[HN Gopher] Show HN: Avo - Build Ruby on Rails apps faster
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Show HN: Avo - Build Ruby on Rails apps faster
Author : adrianthedev
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-06-21 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (avohq.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (avohq.io)
| MattyMc wrote:
| adrianthedev: THANK YOU for implementing a one-time fee. It
| actually make using this realistic for us.
|
| Quick question: Do you have support for front-end frameworks
| (i.e. React)? I did try to crawl the docs to find out.
|
| We have a Rails monolith, but we're unique in that we have a
| highly interactive educational app with a boat load of
| javascript. Our mantra has been: use React only if we absolutely
| have to. I realize we're unique in this regard.
|
| Totally cool if not; just thought I'd ask. Great work on the
| project!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words!
|
| Avo is built using Hotwire (Turbo and StimulusJS) so no fancy
| framework (React, vue, svelte) under the hood. We love Stimulus
| and goes very well with Rails development.
|
| That beign said, Avo supports adding your own custom content
| (erb templates) and your own asset pipeline (webpacker,
| sprockets, or something else), so in theory you could inject
| React or Vue sprinkles here and there.
| bradgessler wrote:
| It's great to see folks building frameworks on top of frameworks.
| I've started to look into full stack starter-kit frameworks that
| goes beyond the admin panel and here's what's out there these
| days.
|
| * https://bullettrain.co - Opensource, $0/year
|
| * https://jumpstartrails.com - Opencore, $249/year
|
| * https://www.bootrails.com - Closed source, ~$83/year
|
| I've even started to piece on together for my own projects at
| https://github.com/rocketshipio/monolith, which will be open
| source, $0, and MIT licensed.
|
| Some of the libraries I'm noticing that seem "settled" include:
|
| * Devise for authentication
|
| * Pundit for authorization
|
| I started to piece on together for my own projects at
| https://github.com/rocketshipio/monolith, which will be open
| source, $0, and MIT licensed.
|
| I'm hoping enough people converge around any one of these
| products where we end up with something as high quality as Rails.
| If the community agrees on how users, authorization,
| subscriptions, etc. should be modeled, it opens up the door for a
| set of APIs and plugins that will make creating SaaS products
| even easier.
|
| My thinking on the economics of this is the Opencore stuff will
| be a race to the bottom in terms of pricing towards free or a
| nominal fee (I guess $250/year is that). What will end up costing
| money is tech support. I do see an ecosystem of third-party
| services that integrate with SaaS kits emerging, such as rapid
| ways to deploy, analytics services, etc.
| mediaman wrote:
| Can I drop this into an existing Rails app? I use Jumpstart but
| would like a nicer admin experience.
| Simpliplant wrote:
| Yes, very easily.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yes you can. Our site uses Jumpstart (lovely app) and we use
| Avo everyday with it.
|
| Avo was designed to be unopinionated. I know that might sound
| off. Avo has a DSL, it must be opinionated, and it is with that
| DSL, but with the rest, we'd like to allow the developer to use
| what they want.
|
| BYOB.
|
| Bring your own authentication. You might not want to use
| devise, but something else. Avo enables you to add your own
| auth layer.
|
| Bring your own search. Avo plays well with ransack, but you can
| hook into it and do your thing with algolia or something else.
|
| Bring your own layer of multi tenancy. Scope things out as much
| as you need it. We have a customer that runs three platforms in
| one app using Avo. Believe me when I say they were able to
| scope out their data "to the bone".
|
| So yeah. Avo plays amazingly well with existing apps. It was
| designed that way.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I mentioned this before, that I spoke with Chris Oliver, and
| started work on bringing Avo inside Jumpstart rails as an
| alternative to rails admin.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Any similar back office projects written in python? I'd like to
| reuse some existing data access code and I'm currently looking at
| using django. So I'd love to hear if others have a better
| suggestion.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I wouldn't know. I'm not that connected with the Python
| ecosystem. Maybe someone else can shed light. I only know about
| Django Admin.
| martibravo wrote:
| This looks so good... I've been always using Node, Deno or .NET
| Core for backend infrastructure, but Avo makes me wanna learn
| Ruby and RoR and make the jump for client-related work. Congrats!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| It's not that difficult. Really. I have a developer friend that
| comes from Node.JS world and is amazed how quickly he can build
| apps with Rails.
|
| I'd love talk to you if you ever want to try it out.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Hey HN,
|
| I'm Adrian, an indie developer and creator of Avo. For more than
| ten years, I built countless admin panels and back-offices for
| all types of apps. After a while, you start to notice patterns
| and extract functionality away to make the job easier. I took
| those patterns and applied them to Avo. Now, in just an hour, a
| developer can build production-ready applications that with
| traditional coding techniques take a few days, if not weeks.
|
| Avo is suited to agencies that build a lot of products for their
| clients and need to move fast and have a beautiful and robust UI,
| indie developers trying to test out their ideas fast, technical
| teams in companies of all sizes that need to build internal tools
| based on Ruby, and start-ups.
