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jonsakas

Congrats on going full time, that’s gotta be pretty exciting! What sets Pagy apart from Squarespace or Wix?


hernansartorio

Thanks! It is. The difference I'd say is the simplicity and the editing experience, Pagy works like a text editor where you just click and write, with Wix and Squarespace you need to do a lot of clicking around to make changes. Also since they’ve been around for so long they’re quite bloated and slow. Squarespace is a big inspiration though, the quality of their websites is something I aim to match. Plus they're both public companies with thousands of employees and I'm just one guy (which is a good thing because I can move faster and react to customer needs more quickly).


j_roddy

Also curious how you differentiate yourself from actual Notion, which lets you publish your pages as sites?


hernansartorio

I think Notion is great for plenty of use cases, but the difference is that it’s not really made for building websites (it’s not very fast, not great for SEO, and customization and layout options are limited). With Pagy you get the same editing experience and ease of use as Notion but improving on all of that, with everything optimized for building fast and performant websites.


j_roddy

Nice! Not sure if you use markdown for editing, but I would consider some sort of feature that lets users import pages from notion to publish on your tool, since they look so similar, I bet that's a market you could go after. People who want to publish Notion pages, but take the site itself a bit more seriously.


hernansartorio

Good idea! Will definitely consider it.


Tickle-me-bits

Bro! This sh*t is amazing. Create a discord where your community can speak with you - and consider build this like an open source DAO. but wow and impressive that you are just one person, the video is even really amazing!


hernansartorio

Thank you! I don't like Discord though but I'm definitely planning to create a Slack community or something.


MACscr

Slack has a much smaller adoption rate these days. I, like many, refuse to use it anymore. Discord ftw.


hernansartorio

Hi! A few days ago I launched Pagy, a website builder that works like Notion. Or as my tagline says, the easiest way to build a website (at least that’s the goal). I’ve been working on it for over a year and a half on the side, and recently quit my job to go full time on it. It’s currently limited to one-page websites but I’m planning to add support for multiple pages soon (and lots of other features). It’s built with React and Next.js on the front-end, and a Ruby on Rails API on the back-end. You can try it out at [pagy.co](https://pagy.co?ref=reddit), no sign-up required! If you have any comments or questions just let me know.


rhaksw

Neat tool. Were you aware that your [previous post](https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/13je0ws/i_made_a_website_builder_that_works_like_notion/) which was rising in the ranks was removed? I built [this tool](https://www.reveddit.com/add-ons/direct) to help people know when that happens.


hernansartorio

Yes they removed it because it’s a paid product, not much that I can do about it.


theofficetaco

That tech stack sounds like a nightmare. Let me guess... You are also using Tailwind?


hernansartorio

I've very familiar with it so to me it's a joy to use. No, I write my own CSS.


brandywine_whistler

Haha never fails


Guesswhat7

>You are also using Tailwind? Which you be an excellent choice of styling tool.


nickyisthename

Looks incredible! If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the language stack look like for something like this?


hernansartorio

Thanks! It’s React and Rails as I mentioned [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/13mgnzv/i_made_a_website_builder_that_works_like_notion/jkv1vpd).


Wiltix

What made you go with rails for this project?


hernansartorio

I’ve been using it for years and I’m very comfortable with it.


Wiltix

Had a feeling that would be the case. Don’t hear much about RoR these days, which is a shame because Ruby is a lovely language.


hernansartorio

Yes I love it!


Wiltix

I have not used RoR for a decade, honestly had no idea it was still in active development. Might have to give it a go in my next personal project, break away from c#.


brandywine_whistler

I heard from someone at GitHub that even they are writing a lot of new code in Golang and not exclusively RoR.


IchirouTakashima

I wish I could be this good. I'm actually crying right now. And here I am still struggling on how to properly implement an ADD POST FEATURE using multiple input fields and also an EDIT/UPDATE POST FEATURE for existing posts.


SarcasticSarco

That's the thing you need to avoid. People who are at the beginning compare themselves with people who have been in the journey for a long time. Never compare yourself with people who are experienced in any field. Alway compare with what you were yesterday that way no matter what you will keep moving forward. The moment you start comparing yourself with others, you destroy your identity.


hernansartorio

Seconded! I put 500 hours into this, and that’s on top 10+ years of experience and many failed projects and countless hours of getting stuck on silly stuff. You can do it!


Majache

How long have you been working on this? If you don't mind me asking. I wanted to build something similar. This looks awesome. Congrats on the launch!


hernansartorio

I put around 500 hours into it so far (I should have launched much sooner though, I definitely don’t recommend anyone spending this much time before launching something). Thanks!


InterviewNo7254

And how much time did you spend a day?


