The keynote talk is not live quite yet. So Caleb recorded a video answering your questions. Please watch it. x.com/calebporzio/status/1829188535066472506?s=46
@@adoraducaI support all of the Laravel ecosystem and community with the same velocity. It’s one of the things that attracted me to the Laravel ecosystem. ☺️
I don't think people are fundamentally against paying for a product. Obviously the price might appeal to some while putting others off. Its just that so much hype was generated around flux that it gave an impression that Caleb was going to add something new and interesting to livewire (for free). After all, it was a livewire keynote. It just turned out that the keynote wasn't so much about livewire but a platform for Caleb to sell his new product built on top of livewire. That was the disconnect and the disappointment as I saw it. The logic that Caleb deserves to be compensated for his efforts is correct. But by that logic livewire also should not have been free. Would it still have enjoyed the popularity it does today? Would laravel have been popular if it was a paid product from the start? Yet both Taylor and Caleb are millionaires today because of the extensive usage of their free products. It is a different game. Once you have a critical mass of users, money can be made through other means like services, consulting, courses, sponsors, complimentary products, speaking engagements, conferences etc. So expecting Caleb to give away flux for free wasn't an unrealistic expectation either. - -
Yeah I could see that. I probably should have been clear it was going to be a paid thing up-front. I just got lost in the excitement of the product and thought it wasn't a big deal. I hate to hear it felt like a sales pitch. I also tried to add lots of little "lessons and details" I embedded in the tool that you can take with you to any tool. All in all - I think I messed up the messaging, probably pricing, but nailed the demo haha. But that's alright, I can still iterate and change some things to make it more pallettable. Otherwise, just wait for next year when I launch something free again. I have to make money so I can't always launch free things only you know?
@@calebporzio1 No worries Caleb. You don't really owe any justification or apology. Your enormous contribution to laravel in terms of livewire and alpine more than compensate for any 'mistake' you or the community think you might have made. Hope you make good money on flux and looking forward to seeing something innovative and brilliant from you next year which will make laravel even cooler.
@@calebporzio1 the demo was fantastic. It blew my mind at how well thought out and easy to use it was. Truthfully, when I saw the pricing I thought to myself "that sucks" but immediately shifted to "this would have saved me 100+ hours in the last 6 months and would still be a better outcome." Considering I've paid for the license after 2-3 hours of contracting, this isn't a big cost for most people that see the value and time savings in it. For one man contractors or people building their next idea (especially those who are primarily backend devs and just want to build something not garbage looking/feeling) $150 is nothing. In literally any other industry, good tools cost money but save time and effort. Don't have to beat my head on my desk (after coding all day at my day job) trying to get some random UI's JS to work? Take my money. I'll get better at JS later. I would really like to see some sort of unlimited license so that my squirrel brain can throw together different projects willy nilly -- and some more information on how updates will be priced. Did that stop me from pre-ordering as fast as Laracon's wifi would let me? Nope. Can't wait to use it, thanks for building cool stuff.
Stay tuned. I think he said unlimited project pricing will probably come out eventually. This is just a simple pre-order page. Hopefully he gives a discount to pre-order customers if he does release unlimited projects. I do feel he should consider offering two years of updates instead of one. However I'll probably buy it anyways just so I can study his code and support him.
@@DrewC-vj7md There needs to be a lifetime option for people just to get people to tinker with it continuously. Otherwise it will remain a niche tool bought by too few and Caleb will lose interest maintaining it (see Alpine Components, Livewire screencasts).
As a contributer to the subreddit, I can say for myself that I don't feel "owed". I don't use live wire very much. When I first saw flux, my reaction was, "oh, this will really help the momentum of the livewire community!". Once the pricing details were dropped, and we all learned it wasn't free, my reaction changed to, "oh, maybe not". I don't think that Flux is bad. I can appreciate the effort that went into it. I was hoping that Flux would lower the barrier to entry for Livewire, and Flux failed on that hope, as there's so many other free alternatives that check enough of the boxes for me.
The website does mention PPP pricing so it's worth reaching out if you live in a country where the price tag is prohibitive even for commercial projects.
It's too easy to say we should support Caleb for this. Let's be honest; Laravel is a multi-million business. Tayler Otwell earned over 10 million USD in 2019 already on things like Forge. This is just another money-scraper. I am happy to support the community, but I am not going to pay $99 PER PROJECT for just some logic like this. And where is the money really going? Back to the community? Or the Laravel Holding? Caleb also could have open-sourced his project and have others work on this as well. Let's not pretend a per-project-license this is the only way here. What alternatives do we have for Laravel? If the money starts floating in the framework itself, it is doomed.
Caleb and Livewire are an entirely different entity from Laravel. So I imagine that money is supporting Caleb and Hugo and their families. Even if we don't agree on the "support" aspect, it's a tool to be used to make money with our individual projects. $100 is a drop in the bucket if I'm creating a paid tool. Just from the few podcasts I heard Caleb ruminate on this, I don't think the per project pricing was a quick decision. I'm sure he thought through everything. But who knows, it might not be final either.
I'm not sure yet if the "per project" pricing works for what I want to use it for (which is more like a SaaS with optional on-prem) but I still pre-ordered it because I see an immense ROI with just the nuances of what he demo'd. Laravel itself generates zero revenue. Open source is primarily a cost center. Yes, Laravel the company makes a lot of money through other commercial servers like the new Cloud service but that's also paying for the dev time spent on the open source projects. This might be an age thing but it's important to understand that open source must always be funded to be sustainable. You have companies like Meta paying people to work on React to create good PR and attract new hires (which given their churn they needed plenty of). You have companies like Vercel paying people to work on Next to get them to use their overpriced hosting. Laravel and Livewire mostly just exist for their own sake and people are making good money selling commercial third-party tie-ins. But as far as I can tell, there's no revenue sharing between the Laravel company and Caleb so for him to continue working "for free" he does need to sell *something*. And for all the hype there's nothing forcing you to use Flux just because you use Laravel and open source alternatives can exist (just like Filament exists alongside paid admin panels). There's a huge problem with entitlement towards open source projects in the recent decade and so far I mostly thought it was a problem in the JavaScript space brought on by all the moonshot startups built around libraries, but it sadly seems to be a problem outside that space too. Again, this might be an age thing: in my teens and twenties I would often slave away on the weekends or pull all-nighters to work on passion projects and it would often feel like I have infinite time to spend. Now as I'm nearing my 40s and have a young kid, I barely have enough time to spend a full day of work just writing code (because a lot of work time goes into other things than that) and I'm lucky if I get any code written outside of work because most of the time it means taking time away from the family or chores. As we age our productive time becomes much more finite - not just in the morbid sense of growing old and dying but also in the practical sense of just having more responsibilities that demand their share of your time and the physical realities of what cutting back on sleep does to you over the long run.