|
| Avo runs on top of Ruby on Rails, which is a powerhouse of a
| framework and uses the most modern tech stack (Hotwire,
| TailwindCSS, esbuild).
|
| Avo has three main parts that you can choose from:
|
| 1. The CRUD UI
|
| 2. The Dashboards UI
|
| 3. The custom content
|
| The CRUD UI is not something generated that takes maintenance in
| the long run. Instead, it's a familiar Ruby DSL that's easy to
| extend with Rails code if you need to break away from it. It
| features about 30 fields with more advanced ones like (one-liner)
| file uploads, WYSIWYG, and key-value fields.
|
| The Dashboards are a light layer on top of chartkick where one
| can query the data from the DB or an endpoint and quickly show
| the data in metrics, charts, or custom partials.
|
| The Custom Content part is the secret sauce of Avo. It enables
| the developer to extend it even further using regular Rails code.
| You get access to partials, controller, action, params, and
| anything else you need to bring your own logic into the UI on
| every level (field, resource, tool).
|
| Avo has a free Community version that features the powerful CRUD
| UI, and a paid Pro version for those who need more power and
| custom content. We also provide technical support for enterprise-
| like customers.
|
| I know that Rails devs will immediately think of Active Admin,
| administrate, and other similar projects, and I want to mention
| that Avo is not them. It's built on a modern stack, and its
| mission is to become the back-office app and not just an "obscure
| admin panel that only the core team visits". I don't want to seem
| harsh, but I challenge non-believers to give Avo an hour of their
| time to see how it's different.
|
| TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's
| toolbox.
|
| I'm here to answer all of your questions.
|
| Thank you
| adrianthedev wrote:
| If you want to keep up with updates you can reach us on
| Twitter[0], Discord[1], or GitHub[2]
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/avo_hq [1] https://avo.cool/chat [2]
| https://github.com/avo-hq/avo [3]
| https://twitter.com/adrianthedev
| highwaylights wrote:
| "I don't want to seem harsh, but I challenge non-believers to
| give Avo an hour of their time to see how it's different.
|
| TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's
| toolbox."
|
| Earnestly, I wish you well. These are rather bold claims.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I was on the fence if I should add those in, but I'm kind of
| glad I did.
|
| I feel a little bit like Taylor Otwell in the old days when
| he was telling people about Laravel, or Evan You back in the
| day when you'd search for "JS framework" and you'd only get
| React and Angular.
|
| They were on the verge of something new and useful, but
| nobody believed. I think developers, in general, are pretty
| inflexible when it comes to new things (only my oppinion),
| that's why I wanted to add those.
|
| It's obvious that Avo is not the silver bullet for any app
| and has caveats in some scenarios. All tools do (Rails,
| Laravel, NextJS, django, spring, you fill in the rest), but
| for most apps it really does give you superpowers. You build
| apps 10x faster and the maintenance work is second to none.
| And in the end, you get a beautiful app ready to present to
| your customers or team.
|
| Thank you for the encouragement! I need it :)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I haven't used Avo, but if it works well, I think it's an
| appropriate claim.
|
| I've worked in the industry for a while and admin pages /
| reports usually being _at least_ 50% of the effort.
| Sometimes, it 's more like 90%.
|
| So, there's a lot of potential impact there.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yes brother! I remember the days when I was building "an
| internal admin for the agency". Something to have for all
| apps and customers.
|
| We'd build it for customer 1, and then for customer 2
| we'd add some features and change some. Same for customer
| 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. After a few years we ended up with 10
| different apps that should be the same. No documentation,
| sometimes the developer that worked on the app is no
| longer with the company, a real mess.
|
| This way, it would be like using Rails. Documentation,
| release, maintenance, the whole shebang!
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| tomhallett wrote:
| When I was skimming your homepage I was thinking "I really
| wish this was built on Hotwire" and then I saw that it was.
| That architecture choice makes me think your bold claims
| might actually pan out, :).
|
| The fact that the ways to customize/escape are "vanilla
| rails" and avo is deployed within my app as an engine, make
| this very very interesting.
|
| As compared to:
|
| * something like retool which is deployed (ie hosted) as an
| additional layer which calls an api my app exposes. Great
| for huge organizations, but overkill for a small team
| (similar to SPA vs Hotwire tradeoff)
|
| * activeadmin where escaping the standard path is extremely
| hard. Not to mention it's built on gems which are no longer
| in favor (inherited resources, etc)
|
| * administrate which I really enjoyed, but felt like the
| support/roadmap was more of a side project vs an "open
| core/commercial offering"
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thank you for the kind analysis! I see you understand the
| product very well from the start! Yes, it's built with
| the knowledge of past projects you mentioned above and is
| deisgned to be very easily "escaped from". I know that
| "escaped from" might sound like you're trapped, but the
| experience is not that. Avo works with you to build the
| app you want.
|
| Looking forward to see what you're going to build, and
| get in touch with me on Discord or Twitter.
