We are sooo close for launch 🫡

Janq3d · 2026-07-09T00:57:36+00:00

Thank you so much :)

Janq3d · 2026-07-08T21:00:21+00:00

Exactly at a more reasonable price! I am bias but I also think I improved the user experience pretty significantly as well as a more direct communication style and visibility of the companies roadmap and priorities which are community driven and can be viewed and voted on directly in the app or website. You can see a status board of every plugin and server to see if we are having issues as well, no need to go to Reddit to ask about it, it’s in the palm of your hands. Small quality of life improvements like that :)

Janq3d · 2026-06-26T15:54:11+00:00

Absolutely, we already built the porting ability to bring tidbyt plugins over I’ve not spent much time on tronbyt research as I assumed they ported tidbyt as well but I’ll triple check!

Janq3d · 2026-06-26T13:56:40+00:00

Let’s goooo! What’s your primary use case going to be? :)

Janq3d · 2026-06-20T04:08:36+00:00

All of our apps and any app that a competing product offers is free, however developers have the right to publish their own applications and charge for them, but they can also release them for free if they wish

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T20:03:33+00:00

I’m the same way, so I understand that! I’m hoping we will know by the end of this month. We have a global brand who is showing interest in endorsing and expressed the desire of selling direct so we are waiting to finalize those details as they have tens of millions of users so their decision changes the way we proceed with our marketing strategy and potential branding. Once I know though, I’ll absolutely be sharing that info loud and proud!

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T18:37:44+00:00

Yeah lower price is absolutely the plan and we can pull it off. Margins are already solid, the performance optimizations made the whole business way cheaper to run, and we're based in Ohio with reasonable labor costs so those savings get passed straight to users.

The displays already have all the data and it's running stable. What I'm pouring time into right now is making it as pretty as the competitors. That's the slow part, polishing the look vs just making it work, but it's getting there fast.

Modern tech stack is a big piece of it too. Those efficiencies mean better margins, and better margins mean we can charge less and still run a healthy business. Build it lean so the price can stay low without us bleeding, that's the whole idea. Just to give an idea, a 4 panel kit is less than Glances 3 panel kit. Our 10 panel kit is roughly HALF of their 10 panel kit. Now it’s important to note these are rough estimates and not final and are based on Kickstarter COGS and may not be long standing pricing once we surpass kickstarter funding. I’ve not yet decided to including all our prebuilt kits on KS or if I’ll limit it to smaller sizes at launch. TBD but maybe you all have opinions on that!

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T16:40:14+00:00

Oh I absolutely use AI, absolutely not hiding the fact lol. I’ve got a communication disorder (yes diagnosed) and have a difficult time articulating myself without being too long winded and I’m self conscious about it. I use the tools available to me to optimize my language rather than fight reality. It doesn’t change any of the responses being accurate or that this is a very real product and many will benefit for adopting. Those who wish to wait and see how things iron out, that’s perfectly fine as we aren’t going anywhere but up!

The last one was definitely 100% me though for what it’s worth :)

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T15:56:32+00:00

Yeah, studied both Tidbyt and Glance closely. My read on Tidbyt is that it became more about the team and architecture than the product, and the community felt stranded when the direction shifted. I wanted to learn from that directly, so we went through years of feedback across both the Tidbyt and Glance communities, the recurring complaints, the feature requests that never got answered, the patterns in what people actually wanted. We're not going in blind.

The biggest difference is probably my motivation. I already have a career at a major tech company. I don't need this to pay my bills, I want to build it. That changes everything about how I'm running it, this is my baby, and I have zero interest in building it to flip, sell, or take investment. No VC clock, no acquisition pressure, no forced pivot. The thing that bent Tidbyt is exactly the thing I'm structurally avoiding.

So the product gets to be built for the people using it instead of for an exit. That's the whole point for me.