@@joshcirre Every UI framework has defaults and it will come with certain limitations. Any client wish might create the necessity for workarounds. If I don't have a way to explore, evaluete, and learn the quirks of this UI framework for free, with a personal project, why would I risk it when it's crunch time for a client?
@@joshcirre today I learned Accel is taking over Laravel for $57 million. Why don't you make a video about that? Stop defending a multimillion corporation.
I feel like a lot of the initial bad reaction was that the pricing talk was a quick 10 second mention after selling us on the product. It almost seemed like Caleb knew people wouldn't like it, so he dropped the details, and dashed out.
Yeah no, I just didn't think people would be that mad? Nova is $99/project for a year of updates. So I thought: ok, I'll just do that. Apparently I was wrong lol
I love Caleb's work but $99/$149 per project is a bit steep. Sometimes all I need for a project is a dropdown menu , couple of input fileds and a button. Just charge me $300 for unlimited use and everybody's happy.
I think Caleb could make much more commercial success for flux if he make flux like sushi. hit a certain sponsors target and it will be become free and open source
The problem with that is that it gives you a small amount of money up-front and then nothing. Sushi is a teeeenyyy tiny project that doesn't really demand much maintenance. Flux is going to be a huge project with a big maintenance burden over time and needs to be funded.
@calebporzio1 hopefully that's the case. at least ur not making aaron level mistake with a roughly $1000+ nova package that he had to backtrack lower the price to about $100+ later despite all the twitter support from prominent laravel community members because that is too out of touch with reality and the market speaks at the end of the day
My only criticism is calling it a Livewire keynote on the Laracon website. The product seems great, I think the presentation and the improvised FAQ before the talk were great. Livewire and Alpine have changed how I work and I purchasing his course was great. But like I said, I went into that talk expecting a Livewire keynote. Maybe that was not to ruin the surprise, but that did not land super well with me. All of the other harsh comments are unwarranted honestly.
I nauseate every time I hear that "no one owes you anything" counter-argument on how badly product might be priced. The price was announced publicly therefore it's subject to valid and not so valid criticism. If all that Laravel upper chromies can come up with is "they don't owe you anything", then it tells more about those defending the pricing than those who think it's overkill. The same people who does not want to indulge valid points, are the ones to complain about their healthcare, subscriptions and living expense bills being high. Oh, did I mention that I pay for PHPStorm, Laravel Idea, one InertiaJS course, supported Filament and Livewire for quite a while? Ah darn, I must be one of those "wants everything for free" 'type of guys. Yeah, you are right, just call me a hater then.
@@joshcirre my brother in Christ, we cannot even get to the docs to see what we are REALLY paying for but it has a checkout flow ready to go for pre-orders... when we only know on a surface level what consists in that purchase - we are allowed to criticize it. I am basing this on how others tend to present their new product in UI library spectrum. In a typical Laravel elitist fashion, your answer has no association with my opinion.
@@ward7576 leave him brother this guy wants to be on the next invite list to the next lararcon or the next deal sponsorship etc. Anyone supporting payment per project on anything code related is best if they buckle down and learn to create their own instead of paying a already rich guy. Interesting how Shadcn, daisy ui etc can survive. Also good point on the docs being inaccessible. Shocking
The main problem people have against it is that it is a subscription plain and simple. It's not the price, it's not the features, it's not the keynote. This also affects the popularity of the product, the adaptation until a "Free FluxUI" shows up in the block (Just like laravel and livewire did) and takes over the entire market. By this logic people will not pay a subscription for a product that is not guaranteed to last or what not.
Thank you Josh, that video came out very fast, you are a machine! I'm happy to support Caleb, his work changed my life and I can't wait to see how Flux works under the hood, that's a fast and inexpensive way to learn. I understand that 99$ per project might be expensive, but just ask Caleb for PPP, I believe he did it for other products before.
I think it's pretty fair to look at the price of a product and make an assessment on its value proposition. You are way out of line getting upset about people discussing a commercial offering. Now, if this product is simply an alternative means to donate to the maintainers, fine. Make it clear up front. They have done so before with the paid screencasts. That would render much criticism moot.
@@joshcirreyou live in a well off comfortable land. The vast majority of the world earn less than $100. Open source is the way of pay once for lifetime or even pay once a month. This is just terrible to make it 99 per project. PER PROJECT 😂 this sort of financial behaviour/decision making should not be supported let alone you going the extra mile to call out others for criticising it
@@unkownsiner You don't need to use the product. Why are you calling the pricing is "terrible" ? Just don't use it if it's not for you. For others it might be just thing they were looking for.
No, $99 per project is the early bird price, it’s really $150 per project… for a couple components? $299 for lifetime tailwind is worth it and the creator mentioned that’s working well for them. Subscription money grabs need to end, not everything needs to be one. consumers get the short stick.
@@calebporzio1 separate business pricing from a hobbyist pricing, majority of the things I build are personal. Businesses charging thousands for a single project can easily have that pricing model covered per project. The outrage is from the single devs.
The price is too much. That's why everyone is upset. It feels like it's milking developers. It's not about "cutting them down". If they want to sell this product, don't make your clients feel like they are being robbed.
It might be a different entity than the Laravel Holdings, but Livewire got it's domain under the main Laravel domain since a while. The pricing is a bit steep, if you think what you can get for the same money from other Laravel products. (Nova, Spark, etc) At least compared to the parts we can see. But I'll always commend on Caleb going deep into the things he loves. He goes next level on everything he makes, even if it takes longer than he himself wants. Caleb's a GOAT. (and his tweet justifies what we couldn't see to properly compare, even though I still think, for the use case, it's steep - but knowing it supports Caleb makes it better.)
Thanks man - I hope you saw the followup twitter video - it's much more than the landing page leads on. 24 components and counting - entire JS library custom built from scratch under-the-hood. Tamplates, layouts, examples, etc. So much work and time and value and effort went into it.