|
| https://avo.cool/chat
|
| https://twitter.com/adrianthedev
| andrewmutz wrote:
| How does your offering compare to Jumpstart Rails
| (https://jumpstartrails.com/)? Are they competitors? If so,
| what are the pros/cons of Avo?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| They are orthogonal tools. They blend together nicely. I use
| both on our infrastructure.
|
| Jumpstart is an amazing starter kit (starter kit doesn't do
| it justice) that gives you accounts, billing, notifications,
| etc. and Avo takes it over and gives you the ability to build
| your admin panel/back-office fast AF. It's like you replace
| rails_admin from Jumpstart.
|
| I've spoken with Chris Oliver and started work on adding Avo
| to Jumpstart and to have it as an alternative to rails_admin.
| latsnoopy wrote:
| Hi! Is it possible to have multi language support?
| (translations of records, think globalize)
| adrianthedev wrote:
| The UI is fully translatable and you can hook into the
| localization system and have multilingual content too.
|
| https://docs.avohq.io/2.0/recipes/multilingual-content.html
| schappim wrote:
| Could you please compare and contrast Avo with Jumpstart Rails
| (Pro)?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yes, sure.
|
| They are tools that work together nicely. I use both on our
| infrastructure websites (https://avohq.io). Jumpstart is an
| amazing starter app that gives you accounts, billing,
| notifications, and others, and with Avo you can take over and
| build your admin panel/back-office fast!
|
| I've spoken with Chris Oliver and started work on adding Avo
| to Jumpstart and to have it as an alternative to rails_admin.
| excid3 wrote:
| Yeah, Avo is a great alternative to the free admin we ship
| with (Administrate). And Jumpstart Pro customers get 20%
| off their first year of Avo. Thanks for sharing that
| discount Adrian!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yeah, my bad there. Jumpstart ships with Administrate,
| not rails admin.
|
| I'm humbled to have built something that could ship with
| Jumpstart. Thank you for the kind words!
| weaksauce wrote:
| Is there a reason jumpstart runs on madmin and jumpstart
| pro runs on administrate?
| picardo wrote:
| Why did you call it Avo? I'm curious because I know of at least
| 4 SaaS companies called Avo.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| The original name was project Avocado, but I didn't find any
| good domain names and social media handles. I agree the
| naming could have been better.
| 0des wrote:
| I like it. Its better than naming it something with "rails"
| embedded like "trailsblazer".
| vlunkr wrote:
| Shouldn't the tagline be more like "Build Ruby on Rails admin
| panels 10x faster"? Since that seems to be the intent.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| When one says "admin panel", the general belief is that it's an
| obscure space where only the core team comes to check on some
| stats, or update some records. Avo is more about building a
| real app with it. It's meant to be what the user sees when they
| interact with your app. You actually build your app with Avo.
| Avo becomes the app.
|
| When I talk to Rails developers and mention the words "admin
| panel", they automatically think about Active Admin, or
| administrate, which were great alternatives in the past, but
| nothing compared to Avo (apologies, sounds like I'm bragging,
| but I'm really not exaggerating). That's the reason I don't
| communicate that.
|
| I have a "Rails admin themed" page[0] where I speak more about
| the benefits as a Rails admin.
|
| https://avohq.io/rails-admin
| matt_s wrote:
| For something like this, I bet a chunk of your target market for
| "Pro" level is people running ActiveAdmin. The beauty (and
| nightmare) of ActiveAdmin is it just looks at your tables and
| gives you an admin UI. If you have a mostly API based app, this
| can be great to give internal people some power tools so they
| leave the engineers alone.
|
| Would love to see demos with real world complexity level of
| things instead of the typical Blog or Todo list trackers. To give
| that some scope for a complex Rails application lets use counts
| of objects, something like 100 models and 80 active admin pages,
| scatter in some 50-100 jobs/workers and like 50-100 service
| objects.
|
| What does Avo provide for a menu-ing or UI customization to deal
| with that level of complexity?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I would say that the Community version (free) covers most of
| what Active Admin does. The search is paid with Avo (and
| included in AA).
|
| The Pro users are those who need to build upon Avo. They need
| custom content (fields, resource tools, custom pages), and they
| need to make it look the same as the rest of the app. Avo
| provides view components that help with that. This way you
| create a seamless UI for your users.
|
| I think of Avo as more than just and admin panel framework
| (although power tool sounds great), but the place where you
| build your app. It becomes the app your users see.
|
| Regarding API based apps, yeah, that's something I'd loke to
| support soon. Offer HTTP adapters where you coudl hook in your
| Stripe/Shopify/Intercom/Custom API endpoints.
|
| Regarding complexity, I tried to cram as much as I could
| (whenever I push out a new feature, I add it) to the demo
| site[0].
|
| One of the biggest apps I've seen has about 41 resources, 431
| fields, and quite some complexity because it's a multi tenancy
| app that serves three marketplace platforms. There's a lot of
| complex scoping applied to the data to match the accounts and
| views.
