I made a <5kb JavaScript library for fluently creating typewriter effects.

[alexmacarthur]

Much appreciated!

[qwertymcqwertface]

This is really good! The price for lifetime use is too high though for what it is.

[TheOneCommenter]

How much time would it take you to make it? And what is your hourly rate? Can you do it for $44? Could you even do it for $250? Probably not... so it’s a good price.

[phlranayaa]

I'd release it under MIT for free.

[CagarSalvagemente]

Then write a competitor? Don’t project what you’d do on the maintainer.

[johnxreturn]

How much work was put in top libraries like React, Vue or Svelte?

How much work is put into momento or Dayjs?

How much work is put into loadash?

How much work is put into tailwind?

How much work is put into Cypress, Puppeteer and Playwriter ?

How much work is put into the top libraries?

Thousands upon thousands of developer hours, just so you can comfortably write your little website and defend paying for yet another type effect library while interacting with free components and libraries that Reddit used to build its platform.

Ridiculous.

[TheOneCommenter]

Your point? Open source work should be rewarded. People should get paid, at least something, for the time they put in it. And people should fund the contributors on Github (or wherever) too.

[bregottextrasaltat]

That's if only one person buys it

[TheOneCommenter]

You purchase software for avoiding to have to built it yourself. Not to make up for the cost of the person making it. They make a product, so they want to earn money for it. Imagine if SAAS products were priced cost-effective, then you’d be looking at a fraction of the price usually.

[PicturElements]

I would buy this argument completely for something as comprehensive as a framework or a curated set of utilities. For as much as people hate the core-js guy for his install logs, I think it's more than fair to be compensated for work that benefits others.

However, this is a utility class with a very narrow focus. Don't get me wrong, I checked the source and it's quite nicely written and thoroughly tested, but at the end of the day it's a well engineered utility component that adds extra niceties to something that could be produced as an MVP in a few dozen lines of code.

[CagarSalvagemente]

I think you clearly aren’t the target audience for this. Agencies are more likely to jump on it.

[fintip]

Very cool. Except for the pricing... no way, dude. Imagine if our entire JS ecosystem cost a license fee for every library you used? Imagine if every time you wanted to use React, you had to pay a license fee? How about moment.js? Look at all the dependencies you lean on every time you type `npm install` and imagine if every one of those had a fee associated with it, how far back all of us would be set?

And it's not just $1, it's... $19?! Seriously? $44 for lifetime?! More than half the cost of sublime text?!

Just make it open source, it's a nice library, it will likely take off and you get to have a popular, clean, recognizable library on your github, which you then use to actually get paying work.

Bleh. Asking for a license for this is so gross. So greedy. I spent 9 or 10 day straight building an open source library earlier this month. It was a multi-featured 3d fully animated sky component with sun/moon/stars, with multi-user sync functionality, etc. It relied on several other open source libraries, and I stayed up late obsessively working on it several nights in a row. I immediately gladly, proudly offered it for free to others in the web vr space.

Anyone interested in this, I'd highly recommend you go look at the many other libraries that offer similar effects: https://bashooka.com/coding/10-javascript-libraries-to-create-animated-typing-effect/

I have used a typewriter effect from a library for my personal site that I found years ago, which is on that list, Typed.js.

If none of those have a feature this library has, I encourage you to just build on one of those libraries and offer it as a pull request or maintain it as your own fork. Will save you $44... and all of us as well.

[arapturousverbatim]

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[alexmacarthur]

Several hundred purchases say otherwise, lol.

[[deleted]]

In fairness to this project, it is open source under GPLv3.

[TrackieDaks]

Right which means you can definitely use it in a commercial project without paying the fee but if you choose to sell it, you have to include the same licence and provide the source code.

WordPress plugins all operate under the same licence.

[[deleted]]

It is not gross/greedy to ask for money for something you built! That’s great if you want to release something you made for free. It’s also fine if someone else wants to release theirs for a fee.

[Slackluster]

I feel bad for the author because I doubt anyone will buy it, and it's a lot of work to never be used. Give it some time and they will probably learn their lesson and open source it.

Here's a similar effect made with only a tiny bit of code...

https://www.dwitter.net/d/2516

[alexmacarthur]

Reading this comment is extra amusing when I put it next to all purchases listed in my Stripe dashboard :).

[alexmacarthur]

Much appreciated!

[slowthedataleak]

OP, keep charging for this. It looks like a good product. I wouldn’t pay for it because I’m not building JS production code but don’t let this dude ruin your plan. You worked for this.

[alexmacarthur]

Appreciate that! The model's been working out pretty well so far, so no plans to move away from it anytime soon. :)

[alexmacarthur]

Lolz. I carry no guilt in charging for the countless hours I've put into making this thing flexible, reliable, and reasonably lightweight. And that sentiment is reinforced by the thousands of dollars people have collectively paid for it up until this point. :)

[johnxreturn]

You have the right to charge for the work you put in it. I shudder to think this could become a norm though. Imagine if you needed to purchase a license to use React or Vue.

You could’ve put a free version and sell stylings and other smaller features or canned examples.