You made this video and this thumbnail like the comment section is verbally abusing Caleb, which is simply not true. There are similar options on a Free plan, while he expects people to pay for that library PER PROJECT. His library is cool, but it is not such a library that demands that amount of money. People are free to criticize his payment plan, as they should be. Why didn't you make a video last year when everybody was praising him for livewire 3? You say you're not biased, but just because he is a prominent member in the community and has made awesome tools, does not mean he is criticism free, especially on this case.
There’s a difference between expressing disapproval and not making an effort to understand where and how the product fits. Why didn’t I make a video last year? I hadn’t started making videos yet. I appreciate the Laravel community. And I think there’s encouragement to happen even through disagreement and disapproval. Attacking time spent and research does not need to happen when disapproving of pricing.
The wed dev industry is strange particularly the PHP ecosystem. We want good things but all for free. How's that even possible? And the fact that somebody has earned X amount of $ on his projects does not mean he is now obligated to offer stuff for free.
Great commentary Josh - the chat in the livestream yesterday was atrocious from so many people in the community undervaluing things. Even if people don't want to use Flux, having more competition in a space is good all around for everyone to try to improve what's out there.
Yh they’ll have more competition on who can up their price to justify minor changes. This just persuades others to follow suit and slap a $$$ on everything. Also a big note that not every Laravel/php dev lives in the US making $70k as a starting salary. It’s understandable for people to be concerned. Also I agree the chat was really bad.
Given all the work that went into Livewire and Alpine and that it's all available and maintained for free, how is a $99 per pop UI component library "milking" anyone?
Haha what? I spent 2 years on Livewire version 3 and released it FOR FREE? Just like Alpine and all the Alpine plugins and Suhi and blah blah blah. I do SO MUCH FOR FREE. I maintain all these tools for free. I don't see how I'm greedy. I paid a designer a bunch of money for his work on Flux. I put a ton of work into it. Like A TON. I thought it would be fine to charge money for it.
@@calebporzio1 having a proper entitlement is an easy way to get OSS people behind you supporting you no matter what kind of price tag you set. You could easily go to putting a price tag of 500 dollars on it and there will still be people protecting you and the work you do because potential upside of them using certain products may just be - making 100k dollars a year. The argument is completely valid because that can easily be the case, but I think people see the issue of how little comparatively is the benefit amount under the given price tag - ok, they will take those components, put them on their website and what do they save? Maybe 5h on top of existing 200h where there's probably 200 more hours to go until "alpha" launch because even if we decide to make those, it's a drop in the ocean compared to amount of work in total needed from start to launch. You can try to get the gist of what developers are saying in their valid criticism or you can spend the time on "being entitlement" to this and that. How about focusing on successes? You had a reason to put such price tag, I am sure there will be plenty of people paying for it. Although, I pay for my products, I've regretted my 30 eur on, for example, tinkerwell repl as it has a memory leak. Some see benefit in that and that's ok. It does not speak well about the product if the main coder comes at the potential customers in some random video comments on YT, you can do better. 👍
The price would be ok. But updates for just one year are a real problem for me. Development for larger projects often takes almost a year. If you want to pay per project, then it should get updates for life-time.
You keep on saying "we can do better" as a community is incorrect. The reason the Laravel community exists is because it is an open source programming framework. Livewire started out as a project which while cool is taking the whole monetization thing a bit too far. Harvesting emails to watch screencasts for example are a bit cheesy. Also the fact that he is selling a full on commercial product at the conference in itself was a bad decision. The laravel conference talks should not become ads. Then he was further doing the whole "alex hormozi / scammer vibes" style email marketing which developers generally do not like. And lastly for the price and what is shown on that landing page, people are giving him feedback for it. So you have to evaluate the community response in the context of what is happening. Otherwise you are not really doing your job properly if you want to teach the community to be better.
ADA & WCAG compliance is the number 1 focus at my company. Getting accessibility right has been one of the hardest tasks of my career. What I saw during Caleb's talk was someone who is trying to get accessibility right in the Livewire space. An unbelievably calling feat and I applaud his efforts.
Thank you. I completely agree. Theres stuff that most of us devs never think about that Caleb and Hugo have probably obsessed about for the last 9 months.
Same at my company, beginning from design stage accessibility is already considered. I wouldn't of even considered Flux if Caleb didn't mention the extreme deal of effort he put into WCAG conformance.
The issue about cost for me is NOT that Caleb wants to earn something from a year of his hard work and effort, but that the price is the same for all projects, commercial or non-commercial. If I am paying a developer $2k per week to develop a project for me, $99 is a drop in the ocean. If I am a retired developer creating a web site for a charity for free, then $99 for Flux and $200 for something else and $50 for something else is impossible. Caleb needs to offer it under a more flexible pricing model.
Seems like Caleb is using the same pricing model as Laravel Nova. I think it's great and the Livewire crew deserves it. Also, maybe this is more for people that know they can use the components rather than people that just want to mess around with it. Props to TALL stack!
It's okay to be upset about the pricing of a product, but what kind of discourse should we be having around that topic? - Should we bash the creator for pricing it that way? - Should we bash the supporters who cheered him on and gave him a platform? - Should we bash the product itself (without knowing too much about it in the first place)? It's far too easy to be negative and start "bashing" away. And what I believe the Laravel community deservers and Josh is asking here is to have the conversation without all the "bashing" I agree the pricing is a bit aggressive for me and my dinky little projects that haven't really come to any meaningful return. I may think differently if working for studio/company which had the capacity and funding available for their projects. Or even as a freelance builder, I could propose my clients this extra expense that would allow me to build their product "x" times faster. They might want to go for it. For my own said dinky projects, I would ask Caleb and team to consider a hobby/free/for-opensource tier. Or perhaps even a dev-only-version of the kit that lets me play around with some of the basic components just without the ability to go to production. But Caleb doesn't owe us this. Caleb has already given a ton to this community and earned a certain "benefit of the doubt" and definitely doesn't deserve all this negativity. The truth of the matter is - we love Calebs work, - we really really really want to use it, - and now that it's behind a paywall, we're annoyed so we're throwing a tantrum. Let's be grownups, lets be kind, and let's give them the benefit of the doubt. And as I tell my two toddlers, "If you're unhappy about something, don't cry! Just ask, but ask nicely".
Have you ever complained about any pricing whatsoever? Whether it be your healthcare, mortgage or lease for a brand new car? The moment you complain, you need to read and listen to what you have said to others here. I can smell a hypocrite.