|
| But, yeah, I'd love to see an app that size. I think the
| project is still young (about two years. version 2.0 three
| months old) and these kinds of projects tend to get built out
| with time. I can't imagine there are a lot of teams with an app
| that size you mentioned that are in a hurry to rip out
| everything they have to replace it with Avo (or any other
| package or app) in such a short time. Even our customers above
| are slowly switching from their homegrown admin panel to Avo.
|
| Right now, the UI customization wasn't our main concern. I do
| want it to look amazing so I work a lot (alongside the
| designer) to keep it looking excellent. This being Rails, you
| can always override the partials and view components to add
| your own and tweak Avo's. The first iteration of UI
| customization will be to enable the developer to change the
| colors of the UI.
|
| Regarding general customization, you can already plug in Avo on
| multiple levels. One can add new fields, sections on resource
| pages, totally new custom pages, etc.
|
| Avo is ready for customization complexity.
|
| [0] https://avodemo.herokuapp.com/
| danneciu wrote:
| Amazing! Keep up to good job Adrian! Really like the features you
| ship every week.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thanks Dan! I appreciate the support and the kind words
| stickyricky wrote:
| Brilliant work. Looks terrific. Very easy, declarative interface.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thank you Ricky! I appreciate the kind words.
| turriblegrapes wrote:
| How would you compare or contrast this with motor_admin
| https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I haven't used motor admin extensively so I couldn't speak
| about it's features very precise. It seems to me that motor
| admin is like a giving a power tool to your end-users. It's
| empowering the citizen-developer. They can make their own admin
| panel. You might end up with a good product, but it also can go
| the other way and build something not that good.
|
| With Avo, you, the developer, draw the lines on what the user
| can and can't do. This way you make sure you give them the best
| experience.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| I am excited to see more of these Frameworks on top of Frameworks
| happening. Folks interested in this may also want to check out
| Bullet Train [0]. They are also a Rails Framework/Framework. I
| believe they started out with a pricing model that was more
| expensive than this but have pivoted to open source.
|
| I appreciate Bullet Train's opinionated idea that APIs and
| webhooks should be part of any project and they have built it in.
| Anyhow, it's worth checking out, in addition to Avo.
|
| [0] https://bullettrain.co/
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yeah, I mentioned bullettrain somewhere in a comment below.
| It's an amazing SaaS starter kit.
|
| As far as I know, they have some things as open source and some
| not. Not sure if they published the pricing for the
| subscription packages though. A lot of people are wondering
| what that's going to cost.
|
| I used Avo with Jumpstart and they go together wonderfull.
| Probably with bullettrain too.
| jressey wrote:
| This is a serious question: Do any of you folks get paid good
| money to _start_ projects? In my career I have "started"
| projects for maybe 2-5% of my time. All of the real effort goes
| in to massaging the app to actually solve unique business
| problems, about 80-90% on edge cases.
|
| Bold and cynical claim: Making and selling apps like this is akin
| to building a social media brand about building social media
| brands. The problem this solves is only experienced by serial
| creators who like _starting_ projects, not making useful stuff. I
| personally know 2 people who are like that attempted to start
| this exact same concept for a company, and that was like 6 years
| ago, and it was Rails too.
| vladcodes wrote:
| > Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a
| social media brand about building social media brands
|
| So much this.
|
| I really can't understand all the excitement above, unless
| you're starting a new proof of concept daily (but then, the
| price looks ridiculous) and you're ready for the "buy now - pay
| later" way of development. If "move fast break things" is still
| the thing in 2022, then it makes more sense to just draft an
| MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| "draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a
| backend"... so much here. It sounds easy, but is it? I
| remember the days when I would get stuck on a webpacker
| config issue instead of working on the real meat of my app.
|
| I speak weekly with developers that tell me "oh, you made an
| admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need
| it." and they never do. They really can't. It's a tough thing
| to make something quick, reliable, and that gives you no
| headaches in the short and long run.
|
| And, I guess the excitement is not just for building MVPs,
| but in general for how much things have evolved and that we
| have alternatives to copy and pasting forms and fields
| around.
|
| I'm not going to say that everyone should use Avo. I believe
| that each developer vibes with some technologies. That's why
| we use ruby, PHP, JS, VSCode, vim, chrome, firefox, linux or
| macs. Because we understand them, think in that way, and push
| out great work with them. So yeah, if Firestore is your thing
| you should use it. I'm not pointing any fingers.
| vladcodes wrote:
| > "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few
| hours. we don't need it." and they never do.
|
| I was never saying making anything with any technology is
| easy.
|
| Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is
| linearly difficult while developing with a set of
| DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from
| 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing -- at a random
| stage of development.
|
| From the business perspective of view, I really like it:
| it's a perfect example of a micro-project and I wish you
| the most of luck.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| > "Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is
| linearly difficult while developing with a set of
| DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike
| from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing -- at a
| random stage of development"
|
| I agree 100% with your statement! Really!
