You know websites/apps who let you enter text/details and then not displaying sign in/up screen until you submit it, so you feel like "Oh but I already filled it out, might as well sign up"?
They really suck, big time! It's disingenuous, misleading and wastes people's time. I had no interest in using your thing for real, but thought I'd try it out, potentially leave some feedback, but this bait-and-switch just made the whole thing feel sour and I'll probably try to actively avoid this and anything else I feel is related to it.
We had the idea that there’s a class of apps [1] that could really benefit from our tooling - mainly Fireproof, our local-first database, along with embedded LLM calling and image generation support. The app itself is open source, and the hosted version is free.
Initially, there was no login or signup - you could just generate an app right away. We knew that came with risks, but we wanted to explore what a truly frictionless experience could look like. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for our LLM keys to start getting scraped, so the next best step was to implement rate limiting in the hosted version.
Put it before letting people enter text, rather than once they've entered text and pressed the button, and people won't feel mislead anymore.
If login takes 30 seconds, and app gen 90, we think this is better for users (but clearly not everyone agrees.) Thanks for the feedback!