Author here. tldraw is not an open source project. It used to be but we switched to a commercial license for our v2 in 2023. The old v1 is still available under MIT; and I try to put as much as we can under MIT license where it makes sense, but the core needs to be licensed in a way that allows us to sell it. We've always been majority source available and still accept community contributions, even though the default is to close external PRs. I care about OSS. I wish the economics of it made sense for us.
> Think about it: when/if this company grows to a larger size, if they can’t handle AI slop from contributors how can they handle AI slop from a large employee base?
(author here) Code quality matters a lot—we make an SDK, we sell our code. I'm writing my own code with the assistance of AI tools. When I'm asking an agent to step in, I can recognize when the tools are producing poor results, I can pause the work, correct it, or take the wheel in order to get things going in the right direction. Programming is still important, quality and care perhaps more important than ever, given how much of it we can do when tool-assisted.
(author here) To be fair, we also were getting plenty of poor PRs that implemented well-described issues. Or hey, maybe they were poor and maybe they weren't, but they were someone else's "claude please fix" and I don't think it's important for me to review them.
But you're right about the todos... except that the majority of times my little /issue command actually produces really great issues and digs up root causes very well. I still need to read and bless them though. Maybe we need a "potentially slop" label.
Hey, OP here. Shitty issue command is fine in a world where I have time to review it and expand it, just like I would have before; except now, there's a 80% chance that actually the AI got it right and I have a well-researched issue that can be immediately worked on. The only problem is if someone without any content comes by and feeds it into cursor to make a PR.
Maybe it would have been better to keep the original no-body "fix truncate in sidebar text" style issues, though I quite like my little /issue command. I'm sure I'll have something else in a month.
Reviewing code is much less of a burden if I can trust the author to also be invested in the output and have all the context they need to make it correct. That's true for my team / tldraw's core contributors but not for external contributors or drive-by accounts. This is nothing new and has up to now been worth the hassle for the benefits of contribution: new perspectives, other motivations, relationships with new programmers. It's just the scale of the problem and the risk that the repo gets overwhelmed by "claude fix this issue that I haven't even read" PRs.
Hey, Steve from tldraw here. We use AI tools to develop tldraw. The tools are not the problem, they're just changing the fundamentals (e.g. a well-formed PR is no longer a sign of thoughtful engagement, a large PR shows more effort than a small PR, etc) and accelerating other latent issues in contribution.
About the README etc: we ship an SDK and a lot of people use our source code as docs or a prototyping environment. I think a lot about agents as consumers of the codebase and I want help them navigate the monorepo quickly. That said, I'm not sure if the CONTEXT.md system I made for tldraw is actually that useful... new models are good at finding their way around and I also worry that we don't update them enough. I've found that bad directions are worse than no directions over time.
Want to email me [email protected]? We're looking at an issue with new accounts today on tldraw.com but it sounds different from what you're describing.
I'd like to do self-serve pricing like that, maybe we will in the future, but I don't think there are as many teams as you think where the difference would be a deciding factor.
When I was doing pricing discovery and asking early adopters what they would pay for tldraw, almost all the teams I talked to either said "nothing because we don't have any money yet" or a number between $5,000 and $10,000, with a handful of outliers. In the end, my solution was just to put a price on the thing and then find ways to provide for everyone else, including PRPF commercial teams. In 3.x our solution was a watermark, which caused other problems for us; but this discussion made it pretty clear to me that we need to have a better answer for these teams in 4.x.
That said, we've at least got the startup sales _process_ as close to self-serve as we can. Someone still needs to validate the size of the company and send a Stripe link, but 20% of startup licensees were delivered in under 24 hours and more than half are done in under a week.
I think we’ll do extended trials for small teams if they’re pre-revenue / pre-funding, and I can imagine setting up some relationships like that with incubators etc. A few other posters have asked the same question and it’s a good one, thanks.
We support iPad about as good as we can, with stylus pressure and some tricks to avoid slowdowns due to the high input rate. I actually did the ink in Excalidraw too, so it at least worked last time I touched it! But the difference between iPad Safari input latency and native latency is gigantic, really heart breaking to work on. Not sure if a native wrapper would improve things. If I did a native app, it would likely be a minimal drawing app for handwriting only. I recently started prototyping an Android app with the new low-latency jetpack ink APIs and they’re fantastic, beating perceived latency vs iPad even on a 60fps screen (Daylight).
You can stay on 3.x. The license on 3.x shows a watermark and a license key will hide it. New commercial licenses will still work for 3.x too, in case you’re unable to upgrade, though 4.x has only a few small breaking changes.
Small teams are so hard to price for. When we first launched we had a non-commercial license and I was spending forever negotiating these tiny deals with teams where that was already a huge expense. The watermark solution we brought on last year fixed that problem but then anchored our price low for bigger companies. I’m sure half this forum has been through this. It’s so hard!
I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.
Sorry for the logins around collaboration. I really liked the open collaboration feature too but we were getting some sketchy user behavior around it and my nerve broke. You can still join someone else’s board anonymously though. When you share a link to a board with a friend, they don’t need an account to join the board.
Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
Yeah, this is the current gap in the offering. Pricing is such whackamole. I expect we’ll offer extended free trials to teams that need longer to get off the ground.