|
| Thank you!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| A very pertinent question. If you're asking if Avo "pays the
| bills", it doesn't. I hope it will some day. Damn, I hope I
| earn money in some other way and donate Avo to Ruby central,
| becomes free so it becomes the default way of building Rails
| apps.
|
| Until that time, I am pretty stocked that other developers want
| (and pay) to use something I've created.
|
| Yeah, it takes a lot to build the messaging around a product.
| This current message "Build apps 10x faster" is probably the
| 10th or 20th iteration. I had to speak with a lot of users and
| try to figure out how it helps them in their daily dev life.
|
| Building the product is the easy thing (for a developer), doing
| the marketing, steering it into the right direction, figuring
| out what the best features are, sales, funnels, etc. Those are
| the difficult things. They are difficult for me because I don't
| have a following.
|
| Regarding your "Bold and cynical claim", I respect your
| opinion. I wouldn't go to say that everyone just want to build
| a following and launch useless product to achieve that.
| jressey wrote:
| I respect your hustle and understanding of what makes a
| successful product. I'm making no comment on that.
|
| I was in general asking the community about how often they
| get paid to start apps vs. continue them.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Oh, I see what you mean. What kind of "gigs" they get.
| "Starters" or "continuers" (maintenance).
|
| Gotcha! Personally I started a lot of projects. Probably
| more than 50%. And the money were good, but not as good as
| doing maintenance for a big company with a big product.
| pmontra wrote:
| I've been working on four projects in the last 12 months. I
| helped starting one of them in 2017 (Elixir / Phoenix.) I
| inherited a RoR one in 2012 and two Django ones in 2016 and
| 2019.
|
| Given the long life of projects that make money one doesn't
| start many of them but being able to show something in a short
| time is important. It helps to focus on features and not to get
| lost in architectural yak shaving.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yak shaving. It's "my mission in life" to avoid that. I like
| pushing things out fast and early.
|
| "Listen to your customers and push out the features they
| need, not the features you think they need."
| mdw wrote:
| Very glad to see this, I'm currently building a SaaS with Rails
| and can totally use this for our admin panel.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| One of our biggest supporters Equipe Technique are building a
| Shopify like platform ontop of Avo. It's not their admin, but
| the actual user interface, so go for it! Dream big!
| gingerlime wrote:
| looks neat. A quick question: you mention pundit, but we use
| cancancan. Would it cause any conflicts?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I'm confident there will not be conflicts. You will have to
| write pundit policies to enable authorization.
|
| Also, I think you could make some sort of adapter between the
| two. Pundit is mostly a Ruby class.
| andi999 wrote:
| Pricing is unclear. It has a fixed price and later talks about
| subscription. How much is the subscription.
|
| Also at what is the frameworks strategie on locking doing
| transactions in the database.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Sorry about that. I'll try to make that clearer. We have an FAQ
| item on teh bottom of the page.
|
| The pricing is per project (per app). You pay $250, and you get
| one year of updates and then use it forever.
|
| The license is a Perpetual Fallback License. When you stop
| paying for a subscription, you will still be able to keep and
| use the latest version of Avo at the point in time when the
| subscription ended but you will loose the ability to update to
| a newer version.
|
| Regarding locking and doing transactions, it does not support
| that, but that's a very good idea and not that difficult to add
| in the near-future. Ideally to let the developer specify what
| kind of locking strategies to use.
|
| I added this topic to keep track of. https://github.com/avo-
| hq/avo/discussions/982
| danenania wrote:
| The "one year of updates" thing is kind of confusing. What if
| an app has a longer lifetime than that? Can you no longer get
| updates to Avo? What about bugs and security updates?
|
| I think you're over-complicating the pricing. Why not just
| say it's $250 per project per year? You can still keep the
| fallback option and explain it in your FAQ. It would be more
| immediately understandable this way imo.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I tried that and the question that popped up was "what if I
| don't pay anymore? will I not be able to use it then?". It
| kind of turned people away, and that's why I change the
| copy.
|
| If an app has a longer lifetime than a year, and I hope it
| does, then you'd have to resume the subscription to get the
| updates (bugs and security). It's the way the perpetual-
| fallback license works. There are plenty of products (table
| plus, jumpstart rails) and large companies (jetbrains) that
| practice this model. I wish there was an easier way of
| shipping those updates without a subscription.
| danenania wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to optimize for people whose focus
| is what happens if they stop paying you. They're unlikely
| to pay in the first place and are more likely to be
| difficult customers even if they do.
|
| Customers who get value out of your product will want to
| pay and keep paying and be sure they're not going to miss
| important updates if they forget to renew in a year.
| These are the customers to focus on imo.
|
| People are happy to pay subscriptions for software they
| get continuing value from. There's no need to reinvent
| the wheel on this.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| This is the approach JetBrains takes with their IDE suite
| and it's the best of both worlds in my opinion. It takes
| most of the risk out of the decision-making process. To
| date I've kept my subscription active, but I probably
| wouldn't have signed up if I didn't have a fallback
| option.
|
| Maybe this is an esoteric case, but I have a project from
| a previously operating business (TechStars Boston 2010).