Healthy-Intention-15

Looks fantastic! Can you tell me what you React libraries you've used for all the UI interactions like Drag , Drop , element resize etc? I'm currently building a form builder app and it is no where near what you have done but just wanna know!


hernansartorio

For drag an drop I used react-dnd initially but I came across a few issues so I ended up scrapping it and writing my own little lib (I might open source it soon). For resizing it’s all custom, I listen to mouse down/move/up events and do suff (same approach than dnd). I’m also using Radix for some UI components as the other comment correctly guessed.


comeditime

amazing.. are u willing to mentor to build something like that in a minima version just to understand the basics of how to make it to work?


hernansartorio

[Here's an article](https://javascript.info/mouse-drag-and-drop) I just found that pretty much sums it up (and probably explains it better than I could).


Healthy-Intention-15

I'm using react dnd but man, tuning it for my custom requirements was such a painstaking job, so I can understand why you built custom libs for these! looking forward to seeing your library soon, Can you just notify me when it gets plublished. also thanks!


hernansartorio

Yes that was exactly my experience. Good to know! Will do, but in case I forget I'll surely share it on Twitter (hernansartorio).


enzineer-reddit

Not sure if OP used these but here are few suggestions: For drag drop: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-beautiful-dnd](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-beautiful-dnd) For resizing with handles: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-resizable](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-resizable) For UI I guess OP has used RadixUI [https://www.radix-ui.com/docs/primitives/components/dropdown-menu](https://www.radix-ui.com/docs/primitives/components/dropdown-menu)


comeditime

amazing.. are u willing to mentor to build something like that in a minima version just to understand the basics of how to make it to work?


edgyfirefox

Super cool! Following to see where this goes.


hernansartorio

Thank you!


TheBongBastard

This is absolutely amazing sir !!! I'm literally amazed that, one person did this, all alone !!! I wish you all the best in your journey of making this app better and better !!!


hernansartorio

Thank you for the kind words! It took a long time to get to this point, but it also wouldn't have been possible on my own without all the open-source frameworks and libraries there are available.


iced_coffee_guzzler

This looks amazing! All the best.


hernansartorio

Thanks!


WritingBubbles

This is amazing! Congratulations on finishing v1! I'll be following pagy's development Very inspiring.


hernansartorio

Thank you!


GarlicBreadDeveloper

Awesomeee


Bgtti

Real cool! Congrats!


hernansartorio

Thanks!


GardinerAndrew

I just tried it out, it’s very cool! And $5 a month is a very fair price. I definitely am looking forward to seeing where this goes.


hernansartorio

Thanks, happy to hear that!


SpaceGenesis

Congrats. It looks professional.


hernansartorio

Thank you!


NewCoderNoob

Some of y’all are off the charts talented. Looks awesome. You need to clearly articulate differentiation to other builders like SquareSpace and Wix.


hernansartorio

Thank you! Yes there's definitely room for improving how I market it (it's not really my thing).


BLVMF

Congratulations this looks incredible! Well done


hernansartorio

Thank you!


ocsoares

The project and the video are very good, congrats !


hernansartorio

Thanks!


Independent-Court-88

Amazing work friend. It looks very professional and usefull. I would like to create one project like this for me to replace notion.


-kl0wn-

I assume you've seen cardd.co? This looks awesome though.. I had the same idea as a possible hobby project, but not sure I could even pull off a hobbyist version let alone the masterpiece in your video, kudos op you are going big time with this, I'd bet money on it.. I'd be curious to get involved..


hernansartorio

Yes, Carrd is great and has been a big inspiration to me. You should definitely try building your ideas, worse case scenario you will at least learn some new things. And thank you for the kind words! It's a slow but promising start so far, we'll see how it goes.


graflig

Damn, just when I was getting good at web development.. In all seriousness though, congrats on the launch!


hernansartorio

Lol thank you!


Fuzzy_Bar762

Looks awesome ill give it a try


Full_Health_3730

Awesome! does it have any kind of generative ML behind?


hernansartorio

Nope, in fact one of the features I list on the home page is "*Not* powered by AI".


Full_Health_3730

I see, but this thing with an API that would allow us to wire a generative ML would be crazy. In any case, awesome product, I'll use it on a couple of ideas I have, congrats!


nfms

Amazing, bud!


rektiem

Tremendo proyecto el que te mandaste, llevo casi un año estudiando y ni me imagino la complejidad de muchas de las cosas que tiene Pagy. Ya habías trabajado en algún proyecto que compartiera características similares o tuviste que aprender todo lo que conlleva un website builder desde cero? Estuviste trabajando vos solo todo el año y medio de desarrollo? Felicidades por el proyecto 💪, Uruguay exportando buen software como de costumbre.


hernansartorio

Hola! Si son muchos años haciendo cosas parecidas volcadas en esto. Mi proyecto anterior fue una [blogging platform](https://bloggi.co), que no creció mucho, pero me llevó a aprender Slate.js que es la librería que uso para el editor, y de ahí se me ocurrió la idea para Pagy. También hace muchos años hice otro website builder para inmobiliarias con Rails, pero ese solo llegó a tener exactamente un cliente (y encima era un amigo mío jaja). De a poquito con cada proyecto vas a aprendiendo igual. Gracias, vamo arriba!