Its a marketing problem. I did not look at any video just the website. 1) Preordering a comp lib. Thats just strange. Were is the list of what I get? What will it include? 2) What does free update means? Does it mean i will not get bug fixes after a year? 3) Pricing per project. Thats also just strange. Its like buying images per projekt or assets per project. I dont like that and most people dont like that 4) The components itself dont say why should i spent so mich money on them. The accordion makes the hole site jump. There is no animation. In the drop down when you select a filter you can see that a checkmark blinks and in the next few frames the menu closes. All this does not feel like a premium comp lib I should pay for. 5) a11y is wanky at best right now. Again for that price i expect more.
now that you have expressed your valid criticism, you will be welcomed with either: a) complete nonsense, unrelated to your points b) "they do not owe you anything" c) "just don't use it" d) you being called a hater at this point, it has become quite hilarious to observe how they handle criticism lmao. I agree with a lot of points, best of luck, bruv
I agree if you’re basing it off of the marketing website currently. It doesn’t show what I saw on stage. The pinned comment shares a little bit more from Caleb directly. (I appreciate the thoughts too.)
I think that the sentiment was set because the flux website was up before Calebs talk and that kinda set the mood for the post even after the talk. I'm hoping for some sort of infinite projects payment option so I can mess around with it even in smaller projects 😅
I can see how that might be weird if you’re not in the room for sure. I just kind of see it as it isn’t even released yet, so I’m fine with not knowing all of the details. I’m sure the pricing will be more finalized in the future too. Who knows! ☺️
My only issue, is that landing page. It shouldn't have had the preorder button if it was not going to at least give us what it actually includes. I love Caleb and his work, and I am just going to assume Flux is really great. But the fact remains, that asking for $99 per project, which is not insignificant, based on that landing page isn't a great marketing move. I really wish I could have watched the talk, and am looking forward to it when it gets released later (I hope). I do agree, slamming on Caleb isn't necessary, but that is also the reason I don't follow very many tech people on Twitter and don't bother with Reddit at all. Toxicity is normal in our industry my friend.
I paid for Alpine JS UI Components because the price is right and wanted to support Caleb's work. I don't use it because it's not practical and frankly not super well written for some component. Flux is just totally over priced, that's it! WE as a community do not need to receive any lessons from you or anyone just for stating a fact. Sorry but your video is rude and embarrassing.
I agree the price is a little steep. But I will at least plan on trying it in at least one project. They probably should make it a per year price and not per project.
I really like flux and pre ordered it yesterday. I think it's a huge time safer. As far as I can tell you can buy it once, tinker with it as much as you like and if you have a project worthwhile to launch 99 are peanuts. It is also livewire optimized. Not only Tailwind and Alpine.
$99 is rather cheap for something that the creator spend hundreds if not thousands of hours into. Also creates a way healthier ecosystem imo if they also have a financial incentive to keep maintaining it. Samething with spatie and its paid packages nothing wrong with that. Besides that I've seen freelancers with higher call-out charges than $99 to let's not lose perspective on the value of someones time. And if the value add isn't there for you, just dont buy it.
Free speech, good or bad. When you release anything on the internet, you bound to be criticized. Redditors especially are brutal to everyone. I don't agree with negative comments that are disrespectful but everyone has free speech as long as its within the scope of the relevant laws.
I think there are too many other free options that come close to or supersede flux in many ways. I fear it will become another beyondcode dead on arrival project. Livewire tutorials are pretty much dead and no wonder if the only one working is poor Caleb, it’s hard to expect him to maintain everything alone… but then it shouldn’t have such a hefty price tag.
We can all agree that Flux had a rough start. It’s a great idea, with a lot of effort behind it, and it might even turn out to be a great product once it's released.
There's a common feeling that you never pay for a repo, which is absolutely wrong. When paying 99$ USD for Flux, you're not buying code, you're buying velocity.
One think as my suggestion if your channel want to more interesting channel it would be great if you can create good development related tutorials. Otherwise if this channel like creating content around political type or opinion like one. I thnk peoples will be not subscriped. Main reason think about your audience most are developers and their living their own rule life way. But if their looking channel most of the time to learn new thing other wise their will not comeback. Not get me wrong way bro. i love early contents but now your channel contents not in good direction way. 😢
I still have tutorials. Just had one last week. But I can’t do a tutorial every day. :) don’t worry. That will be most videos. I’m just at Laracon and it’s helpful to share my thoughts.
for some reason reddit is one of the worst places on the place on the internet it's almost like it's only toxic people in there, and it's not just the laravel subreddit
It might not be for most people. But if that’s a fraction of what the project will make you… No brainer for me. Especially with all of the things I don’t have to think about. :)
The keynote talk is not live quite yet. So Caleb recorded a video answering your questions. Please watch it.
x.com/calebporzio/status/1829188535066472506?s=46
Why are you supporting Caleb so hard? I'm looking to your videos for about 6 months, and definitely in this one you are not you.
@@adoraducaI support all of the Laravel ecosystem and community with the same velocity. It’s one of the things that attracted me to the Laravel ecosystem. ☺️
@@joshcirre to be honest I like Laravel a lot ... and I learned from your videos a lot, so thank you! ... but I'm also honest in this case
@@adoraduca paid influencer maybe? that is how youtube works.
I don't think people are fundamentally against paying for a product. Obviously the price might appeal to some while putting others off. Its just that so much hype was generated around flux that it gave an impression that Caleb was going to add something new and interesting to livewire (for free). After all, it was a livewire keynote. It just turned out that the keynote wasn't so much about livewire but a platform for Caleb to sell his new product built on top of livewire. That was the disconnect and the disappointment as I saw it.
The logic that Caleb deserves to be compensated for his efforts is correct. But by that logic livewire also should not have been free. Would it still have enjoyed the popularity it does today? Would laravel have been popular if it was a paid product from the start? Yet both Taylor and Caleb are millionaires today because of the extensive usage of their free products.
It is a different game. Once you have a critical mass of users, money can be made through other means like services, consulting, courses, sponsors, complimentary products, speaking engagements, conferences etc. So expecting Caleb to give away flux for free wasn't an unrealistic expectation either.
- -
Yeah I could see that. I probably should have been clear it was going to be a paid thing up-front. I just got lost in the excitement of the product and thought it wasn't a big deal.