| Every now and then I think I'd like to take a nice stroll
| down memory lane. And then I remember I have one
| component that was an annual SaaS that I no longer have
| an expensive license for, so the thing won't boot. And I
| don't have the wherewithal to invest the time to replace
| it. It's extremely unlikely I'll ever adopt something
| similar in future projects, personal or otherwise.
|
| I get "continuing value" from all sorts of things I'd
| never want a subscription for. If you're confident in
| your product's ability to innovate and continue to add
| value, you shouldn't worry about attrition. Providing a
| fallback option makes it clear to me that you have that
| confidence and that makes a huge difference during a
| purchase decision.
| danenania wrote:
| Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that he should remove
| the fallback option, just that a subscription should be
| the default. I agree the fallback is a good thing that
| reduces lock-in/shutdown risk. But that benefit can still
| be offered alongside a yearly subscription.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but that's on more "traditional"
| SaaS products. When it's a service. This is more of a
| product.
|
| There are developers and agencies that buy Avo, build
| something for a customer and then transfer the license to
| them. The customer might not even know that the agency
| bought something. They might not want to pay something
| ongoing.
|
| Yes, one could make the case that "hey, you pay hosting
| ongoing after the project is delivered, why not pay the
| admin framework?" and that's fair, but I just don't know
| if we're at that point yet. I'd love it if Avo would
| bring us closer to that point.
| danenania wrote:
| I see your point, but I think it's just a framing issue.
| It's great to have an option for people who are concerned
| about this, but not at the expense of confusing customers
| who just want to pay you and keep paying you for your
| thing, and also killing your year 2 retention by making
| it opt-in instead of a normal subscription.
|
| Looking at jumpstart rails, they seem to be doing exactly
| what I'm suggesting. It's a simple per project per year
| price, but then in their FAQ they explain that you stop
| getting updates if you stop paying.
|
| On the agencies point, yeah I think it's normal for
| agencies to sign a client up for a bunch of services they
| need to build the project. You'll just be one more on the
| list.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Well... Avo's pricing is exacty like Jumpstart's (except
| the $750 for unlimited). So pay $250, get Avo (or
| Jumpstart) with a year of updates. When you stop paying,
| you keep what you have until that point and no more
| updates. Isn't that the same? Am I missing something?
|
| Also, you do make a point regarding agencies "sign a
| client up for a bunch of services". I'll try and
| experiment with that. Thanks for the nudge!
| danenania wrote:
| Right, that's exactly my point! Jumpstart has basically
| the same pricing/licensing but doesn't frame it in a
| confusing way.
|
| At first glance, it's just a yearly subscription per
| project. Simple and standard. Everyone understands it.
|
| If I'm concerned about what happens if I stop paying for
| jumpstart, I can find that information, but it's not
| emphasized at the top like it is on your pricing page.
| And the yearly subscription is the _default_ , not
| something I have to opt into again every year.
|
| Most customers are just going to sign up for a yearly
| subscription and never look back. It's better for the
| customer and for jumpstart.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Ok. Got it! It's mostly about the phrasing. Pushed
| changes now.
|
| "It's better for the customer and for jumpstart." It's
| true.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| but I see what you mean and I think you're not wrong.
| andi999 wrote:
| But you dont say how much the subscription is.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Ok. I see that. I pushed an update to fix it. It's
| $249/year afterwards.
| bestinterest wrote:
| Looks great from the demo
| https://avodemo.herokuapp.com/users/sign_in
|
| My only suggestion would be to perhaps try out a beefer instance
| for heroku or perhaps it is http/1.1 limitation of heroku and a
| switching to one of the disruptors like render.com would help
| performance?
|
| It also may completely be because I am in the UK. Clicking around
| just feels slow 700-800ms+ response times, assuming its hosted in
| US.
|
| Also another quick fix might be sending the request on mouse
| down. I know unpoly (side competitor to Hotwire) does this
| https://unpoly.com/a-up-instant
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Oh darn. I forgot about the demo site to beef up the hosting
| for this post. I'll do that this week. I'll probably move it to
| a separate instance.
|
| Yes, it's hosted in the US.
|
| Thank you for that and unploy. I'll have a look.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Looks cool - looking forward to trying it out. One thing I feel
| is missing from rails today is a great text editor. ActiveText
| feels old compared to editors like TipTap.
|
| Any plans or recommendations on standardizing on a new rich text
| editor for Avo?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I feel your pain. I see the talk in the community around text
| editors and I monitor it closely.
|
| TBH, I haven't built anything like that before and I'm not sure
| if my efforts would be spent in the best way if I tried to. I
| added Trix to Avo because it played well out-of-the box with
| Rails.
|
| I'll be watching the text editors race and will add the winners
| to Avo.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to
| https://bullettrain.co/.
|
| Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin
| panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like
| https://activeadmin.info/?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Great comment! It does intersect a bit with Active Admin, but
| it's meant to do so much more.