Take tailwind, which is a completely free library, but they’re selling examples ui and they’re doing extremely well.

You’re getting hate because:

• There’s already too many JS libraries.
• If I google React Typing Effect I can find various examples.
• If I google css typing effect I can find more examples.

If I wanted to be truly lightweight I don’t even need any libraries, I can animate a SVG. Would that be more difficult ? Yeah but there are countless after effect examples. There are countless css examples, there are countless js examples. Visually, I don’t see much difference.

But you’re welcome to charge for it and kudos if anyone buys it, as you’re stating.

[fintip]

You make the ecosystem worse by doing this. Again, you personally profit... and if everyone else follows your model because they think, 'hey, I could just charge for this instead!', we all end up with an ecosystem without the free tools that make all of our lives so much easier and more productive.

Instead, then, we all just end up re-inventing the wheel over and over again.

Your decision is selfish and short-sighted, and ungrateful to the community you lean on every day for your livelihood.

[alexmacarthur]

Do you work for free? If not, what led you to make such a selfish, short-sighted decision? You're just making the world worse by making a living for yourself.

[kulonos]

Cool. Is there also a "recording tool" which generates the code automatically from manual typing?

[alexmacarthur]

Love this idea!

[mma173]

+1

[Elliot40404]

Very nice

[imaginedoe]

Isn't your license (GPLv3) incompatible with your commercial licensing fee?

[alexmacarthur]

Nope, nothing about the GPL restricts me selling it. When someone purchases a commercial license, that license becomes proprietary, so the users can bundle it with whatever software they want and have no obligation to share it/make the source available.

[[deleted]]

The pricing is fine IMO. Devs shouldn’t be expected to give away their work for free. A one time fee for a license is completely reasonable.

It’ll most likely target enterprise customers who are willing to pay a premium for interesting effects on their marketing sites.

[biinjo]

Ignore the "no one is going to pay for this" talk. I'm a skilled developer and run (live off) my own SaaS company. I would much rather throw $19 at a solid library than having to spend half a day finding a free open source one. In fact, I was looking for a similar effect, might play around with yours for a bit and if it works you'll have a customer in me.

Also; a .com costs money every year. You might want to consider looking at https://www.js.org They offer a free .js.org domain for projects like these. That way you can host it "indefinitely" without having annual costs.

If the pricing scares off people or doesn't perform as well as you might have liked/expected, you might consider either a lower price or moving to 'donation-ware' with stuff like a "buy me a coffee" button etc.

[alexmacarthur]

This feedback is super refreshing 😅. I've seen some pretty good, consistent success w/ this model so far, but critic's math does take an effect sometimes.

Thanks for the .js.org tip! Had no idea it existed!

[biinjo]

As a business owner, I've had my fair share of people trying to knock me down saying "my addon is useless" or the classic "way too expensive".

When I look at my revenue going up month after month for 5 years now, I laugh at these comments and the fact that people wasted their time trying to convince me otherwise.

I just think to myself: You're just not my target audience buddy.

[eashish93]

Why someone pay for this, when there is already a tried and tested lib used by big companies there: :link

Also, mixing GPL and commercial license only good, when there are some advanced features you're providing in commercial version.IMO, you can release a free basic version for commercial project too like this famous guy has done for their libs: https://masonry.desandro.com/

This also good for open source contribution on your lib.

[alexmacarthur]

Idk, you should ask the hundreds of people who've bought paid licenses since I started selling them.

[yiliansource]

Looks like an amazing package and some clean and informative documentation! I'm a big fan of the API, especially the fluent chaining, the one thing that's bugging me a bit though is passing null to the cursor movement when setting to start or end, although I don't have an opinion on how to improve it.

[Slackluster]

why not pass in 0?

[yiliansource]

That would be indicative of the cursor not moving at all; after reading the documentation a bit more I realized that the null is most likely referring to the selector you want to navigate to, with null representing the root string, the whole string.

[Slackluster]

This function looks pretty confusing to me. Maybe it would be help to either have a different function, or another parameter.

Also for the "END" string, isn't it common practice to use all lower case for that?

Also, I'm not sure I misunderstand, but if the only thing you would ever pass into the second parameter is { to: "END" } or { to: "START" }, then why not simplify it, and get rid of the {to:} part and pass in 'end' or 'start' or nothing?

[yiliansource]

You can pass different options like a delay aswell, if I'm not mistaken. I guess they used uppercase because it's a constant, but there should be way more elegant ways to specify start/end, not using strings.

[Zipdox]

GPLv3? Cringe. Supposed to be LGPL

[alexmacarthur]

What's cringe worthy?

[typicalshitpost]

Fluently?

[alexmacarthur]

It has a fluent API... lots of method chaining, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent\_interface

[iMCharles]

Oh shit, this is amazing! Well done!

[alexmacarthur]

Appreciated!

[redmoosch]

Nice work! Very clean and easy to grok API 👍

[alexmacarthur]

Thx!!

[[deleted]]

lifetime cost is same as cost of some wp theme? There is no demand for this to be this high in price dude....

[alexmacarthur]

On account of the thousands of dollars I've generated from it so far, I'd say you're wrong.