I hate to hear it felt like a sales pitch. I also tried to add lots of little "lessons and details" I embedded in the tool that you can take with you to any tool.
All in all - I think I messed up the messaging, probably pricing, but nailed the demo haha. But that's alright, I can still iterate and change some things to make it more pallettable.
Otherwise, just wait for next year when I launch something free again. I have to make money so I can't always launch free things only you know?
@@calebporzio1 No worries Caleb. You don't really owe any justification or apology. Your enormous contribution to laravel in terms of livewire and alpine more than compensate for any 'mistake' you or the community think you might have made. Hope you make good money on flux and looking forward to seeing something innovative and brilliant from you next year which will make laravel even cooler.
@calebporzio1 $99 is not steap at all for well made UI library.
My latest inspiration is Preline UI kit, very similar to Shadcn.
@@calebporzio1 the demo was fantastic. It blew my mind at how well thought out and easy to use it was.
Truthfully, when I saw the pricing I thought to myself "that sucks" but immediately shifted to "this would have saved me 100+ hours in the last 6 months and would still be a better outcome."
Considering I've paid for the license after 2-3 hours of contracting, this isn't a big cost for most people that see the value and time savings in it. For one man contractors or people building their next idea (especially those who are primarily backend devs and just want to build something not garbage looking/feeling) $150 is nothing. In literally any other industry, good tools cost money but save time and effort. Don't have to beat my head on my desk (after coding all day at my day job) trying to get some random UI's JS to work? Take my money. I'll get better at JS later.
I would really like to see some sort of unlimited license so that my squirrel brain can throw together different projects willy nilly -- and some more information on how updates will be priced. Did that stop me from pre-ordering as fast as Laracon's wifi would let me? Nope. Can't wait to use it, thanks for building cool stuff.
99 USD / per project with updates for only an year = that's why we're upset. TailwindUI = 299 USD / once for as many projects as you want.
Yeah I said same thing on Laracon live stream...
Nah it’s $150/project. Insane.
And not even a free tier for non-commercial/personal projects to learn it.
Stay tuned. I think he said unlimited project pricing will probably come out eventually. This is just a simple pre-order page.
Hopefully he gives a discount to pre-order customers if he does release unlimited projects.
I do feel he should consider offering two years of updates instead of one. However I'll probably buy it anyways just so I can study his code and support him.
@@DrewC-vj7md There needs to be a lifetime option for people just to get people to tinker with it continuously.
Otherwise it will remain a niche tool bought by too few and Caleb will lose interest maintaining it (see Alpine Components, Livewire screencasts).
Unfortunately in a country that 99 is 1/3 or my income this is not going to happen
As a contributer to the subreddit, I can say for myself that I don't feel "owed". I don't use live wire very much. When I first saw flux, my reaction was, "oh, this will really help the momentum of the livewire community!". Once the pricing details were dropped, and we all learned it wasn't free, my reaction changed to, "oh, maybe not".
I don't think that Flux is bad. I can appreciate the effort that went into it. I was hoping that Flux would lower the barrier to entry for Livewire, and Flux failed on that hope, as there's so many other free alternatives that check enough of the boxes for me.
The website does mention PPP pricing so it's worth reaching out if you live in a country where the price tag is prohibitive even for commercial projects.
It's too easy to say we should support Caleb for this. Let's be honest; Laravel is a multi-million business. Tayler Otwell earned over 10 million USD in 2019 already on things like Forge. This is just another money-scraper.
I am happy to support the community, but I am not going to pay $99 PER PROJECT for just some logic like this. And where is the money really going? Back to the community? Or the Laravel Holding?
Caleb also could have open-sourced his project and have others work on this as well. Let's not pretend a per-project-license this is the only way here.
What alternatives do we have for Laravel? If the money starts floating in the framework itself, it is doomed.
Caleb and Livewire are an entirely different entity from Laravel. So I imagine that money is supporting Caleb and Hugo and their families.
Even if we don't agree on the "support" aspect, it's a tool to be used to make money with our individual projects. $100 is a drop in the bucket if I'm creating a paid tool.
Just from the few podcasts I heard Caleb ruminate on this, I don't think the per project pricing was a quick decision. I'm sure he thought through everything. But who knows, it might not be final either.
I'm not sure yet if the "per project" pricing works for what I want to use it for (which is more like a SaaS with optional on-prem) but I still pre-ordered it because I see an immense ROI with just the nuances of what he demo'd.
Laravel itself generates zero revenue. Open source is primarily a cost center. Yes, Laravel the company makes a lot of money through other commercial servers like the new Cloud service but that's also paying for the dev time spent on the open source projects.
This might be an age thing but it's important to understand that open source must always be funded to be sustainable. You have companies like Meta paying people to work on React to create good PR and attract new hires (which given their churn they needed plenty of). You have companies like Vercel paying people to work on Next to get them to use their overpriced hosting. Laravel and Livewire mostly just exist for their own sake and people are making good money selling commercial third-party tie-ins. But as far as I can tell, there's no revenue sharing between the Laravel company and Caleb so for him to continue working "for free" he does need to sell *something*. And for all the hype there's nothing forcing you to use Flux just because you use Laravel and open source alternatives can exist (just like Filament exists alongside paid admin panels).
There's a huge problem with entitlement towards open source projects in the recent decade and so far I mostly thought it was a problem in the JavaScript space brought on by all the moonshot startups built around libraries, but it sadly seems to be a problem outside that space too. Again, this might be an age thing: in my teens and twenties I would often slave away on the weekends or pull all-nighters to work on passion projects and it would often feel like I have infinite time to spend. Now as I'm nearing my 40s and have a young kid, I barely have enough time to spend a full day of work just writing code (because a lot of work time goes into other things than that) and I'm lucky if I get any code written outside of work because most of the time it means taking time away from the family or chores. As we age our productive time becomes much more finite - not just in the morbid sense of growing old and dying but also in the practical sense of just having more responsibilities that demand their share of your time and the physical realities of what cutting back on sleep does to you over the long run.
@@joshcirre Every UI framework has defaults and it will come with certain limitations. Any client wish might create the necessity for workarounds.
If I don't have a way to explore, evaluete, and learn the quirks of this UI framework for free, with a personal project, why would I risk it when it's crunch time for a client?
@@joshcirre today I learned Accel is taking over Laravel for $57 million. Why don't you make a video about that?
Stop defending a multimillion corporation.