|
| Avo is not meant to be an "obscure admin panel" where only the
| core team members go to do some CRUD operations. It's meant to
| be the interface on which you build your back-office. Something
| that you'd love to give to your users from day one. Something
| that will make you, the developer, look like a superhero, all
| with little to no sweat.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Seems reminiscent of both Nova and Filament for Laravel/PHP. Nice
| work :)
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Nova was a big inspiration for me to build Avo. I don't think I
| would have started Avo without using Nova before.
|
| My train of thought was "Rails helps you build apps fast! If we
| had something like Nova it would make it 10x faster!".
|
| I belive the pair (Rails and Avo) is one of a kind in the
| frameworks world.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I suspect it won't be for long. The concept of the
| programmable/standard 'resource wrapper' around the models in
| a framework like laravel or rails provides a decent
| separation for adding on standard behavior without actually
| having to touch any of your existing code. If you're the
| first in the rails world to do this, you won't be the last.
|
| Look at filamentphp as well for some inspiration/ideas.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| I'm aware that Avo (like Nova) is not suitable for any type
| of app. It's for "most apps" where you use common things
| like CRUD, dashboards, and cards.
|
| Speaking of competition, it's only going to make the
| ecosystem better, so I'm all up for it.
| mark242 wrote:
| You may want to check your branding -- https://www.avo.app/
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Do you think my branding is similar to avo.app?
| pantulis wrote:
| This delivers quite a lot of value in terms of developer time...
| pricing seems incredibily low!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thank you for the compliment. Yes, I agree the pricing is quite
| low.
|
| I launched this pricing scheme in March and since then I added
| a ton of features that, IMHO, have increased Avo's productivity
| 2x. I haven't updated the pricing yet, but I'll probably do it
| soon.
|
| I also spoke with other indie developers and they agree that
| the pricing is quite low.
|
| Thank you for the feedback!
| mgkimsal wrote:
| The pricing may be 'low', but you may help foster a larger
| 'avo' ecosystem if more people are using it (AKA, keeping the
| price lower). What was/is attractive about Nova and Filament
| in the PHP world is that both have moderate ecosystems of
| packages (free and paid) which extend out the base admin
| system in niche ways. "avo" might be really good on its own -
| coupled with dozens of custom add-ons that demonstrate a
| community of people building their own solutions on top would
| propel this even farther (imo).
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Tell me about it!
|
| Yeah, that's my vision too. To create the plugin system and
| enable developers to hook into that ecosystem and earn
| money.
| Simpliplant wrote:
| We've been using Avo on my latest side project
| (https://aoe4world.com) and it has been great experience and Avo
| saved us a lot of time that we would otherwise spend on building
| admin interface. Highly recommended it.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it!
| sandGorgon wrote:
| this is very very cool. Any plans of making this for the js
| ecosystem ?
|
| Unfortunately not all of us are on ruby...but everyone is on js.
| Would totally love something like this on React/Next.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Haha. Funny you should mention that.
|
| Me, together with my brother, built basetool, which should have
| been Avo but for TypeScript (framework agnostic). You give it a
| database URL and it will build the admin panel for you.
|
| Today was the day that I decided to sunset it, but you could
| try to use it with docker or compile it from source.
|
| https://basetool.io https://github.com/basetool-io/basetool
| sy_174 wrote:
| fzaninotto wrote:
| Are you looking for react-admin? https://marmelab.com/react-
| admin/
| dchuk wrote:
| > Unfortunately not all of us are on ruby...but everyone is on
| js.
|
| This is such an interesting statement.
| yoda97 wrote:
| Yeah, I can already see someone screenshoting and posting it
| to r/ProgrammerHumor
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I don't want to start anything here :P
| mberning wrote:
| Looks incredible. Seems like it is really tailored to small
| -medium sized apps or devs doing client work. How do you deal
| with objections around scaling out and lock in?
|
| I am loving the renaissance of "boring" tech stacks.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| It's Rails code under the hood. We do a little bit meta-
| programming but try to keep things as basic as possible exactly
| for this reason so we don't get in the way of the parent app.
|
| We mitigated the "tiny stupid" mistakes like n+1 with dedicated
| includes option. The front-end is powered by Hotwire so a very
| small JS bundle.
|
| We have a few customers that are running medium-to-large
| applications with Avo and they are quite happy with the
| results. I do admit they have started to do a bit of "magic" to
| support their use cases, but we're in contact with them and
| actively extracting things to make the developer experience
| better and support more use-cases. One example is the tabs and
| panels features that we're preparing to release next.
|
| Yup. Boring is good. It just works!
| AncoraImparo wrote:
| People still use rails? Wild.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Haha. You're trying to stir sh*t up.
| danbee wrote:
| This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot
| https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yes, they do intersect in some areas as you can build CRUD UIs
| with both. Avo takes it further to give it a nicely designed
| UI, all the "missing" features like extending the interface,
| adding custom content, supporting all associations thoroughly
| and more.
|
| I think of it like the next iteration of these kinds of tools.
|
| Have you built something using administrate?
