4 hours ago

Ex-Figma.

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.

arkforge - 5 hours ago

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arkforge - 6 hours ago

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thrownaway561 - 5 hours ago

I think you're 4 years too late bro. With AI, you can pretty much get 80% of the way there in a minute. I don't understand why anyone nowadays would build anything from scratch.