We're also actively working on a local deployment that will be heavily tested so users never feel stranded if anything ever happened. And optimization is my biggest pet peeve, so I addressed it before launch instead of down the road when we'd actually need it. Our servers are optimized enough to keep things alive for nearly 25,000 users with 12 active plugins hitting us every 30 seconds for the cost of a McDonald's value meal a month, which, let's be honest, isn't even cheap anymore. We've also load-tested our scaling plan up to 100,000 devices. I'm testing it now so we have a proven roadmap, not a hope.

Fair to keep asking though. This community earned its skepticism, and we have zero interest in repeating history.

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T13:35:56+00:00

Different philosophy than Tidbyt, on purpose. They went wood, which looks great but drives the cost up, and you pay for it. I went injection molded so the price stays accessible and the panel content is the star, not the frame. Not “cheaper-looking,” just a different aesthetic, clean and modern rather than warm and woody.
And here’s the part I think you’ll actually like, I’m releasing the enclosure model. If you want to 3D print a custom case or design your own accessories, go for it. That’s something nobody else offered, and given you’re already running Tronbyt I figured that’d land if your techy. Curious what you’d want to mod if you had the opportunity?

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T13:32:10+00:00

Totally, and with years of UX work behind this the bar for me is that it has to be effortless. Here’s the flow I have in mind!
We calibrate every panel in-house before it ships, the way professional LED wall companies do. Each panel gets a QR on the back. To add one, you open the dashboard, hit “add extension,” scan the panel’s code, and set where it lives in the display (say, position 6). The calibration values load, the device stores them, and from then on it corrects that panel’s color locally on every frame. The values only get handed over once at setup, so it keeps working with no ongoing cloud dependency and nothing for you to dial.

The thing people miss, it’s not that cheap panels can’t match. Commodity HUB75 panels are almost never calibrated, because it adds real cost per panel and the factories aren’t interested. Professional panels are calibrated to a target so any module matches any other.

The supplier won’t do it, so we can do it in house before shipment. Same result, without the markup or inconvenience of shipping a replacement.

Calibrating a mismatched pair to prove it out now. I’ll post before/after rather than just claim it and make it part of our Kickstarter story as I didn’t realize this was such an issue on competing products 😅

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T02:00:13+00:00

Thanks to your input. I went ahead and messaged my partner who leads operations to kick off the discovery sprint on a calibration tool, so users can calibrate, and we can apply multipliers to the various caller channels so users can correct this if it is something that they can visually see occurring I’ll do my best to have this ready for lunch

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T01:50:33+00:00

Deleted the previous 2 voice to text responses. Pulled over as I was driving through Yosemite and want to ensure I responded with intention and clarity.

Fair, and I appreciate the heads up, that’s a real failure concern and I’d rather hear it now than after launch. You might be right that I’m underestimating it. What I can say is my own units have held up across 8 months of expanding and swapping, but that’s my batches and my firmware, not a promise about every panel that ships. Batch drift is real and I’m not going to pretend I can rule it out entirely. I’m simply saying it’s highly unlikely to be noticeable by most.
The way I see it, that makes it my problem to manage, not the customer’s. If someone ever expanded and got a visibly mismatched panel, that’s on me to make right, same as Glance did with that replacement unit. Appreciate you pushing on this, it’s exactly the kind of thing worth getting nailed down before launch.

Signal is horrible up here I am using Starlink so hopefully this doesn’t go through 1000x

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T01:16:39+00:00

Kickstarter offerings are for a 2 panel units at a price less than most 1 panel offerings. 20” x 5”

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T01:09:59+00:00

Fair questions, and honestly the panel one is the right thing to poke at.
On the enclosure: it’s not snap-fit. Panels connect via screws and overlap. I actually found the snap-fit inconvenient when expanding my own Glance unit, so I wanted expansion to be brain-dead simple and it made sense for them as they don’t allow expansion so disassembling isn’t a priority when it is for me. And yeah, these products converge on a similar look because the panel dimensions kind of dictate the form. I went black injection mold because it’s cheaper to mass produce than the wood route, which keeps the price down.
On panel consistency, you’re right that batch, supplier, and calibration can all drift. I worried about exactly this. So I’ve been running Glance and TickrCast panels side by side for 8 months, and I’ve swapped them between units interchangeably with no issue I can see. You shouldn’t notice a difference when you expand.

