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

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Congrats on launching!

Great job, congrats on the launch!

Fun submission, will have a look :)

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.

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

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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.