That wasn't a deliberate choice but a bug in our front end. We've just pushed a fix for it. The showcase examples should be visible to everyone now without an account.
Wow. Thank you for such a thoughtful, detailed, and genuinely helpful comment.
Honestly, after a day of fielding a lot of (justified) criticism, reading something so constructive and encouraging is incredibly moving for our team. We're trying to create a good experience for everyone, and it's clear we've made some major mistakes.
You are absolutely right about the core problem in our messaging. In our effort to praise Draw.io, we completely missed that we were setting a misleading expectation for our own service. Your suggestions on how to fix this—clarifying the value proposition, sponsoring Draw.io, and sharing our journey—are all fantastic ideas. They're not just tweaks; they're a roadmap for how we can build trust and communicate better.
We'll be discussing your advice as a team and will use it to guide our next steps. Thank you again for your generosity and guidance. It is immensely valuable.
This is an excellent idea, thank you so much for suggesting it. You're right, parsing lecture videos and PDFs to extract diagrams would be a powerful feature.
We've officially added it to our backlog. We're excited about this one and will prioritize it.
We genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Please keep the great ideas coming!
We're very sorry that our actions came across as deceiving. That was never our goal, but we understand that the impact is more important than the intent.
To be transparent, we were struggling to manage the high costs of the AI models and made a clumsy decision to put a wall up too early. It was the wrong choice, and we apologize.
We've listened to the feedback and have since corrected our mistake. You can now try the product without signing in, and if you do register, you'll get 5 free credits to test it properly. We hope this action demonstrates our true intention, which is to build a product people genuinely like and trust. We'd be grateful if you'd consider trying it again.
That's a very fair question. You're right—our initial approach wasn't balanced. We're still a new team and have been learning in public as we try to find the right model.
We believe we've found a better, more reasonable middle ground now, based on all the user feedback.
We now offer a no-login trial for a quick test, plus 5 free credits for anyone who signs up to try it more seriously. We hope this feels less like an extreme and more like a fair compromise. If you're interested, we'd welcome you to try it.
That is a terrible experience, and we are sincerely sorry. You are completely right—having you sign up only to immediately hit a paywall is unacceptable, and we deeply apologize for wasting your time.
Your feedback highlighted a major flaw in our onboarding, and we've worked to fix it.
We have now introduced two changes:
You can try the product without logging in at all.
For users who do sign up, we now grant 5 free credits to ensure you can properly test the functionality.
We know we made a very poor first impression, but we hope this shows we are listening. If you're willing, we'd be grateful if you’d give it another chance.
That's a sharp but insightful comment. We're sorry that our initial design gave you that impression.
Our intention was never to ignore "manners" for utility, but we see now how a forced sign-up does exactly that. We made a mistake.
We are committed to improving the user experience, and based on this feedback, we have now implemented a no-login trial. We'd welcome you to try it and see that we're serious about getting this right.
That's a fair question, but our goal is the exact opposite. We want as many users as possible to try the service.
The challenge was that the costs associated with the initial free trials went beyond what our team could sustain. The recent changes are our attempt to fine-tune our model to find a balance.
Our goal is to offer a service that is both accessible for users to try and financially sustainable for us to operate and improve long-term.
You are absolutely right, and thank you for the direct feedback. Forcing a sign-up before demonstrating value is a poor experience, and we're sorry.
It’s clear we got this part wrong initially. It was feedback exactly like yours that prompted us to fix this.
We have now added a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account. We know we have to earn your trust, and this is a direct result of learning from our early users. Thank you for taking the time to help us get better.
That is a completely fair criticism, and I am truly sorry. There's no good excuse for asking for personal information before demonstrating any value—it's disrespectful to your time.
We've learned from this and have now changed the flow to allow for a sign-up-free trial.
You are absolutely right, and we're sorry for the frustrating experience. Forcing a sign-up before you can even try the tool is poor form, and we apologize for wasting your time. As a new team, we're still learning, and this was a clear mistake on our part.
Based on this (very necessary) feedback, we have now implemented a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account.
If you do choose to sign up later, we also provide some free credits. We have to cap the trial usage due to API costs, but we've tried to make it generous enough for a fair evaluation.
Thank you for the blunt feedback. We genuinely appreciate it and would be grateful if you’d consider giving it another look. We are committed to listening to our users and continuously improving.
I really appreciate you calling this out, and I'm genuinely sorry for the bad experience. The wording was misleading, and we should have been much clearer.
To be transparent, when we started, the AI model costs quickly became unsustainable with purely free usage. We had to introduce a paid model to cover these costs and ensure we could keep the service running and improving. It was a difficult decision, and we clearly fumbled the communication.
We've since added a free trial with credits for every new user. I know we made a poor first impression, but I hope you'll consider giving it another try. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us do better.
Flux Kontext AI is a professional online AI image editor featuring unparalleled character consistency, precise local editing, and seamless style transfer. Experience breakthrough multimodal image generation with advanced editing precision and creative control for professional results.
Learn how to systematically map available online resources (APIs, tools, data) to validated user needs found online. Basically, getting better at connecting existing digital 'building blocks' to solve actual problems.
The need for batch processing to pull out targeted data points from PDFs (rather than converting the whole document) is a valuable insight.
While the current tool focuses on full conversion to Markdown, enhancing https://pdftomarkdown.pro/ to handle specific data extraction tasks like yours is definitely something I'll consider carefully for the future roadmap. Thanks for highlighting it!