I feel like a lot of the initial bad reaction was that the pricing talk was a quick 10 second mention after selling us on the product.
It almost seemed like Caleb knew people wouldn't like it, so he dropped the details, and dashed out.
Hard when you’re already 30 minutes behind schedule. Graciousness goes a long way. :)
Yeah no, I just didn't think people would be that mad? Nova is $99/project for a year of updates. So I thought: ok, I'll just do that. Apparently I was wrong lol
I love Caleb's work but $99/$149 per project is a bit steep. Sometimes all I need for a project is a dropdown menu , couple of input fileds and a button. Just charge me $300 for unlimited use and everybody's happy.
It's not released yet, so who knows if that price changes? :)
@@joshcirre In his twitter stream he mentioned he might add an unlimited package.
not just per project but per year too
I think Caleb could make much more commercial success for flux if he make flux like sushi. hit a certain sponsors target and it will be become free and open source
The problem with that is that it gives you a small amount of money up-front and then nothing. Sushi is a teeeenyyy tiny project that doesn't really demand much maintenance. Flux is going to be a huge project with a big maintenance burden over time and needs to be funded.
@calebporzio1 hopefully that's the case. at least ur not making aaron level mistake with a roughly $1000+ nova package that he had to backtrack lower the price to about $100+ later despite all the twitter support from prominent laravel community members because that is too out of touch with reality and the market speaks at the end of the day
My only criticism is calling it a Livewire keynote on the Laracon website. The product seems great, I think the presentation and the improvised FAQ before the talk were great. Livewire and Alpine have changed how I work and I purchasing his course was great.
But like I said, I went into that talk expecting a Livewire keynote. Maybe that was not to ruin the surprise, but that did not land super well with me. All of the other harsh comments are unwarranted honestly.
I appreciate your thoughts and take. I completely understand and agree with you. :)
I really love your videos , can you tell which softwares do you use for recording and editing. I will really appreciate it.
I nauseate every time I hear that "no one owes you anything" counter-argument on how badly product might be priced. The price was announced publicly therefore it's subject to valid and not so valid criticism. If all that Laravel upper chromies can come up with is "they don't owe you anything", then it tells more about those defending the pricing than those who think it's overkill.
The same people who does not want to indulge valid points, are the ones to complain about their healthcare, subscriptions and living expense bills being high.
Oh, did I mention that I pay for PHPStorm, Laravel Idea, one InertiaJS course, supported Filament and Livewire for quite a while? Ah darn, I must be one of those "wants everything for free" 'type of guys. Yeah, you are right, just call me a hater then.
It’s not even released yet. You’re going to base all of this without knowing the details?
Graciousness goes a long way.
@@joshcirre my brother in Christ, we cannot even get to the docs to see what we are REALLY paying for but it has a checkout flow ready to go for pre-orders... when we only know on a surface level what consists in that purchase - we are allowed to criticize it.
I am basing this on how others tend to present their new product in UI library spectrum. In a typical Laravel elitist fashion, your answer has no association with my opinion.
@@ward7576 leave him brother this guy wants to be on the next invite list to the next lararcon or the next deal sponsorship etc. Anyone supporting payment per project on anything code related is best if they buckle down and learn to create their own instead of paying a already rich guy. Interesting how Shadcn, daisy ui etc can survive. Also good point on the docs being inaccessible. Shocking
The main problem people have against it is that it is a subscription plain and simple. It's not the price, it's not the features, it's not the keynote.
This also affects the popularity of the product, the adaptation until a "Free FluxUI" shows up in the block (Just like laravel and livewire did) and takes over the entire market. By this logic people will not pay a subscription for a product that is not guaranteed to last or what not.
Thank you Josh, that video came out very fast, you are a machine! I'm happy to support Caleb, his work changed my life and I can't wait to see how Flux works under the hood, that's a fast and inexpensive way to learn. I understand that 99$ per project might be expensive, but just ask Caleb for PPP, I believe he did it for other products before.
I think it's pretty fair to look at the price of a product and make an assessment on its value proposition. You are way out of line getting upset about people discussing a commercial offering.
Now, if this product is simply an alternative means to donate to the maintainers, fine. Make it clear up front. They have done so before with the paid screencasts. That would render much criticism moot.
I’m way out of line when I say that $99/project is more than fair for client use? It would save me hundreds of hours.
@@joshcirreyou live in a well off comfortable land. The vast majority of the world earn less than $100. Open source is the way of pay once for lifetime or even pay once a month. This is just terrible to make it 99 per project. PER PROJECT 😂 this sort of financial behaviour/decision making should not be supported let alone you going the extra mile to call out others for criticising it
@@unkownsiner You don't need to use the product. Why are you calling the pricing is "terrible" ? Just don't use it if it's not for you. For others it might be just thing they were looking for.
@@unkownsiner 99$ for project is very cheap. If your project doesn't reach 99$ in revenue then you are doing things wrong.
its bonkers to asses a cybertruck with the pricing of a prius in mind though
No, $99 per project is the early bird price, it’s really $150 per project… for a couple components? $299 for lifetime tailwind is worth it and the creator mentioned that’s working well for them.
Subscription money grabs need to end, not everything needs to be one. consumers get the short stick.
It's 24 components and counting. Nova is $99/project/year - I didn't think it would be a big deal. I'll reconsider the pricing
@@calebporzio1 separate business pricing from a hobbyist pricing, majority of the things I build are personal. Businesses charging thousands for a single project can easily have that pricing model covered per project. The outrage is from the single devs.
The price is too much. That's why everyone is upset. It feels like it's milking developers. It's not about "cutting them down". If they want to sell this product, don't make your clients feel like they are being robbed.
I so want to have version for Ruby on Rails this feels magical
It might be a different entity than the Laravel Holdings, but Livewire got it's domain under the main Laravel domain since a while. The pricing is a bit steep, if you think what you can get for the same money from other Laravel products. (Nova, Spark, etc) At least compared to the parts we can see.
But I'll always commend on Caleb going deep into the things he loves. He goes next level on everything he makes, even if it takes longer than he himself wants. Caleb's a GOAT. (and his tweet justifies what we couldn't see to properly compare, even though I still think, for the use case, it's steep - but knowing it supports Caleb makes it better.)
Thanks man - I hope you saw the followup twitter video - it's much more than the landing page leads on. 24 components and counting - entire JS library custom built from scratch under-the-hood. Tamplates, layouts, examples, etc. So much work and time and value and effort went into it.
