I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use
Details
- External ID
- 46917033
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use
- Website domain
- vecti.com
- Launched
- Feb. 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 386
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9851752021563343
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hello everyone!I'm a solo developer who's been doing UI/UX work since 2007. Over the years, I watched design tools evolve from lightweight products into bloated feature-heavy platforms. I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way.So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need: pixel-perfect grid snapping, a performant canvas renderer, shared asset libraries, and export/presentation features. No collaborative whiteboarding. No plugin ecosystem. No enterprise features. Just the design loop.Four years later, I can proudly show it off. Built and hosted in the EU with European privacy regulations. Free tier available (no credit card, one editor forever).On privacy: I use some basic analytics (page views, referrers) but zero tracking inside the app itself. No session recordings, no behavior analytics, no third-party scripts beyond the essentials.If you're a solo designer or small team who wants a tool that stays out of your way, I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback: https://vecti.comHappy to answer questions about the tech stack, architecture decisions, why certain features didn't make the cut, or what's next.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ui design tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No A custom collaborative vector/UI design tool requires complex custom rendering engines (WebGL/WebGPU/Canvas), custom geometry math, and real-time CRDT synchronization.
What it would actually take: A production tool like this uses WebGL/WebGPU or Skia/WASM for high-performance 60fps vector graphics rendering, along with tree-based document object models and scene graphs. The core difficulties lie in sub-pixel vector rendering, snapping algorithms, spatial indexing (BVH/R-Tree) for hit testing, and multiplayer state resolution via CRDTs or operational transformation (Yjs/Automerge). It requires multi-year computer graphics, computational geometry, and distributed state engineering.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Lazarus (RAD tool), Bootstrap Studio, Figma, Penpot, Illustrator
Concerns raised: Lack of feature completeness on launch hurts first impression, Combining RAD and design tools is very large undertaking, Raster design to framework prototype conversion not easily automated, Group/isolation mode doesn't work like Illustrator or Figma, GUI similarity to Figma could invite legal issues
Feature requests: Better group isolation mode (hide objects in front, prevent accidental selection outside), Design structure output to multiple target frameworks, Vector-level isolation mode for individual elements
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 74 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 75 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 94 days after the earliest competitor.
- I left Figma to build a diffusion-based UI design tool · hn · 2026-07-21 · 80 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- An iOS budget app I've been maintaining since 2011 · hn · 2026-01-13 · 159 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- I left VSCode to build an IDE to handle many projects/agents workflow · hn · 2026-07-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I built a free to use logo generator using icons and colors · hn · 2025-12-18 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I built a browser-based 3D editor since I didn't want to learn Blender · hn · 2026-03-01 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Odozi · hn · 2026-04-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I Built Tinyfocus · hn · 2025-11-30 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I made a tool that steals any website's UI into .md context · hn · 2026-01-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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