My complaint isn't about that you need to protect it with a login/signup, but where in the process you put that login/signup.
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.
The generation is running while you login, so this appreciable decreases wait time from idea to app, because by the time you click through the login, your app is ready. (Vibes DIY CEO here.)
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!
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.
[1] https://tools.simonwillison.net/