@@calebporzio1 I know, and yes I saw. 😁
You made this video and this thumbnail like the comment section is verbally abusing Caleb, which is simply not true.
There are similar options on a Free plan, while he expects people to pay for that library PER PROJECT. His library is cool, but it is not such a library that demands that amount of money.
People are free to criticize his payment plan, as they should be. Why didn't you make a video last year when everybody was praising him for livewire 3?
You say you're not biased, but just because he is a prominent member in the community and has made awesome tools, does not mean he is criticism free, especially on this case.
Laravel community is known for not being able to take criticism well.
There’s a difference between expressing disapproval and not making an effort to understand where and how the product fits.
Why didn’t I make a video last year? I hadn’t started making videos yet.
I appreciate the Laravel community. And I think there’s encouragement to happen even through disagreement and disapproval.
Attacking time spent and research does not need to happen when disapproving of pricing.
$99 bucks? I don't know it saves you a lot of time... I'll rethink the pricing though
Spot on take, Josh. People moaning about it being a paid product probably wouldn't choose to work for free for 9 months themselves.
The wed dev industry is strange particularly the PHP ecosystem. We want good things but all for free. How's that even possible? And the fact that somebody has earned X amount of $ on his projects does not mean he is now obligated to offer stuff for free.
Thank you. ☺️
Great commentary Josh - the chat in the livestream yesterday was atrocious from so many people in the community undervaluing things. Even if people don't want to use Flux, having more competition in a space is good all around for everyone to try to improve what's out there.
I appreciate those words. It was sad for me to see some folks reaction. I appreciate your approach! ☺️
Yh they’ll have more competition on who can up their price to justify minor changes. This just persuades others to follow suit and slap a $$$ on everything. Also a big note that not every Laravel/php dev lives in the US making $70k as a starting salary. It’s understandable for people to be concerned. Also I agree the chat was really bad.
for me its looking that are some people... at the top of the pyramid... milking the Laravel community... which are supporting each other
Given all the work that went into Livewire and Alpine and that it's all available and maintained for free, how is a $99 per pop UI component library "milking" anyone?
@@lnplum my thoughts exactly
Haha what? I spent 2 years on Livewire version 3 and released it FOR FREE? Just like Alpine and all the Alpine plugins and Suhi and blah blah blah. I do SO MUCH FOR FREE. I maintain all these tools for free.
I don't see how I'm greedy. I paid a designer a bunch of money for his work on Flux. I put a ton of work into it. Like A TON. I thought it would be fine to charge money for it.
@@calebporzio1 having a proper entitlement is an easy way to get OSS people behind you supporting you no matter what kind of price tag you set. You could easily go to putting a price tag of 500 dollars on it and there will still be people protecting you and the work you do because potential upside of them using certain products may just be - making 100k dollars a year. The argument is completely valid because that can easily be the case, but I think people see the issue of how little comparatively is the benefit amount under the given price tag - ok, they will take those components, put them on their website and what do they save? Maybe 5h on top of existing 200h where there's probably 200 more hours to go until "alpha" launch because even if we decide to make those, it's a drop in the ocean compared to amount of work in total needed from start to launch.
You can try to get the gist of what developers are saying in their valid criticism or you can spend the time on "being entitlement" to this and that. How about focusing on successes? You had a reason to put such price tag, I am sure there will be plenty of people paying for it. Although, I pay for my products, I've regretted my 30 eur on, for example, tinkerwell repl as it has a memory leak. Some see benefit in that and that's ok.
It does not speak well about the product if the main coder comes at the potential customers in some random video comments on YT, you can do better. 👍
The price would be ok. But updates for just one year are a real problem for me. Development for larger projects often takes almost a year. If you want to pay per project, then it should get updates for life-time.
You keep on saying "we can do better" as a community is incorrect.
The reason the Laravel community exists is because it is an open source programming framework. Livewire started out as a project which while cool is taking the whole monetization thing a bit too far. Harvesting emails to watch screencasts for example are a bit cheesy.
Also the fact that he is selling a full on commercial product at the conference in itself was a bad decision. The laravel conference talks should not become ads.
Then he was further doing the whole "alex hormozi / scammer vibes" style email marketing which developers generally do not like.
And lastly for the price and what is shown on that landing page, people are giving him feedback for it.
So you have to evaluate the community response in the context of what is happening. Otherwise you are not really doing your job properly if you want to teach the community to be better.
ADA & WCAG compliance is the number 1 focus at my company. Getting accessibility right has been one of the hardest tasks of my career. What I saw during Caleb's talk was someone who is trying to get accessibility right in the Livewire space. An unbelievably calling feat and I applaud his efforts.
Thank you. I completely agree. Theres stuff that most of us devs never think about that Caleb and Hugo have probably obsessed about for the last 9 months.
Same at my company, beginning from design stage accessibility is already considered. I wouldn't of even considered Flux if Caleb didn't mention the extreme deal of effort he put into WCAG conformance.
The issue about cost for me is NOT that Caleb wants to earn something from a year of his hard work and effort, but that the price is the same for all projects, commercial or non-commercial. If I am paying a developer $2k per week to develop a project for me, $99 is a drop in the ocean. If I am a retired developer creating a web site for a charity for free, then $99 for Flux and $200 for something else and $50 for something else is impossible. Caleb needs to offer it under a more flexible pricing model.
Seems like Caleb is using the same pricing model as Laravel Nova. I think it's great and the Livewire crew deserves it. Also, maybe this is more for people that know they can use the components rather than people that just want to mess around with it. Props to TALL stack!
Thanks man!
It's okay to be upset about the pricing of a product, but what kind of discourse should we be having around that topic?
- Should we bash the creator for pricing it that way?
- Should we bash the supporters who cheered him on and gave him a platform?
- Should we bash the product itself (without knowing too much about it in the first place)?
It's far too easy to be negative and start "bashing" away. And what I believe the Laravel community deservers and Josh is asking here is to have the conversation without all the "bashing"
I agree the pricing is a bit aggressive for me and my dinky little projects that haven't really come to any meaningful return. I may think differently if working for studio/company which had the capacity and funding available for their projects. Or even as a freelance builder, I could propose my clients this extra expense that would allow me to build their product "x" times faster. They might want to go for it.