| danbee wrote:
| Yeah, I've used Administrate a bunch. All those things are
| possible in Administrate as it generates controllers that can
| be customized, so anything it doesn't do out of the box can
| be added easily. It's also easy to define custom input types
| and content types.
| chourobin wrote:
| congrats on launching, what's the landscape now and who are your
| competitors? it could be nice if you had a comparison page as a
| way to sell it further.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I'd say that the classic direct competition are Active Admin,
| Administrate, rails admin. They are the OG admin panel builders
| in the Rails world. They focus a lot on building just classic
| CRUD admin panels.
|
| I focused on making Avo a whole app development platform. It's
| not that hidden place where just a few team members go to
| update some records, but the actual UI that you give to your
| users.
|
| I'll make sure to create an "alternatives" page with
| competitors.
| sy_174 wrote:
| gkoberger wrote:
| Hey! Minor bit of feedback on the homepage UI; I saw the pricing
| calculator and the big number wasn't obviously my savings (I
| assumed it was the cost). I'd make sure that for anyone scanning,
| it's clear the large $$ amount is savings vs the actual cost!
|
| (Also, while I do think it's important you come off as cheap, I
| wouldn't lead with "saving money" as the main reason to use your
| product. It looks like you've built something really interesting,
| and you don't want early customers to only use you because they
| think you're the cheapest option!)
|
| Overall, this looks really great... good luck!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Wonderful! On point feedback!
|
| I had quite a tough time promoting the product and the homepage
| calculator was one push to highlight one quality of Avo ($
| savings). But I agree, that's shouldn't be the biggest selling
| point.
|
| I'll make sure to position the product differently.
|
| Thank you!
| gkoberger wrote:
| For what it's worth, I do like that it builds as you scroll
| down! It shows how much goes into building an app. I wonder
| if switching the focus to just the dev time, or even have
| some sort of chart of all the other tools that slowly merges
| into Avo?
|
| EDIT: Or a cute "Dev todo list" that gets crossed off
| (https://roughnotation.com/) as you scroll down, and Avo
| takes care of things for you?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Those roughnotation.com animations look so cool! I don't
| know how much time was spent on building those, but you
| don't want to know how much time I spent on building that
| calculator :grinning face with sweat:
| nico wrote:
| This is great. We definitely need more tools/frameworks like this
| to allow for faster development.
|
| It reminds me of Bullettrain: https://bullettrain.co/
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yeah, the guys at bullettrain do a good job! I think of them as
| being in the same category as Jumpstart. They give you the
| tools to build the SaaS part of your app, Avo takes it from
| there and enables you to move very fast with the rest of your
| app.
| upupandup wrote:
| is there anything like Avo out there? This is great work but I'm
| not a Ruby/RoR dev
| MSkog wrote:
| ActiveAdmin gets the job done well enough in my opinion. Not
| nearly as slick as Avo though.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Yeah, for sure! This post, or Avo's existence is not about
| bashing other tools.
|
| Each project has it's own requirements and budget.
|
| Thank you for your message!
| adrianthedev wrote:
| There are a few free packages (Active Admin, administrate,
| rails admin) built a few years ago that can help you build a
| CRUD UI, but the conversations I had with developers is that
| they are a bit annoyed with them.
|
| I built Avo as a modern alternative learning from the past
| products and improving on them.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| I think it makes total sense for client work and almost no
| sense for startups
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Why do you say that? Start-ups by definition need to move
| fast and test out hypothesis. With a tool like Avo you
| could prototype something, get it out to your customers and
| get feedback fast.
|
| The secodn use-case is internal tooling. When I worked at a
| start-up we had a lot of "shady" internal tools built fast,
| crappy and unreliable (because it's just an internal tool)
| and we always had issues working with them.
|
| I build a lot of internal tooling using Avo and the process
| is quite painless.
| canadiantim wrote:
| Looks awesome. I'm a bit jealous Rails has this resource coming
| from the Django world (although I know django admin also great
| but has its limitations)
| adrianthedev wrote:
| I believe it's better than having nothing. I think there's a
| lot to be done in this space and having someone or a team
| working on it full time is the way to go.
| canadiantim wrote:
| Absolutely. I know there are some projects kind of like this,
| but right now they are lost in my bookmarks folder
| somewhere... I recall a couple of good admin dropin
| replacements, I think one or two even have a paid-model which
| I dig cause I'm more than willing to pay for django-specific
| code that will save me development time. Likewise, I know
| there's some good projects trying to do something similar to
| Avo, but again I've lost them in bookmarks and my google-fu
| isn't working to retrieve them.
| adrianthedev wrote:
| If you can, buy their product or sponsor the project. The
| amount of work it goes into maintaining this kinds of
| products is quite high. Spread the love!
| focom wrote:
| Yes its a shame django isn't as active as rails
| canadiantim wrote:
| Certain parts are and there is some encouraging development
| work going, e.g. Tetra (https://www.tetraframework.com/) -
| but yeah it can be sparse.
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