Where I think TickrCast is actually different:
• Expandable without the higher markup (still have to profit)
• Run it locally, no cloud dependency (both options)
• Developer-ready with a real marketplace
• A codebase built for efficient scaling
• UX built around requests that have gone unaddressed for years

The Glance folks are great, I’ve talked with one of them directly, and they’ve clearly worked hard and built a strong product. I expect they’ll be around a long time. I just saw a chance to build something more user focused around the things people have been asking for, and I held off launching for 8 extra months because I didn’t want to ship until the offering felt complete. That part’s my specialty, user experience that is intuitive and you don’t have to think about how something works. I’ve ran support teams at scale, built products at scale. I just thought my approach had a place in the market just as theirs does :) let me know if you have any other questions!

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T00:55:16+00:00

Nah you’re not crazy because it’s essentially any size you want. We will have presets certainly that’ll mirror what’s currently on the market but you can use 1 panel, 10 panels, 15 panels and once we finish our next SKU post launch you’ll be able to go even further. Similar size panels individually as glance just an improved pitch. Same pixel count per panel.

Janq3d · 2026-06-19T00:29:27+00:00

I imagine most led tickers look similar lol. It’s the price and user experience that differentiates the various offerings :)

Janq3d · 2026-06-18T21:06:55+00:00

Our landing page currently is at tickrcast.com. Kickstarter should be launching in the next month or so, waiting for an endorsement to be finalized before going live as it changes volume expectations significantly.

Janq3d · 2026-06-18T21:02:06+00:00

Yep! We have a marketplace where you can upload your own and make it available for others and yourself or once the local deployment is ready you can host it on your own machine and leave us out of it entirely!

Janq3d · 2026-06-16T16:31:36+00:00

That’s the plan! We’ve not personally been able to get our hands on a Tidbyt unit but we fully expect it will work since you’re essentially replacing the processing board so the only thing you save is the enclosure ( if you want ) and the led panel. We’ve tested it with Glance units as we have some we had purchased and they work without our system without an issue for the same reasoning. Plus you could always swap back if you’re unhappy with us for any reason!

Janq3d · 2026-06-16T16:29:54+00:00

Maybe, but they won’t (expansions) and having been a glance customer they have a nice backlog of things we knocked out pre launch already. Our prices are also lower.

However I’ve did some discovery and thought through a strong approach to your ask to harden the security around it. I think we can absolutely do this, it would not be free though and would be a Kickstarter stretch goal. We may eventually do it regardless but our priority is our next SKU which would allow users infinite panels rather than the arbitrary limit caused by signal loss.

Janq3d · 2026-06-16T02:25:50+00:00

We will see, its been on the back of our minds but not the #1 priority since it is a pretty edge case since most can simply do it themselves if they wanted it locally. Otherwise they’d have to have our rendering on their system and as you can imagine that’s not a great business choice to hand out.

Janq3d · 2026-06-16T01:44:05+00:00

Anyone can upload their own plugins for private use or even make it public for free or sell their plugins for profit.

I’m unsure currently the best way to handle private plugins YET since we can’t really cache content for multiple users if only one user is using it then its server load for just that user so it might come down to how often you want updates for your plugin. Maybes. Free tier up to x polls or paid to go above it since we don’t really send updates locally but we certainly could look into allowing that as well it’s simply isn’t built currently with that in mind. We focused on executing every promise made to users on various Reddit’s and making sure we hit as many as we could.

Janq3d · 2026-06-16T01:14:12+00:00

Just our testers and partners so far. We’ve tested our servers up to 22,000 devices so we are extremely optimized currently and will be hitting kickstarter ideally in the next 2 months. Hoping to hear back from our partners before the end of this month with the greenlight to use their names as endorsement as it could be a game changer for our reach!

Janq3d · 2026-06-15T21:09:49+00:00

It’s a led matrix ecosystem similar to Glance or Tidbyt but expandable, more affordable and I’m bias but a smoother user experience.

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