For my own said dinky projects, I would ask Caleb and team to consider a hobby/free/for-opensource tier. Or perhaps even a dev-only-version of the kit that lets me play around with some of the basic components just without the ability to go to production.
But Caleb doesn't owe us this.
Caleb has already given a ton to this community and earned a certain "benefit of the doubt" and definitely doesn't deserve all this negativity.
The truth of the matter is
- we love Calebs work,
- we really really really want to use it,
- and now that it's behind a paywall, we're annoyed so we're throwing a tantrum.
Let's be grownups, lets be kind, and let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
And as I tell my two toddlers, "If you're unhappy about something, don't cry! Just ask, but ask nicely".
Have you ever complained about any pricing whatsoever? Whether it be your healthcare, mortgage or lease for a brand new car? The moment you complain, you need to read and listen to what you have said to others here. I can smell a hypocrite.
Its a marketing problem. I did not look at any video just the website.
1) Preordering a comp lib. Thats just strange. Were is the list of what I get? What will it include?
2) What does free update means? Does it mean i will not get bug fixes after a year?
3) Pricing per project. Thats also just strange. Its like buying images per projekt or assets per project. I dont like that and most people dont like that
4) The components itself dont say why should i spent so mich money on them. The accordion makes the hole site jump. There is no animation. In the drop down when you select a filter you can see that a checkmark blinks and in the next few frames the menu closes. All this does not feel like a premium comp lib I should pay for.
5) a11y is wanky at best right now. Again for that price i expect more.
now that you have expressed your valid criticism, you will be welcomed with either:
a) complete nonsense, unrelated to your points
b) "they do not owe you anything"
c) "just don't use it"
d) you being called a hater
at this point, it has become quite hilarious to observe how they handle criticism lmao. I agree with a lot of points, best of luck, bruv
I agree if you’re basing it off of the marketing website currently. It doesn’t show what I saw on stage.
The pinned comment shares a little bit more from Caleb directly.
(I appreciate the thoughts too.)
I think that the sentiment was set because the flux website was up before Calebs talk and that kinda set the mood for the post even after the talk.
I'm hoping for some sort of infinite projects payment option so I can mess around with it even in smaller projects 😅
I can see how that might be weird if you’re not in the room for sure.
I just kind of see it as it isn’t even released yet, so I’m fine with not knowing all of the details.
I’m sure the pricing will be more finalized in the future too. Who knows! ☺️
It’s simple for me, $99 = supporting Caleb mostly + Bonus of an unreal UI library
Its 99 (early bird) / 149 per project and 1 year of free updates.
😮💨
MaryUI > WireUI > TailwindUI > Flux
My only issue, is that landing page. It shouldn't have had the preorder button if it was not going to at least give us what it actually includes. I love Caleb and his work, and I am just going to assume Flux is really great. But the fact remains, that asking for $99 per project, which is not insignificant, based on that landing page isn't a great marketing move. I really wish I could have watched the talk, and am looking forward to it when it gets released later (I hope).
I do agree, slamming on Caleb isn't necessary, but that is also the reason I don't follow very many tech people on Twitter and don't bother with Reddit at all. Toxicity is normal in our industry my friend.
I paid for Alpine JS UI Components because the price is right and wanted to support Caleb's work. I don't use it because it's not practical and frankly not super well written for some component. Flux is just totally over priced, that's it! WE as a community do not need to receive any lessons from you or anyone just for stating a fact. Sorry but your video is rude and embarrassing.
I'll make Flux worth your while. Trust me.
@@calebporzio1 I trust you 🥰
I agree the price is a little steep. But I will at least plan on trying it in at least one project. They probably should make it a per year price and not per project.
Greed, better use Inertia. Its more faster
Am I the only one that noticing the horizontal scrollbar on Flux homepage?
I use bootstrap for this.
I really like flux and pre ordered it yesterday. I think it's a huge time safer. As far as I can tell you can buy it once, tinker with it as much as you like and if you have a project worthwhile to launch 99 are peanuts. It is also livewire optimized. Not only Tailwind and Alpine.
Thank you. ☺️ I agree with you.
$99 is rather cheap for something that the creator spend hundreds if not thousands of hours into. Also creates a way healthier ecosystem imo if they also have a financial incentive to keep maintaining it. Samething with spatie and its paid packages nothing wrong with that.
Besides that I've seen freelancers with higher call-out charges than $99 to let's not lose perspective on the value of someones time. And if the value add isn't there for you, just dont buy it.
Free speech, good or bad. When you release anything on the internet, you bound to be criticized. Redditors especially are brutal to everyone. I don't agree with negative comments that are disrespectful but everyone has free speech as long as its within the scope of the relevant laws.
that's some cool shit
I think there are too many other free options that come close to or supersede flux in many ways. I fear it will become another beyondcode dead on arrival project. Livewire tutorials are pretty much dead and no wonder if the only one working is poor Caleb, it’s hard to expect him to maintain everything alone… but then it shouldn’t have such a hefty price tag.
We can all agree that Flux had a rough start. It’s a great idea, with a lot of effort behind it, and it might even turn out to be a great product once it's released.
There's a common feeling that you never pay for a repo, which is absolutely wrong. When paying 99$ USD for Flux, you're not buying code, you're buying velocity.
One think as my suggestion if your channel want to more interesting channel it would be great if you can create good development related tutorials. Otherwise if this channel like creating content around political type or opinion like one. I thnk peoples will be not subscriped. Main reason think about your audience most are developers and their living their own rule life way. But if their looking channel most of the time to learn new thing other wise their will not comeback. Not get me wrong way bro. i love early contents but now your channel contents not in good direction way. 😢
I still have tutorials. Just had one last week. But I can’t do a tutorial every day. :) don’t worry. That will be most videos.
I’m just at Laracon and it’s helpful to share my thoughts.
@joshcirre yeah great . 🥰
for some reason reddit is one of the worst places on the place on the internet it's almost like it's only toxic people in there, and it's not just the laravel subreddit
99$ per project is not worth it
wtf per project? rather go with preline ui
@@derpina8330 99$ per lifetime is worth but per project is not worth at all 😌
@@derpina8330 flux is livewire optimized, though. You can't really compare, those.
It might not be for most people. But if that’s a fraction of what the project will make you…
No brainer for me. Especially with all of the things I don’t have to think about. :)
I think Caleb needs to rework the website to show more of what the flux can do otherwise 99$/project is a really bad pricing point.