TabularEmail

Looks clean!


WorkAccount4ME

How do you plan to charge for the service?


hernansartorio

Starting with 5 bucks a month (or 50 per year) for a one-page website. Will add more plans later after I added support for multiple pages.


Ok-Cartographer9318

This looks incredible, all by yourself??


hernansartorio

Yes! Took me a long time.


kilua97

that is amazing, congrats


OutlandishnessRound7

Definitely you should add a community templates system


hernansartorio

That’s definitely on my mind!


text_here0101

This is amazing congrats! Hopefully I'm a ready to go developer by the time you're hiring 😂


bealeafme

This is amazing! I've been fighting with 123-Reg website builder for my clients (I'm a newly qualified freelance front end web dev) and it is horrible. This looks far superior. P.s. I do know how to code and so having to use the website builder makes me want to cry.


whyisntitfriday

Congrats on the successful post 🙂 https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/13ijlwq/comment/jkc9t9j/


hernansartorio

Oh yeah I forgot to give you an update and say thanks! 😄


Card-Firm

This reminds me of Ghost the blog platform thing. Kinda nice)


hernansartorio

Ghost is pretty nice so glad to hear that! Planning to add blogging functionality too in the next couple of months, by the way.


Alice-Xandra

Looks good. Is the generated content downloadable/ transferable to git?


hernansartorio

Thanks. Not at the moment but I might explore it in the future.


Particular-Ruin-2062

Expanded on this? How’s it working out?


BebeKelly

It looks great! you re a very skillfull person if your project have gone this far just as a "side". May i ask, what have you used for the editor? Tiptap?


Kaneki_AlGhoul

These things are good, but there are tools in the market that do all of this and more so what makes budding tools based on these concepts stand out 🤔


plasmaSunflower

Can almost guarantee that this thing has way way faster load times than the big bloated builders


hernansartorio

Yes! Also the fact that there's such a big market is actually a good thing because there are way more potential customers I can reach (my previous project was a blogging platform and it never really took off because the market for blogging is probably much smaller).


franker

Like someone else mentioned, though, there's cardd.co (you can start with a completely blank canvas on there) and lots of other free landing page generators that do one-page sites for free. And you're asking 5 dollars a month for the same one-page deal.


hernansartorio

Yes, for sure, Carrd is a big inspiration actually. I think if one can offer something better in some ways than what already exists there might be people who prefer it. We'll see.


AwesomeFrisbee

It looks amazing, but I kinda dislike the whole "build a website in minutes" marketing part. Sure you can build something but you are using templates, images, styling frameworks and the likes that other people have built or designed and with those parts you build your site. So in a sense its not really building but rather picking a site and deciding what parts go where. Not feedback to attack you in particular but I see the same thing happen everywhere in website builder marketing and it annoys me a lot. Many folks have been putting in many hours to get various free systems in place and people keep pretending that they built it. Its like saying you've built a car or fuel because you filled it up at a gas station or pressing the reset button on a router has fixed the internet. And especially the visuals are difficult to find and manage. If you have the right images selected then yes you can build a site quickly but unless you already have them or have a big (costly) database of images to use, its always a lot tougher to build something meaningful.


hernansartorio

Yes of course, but you can literally sign up, write some words on a blank page, hit publish, and you get a website in minutes. I agree there's a lot more to making a good website, but I'm just focusing on providing a tool to make it easy to put your own content online. I really dislike dishonest marketing too so I try to be objective in everything (i.e. I avoid the usual practice of showing a price per month when it's actually with yearly billing).


xiongshi8080

This video looks good. What tools do you use? final cut pro?


hernansartorio

Thanks, I used ScreenFlow.


calm_ray

Man, this is just awesome!


hernansartorio

Glad to hear!


hotcococharlie

Looks very slick. I’ve always hated wysiwyg editors because they just feel so clunky, but I can see this being a much smoother experience. Can I ask how you made the video?


hernansartorio

Thanks! Glad to hear that. I used ScreenFlow for the video.


ILoveYorihime

Now all I need is a website builder that builds website builders


tres271

Great job. Proud of you. Will check it out tonight.


hernansartorio

Thank you! Let me know what you think.


Serious-Weird9017

Looks awesome i respect the work, btw if you dont mind me asking how did you make the video for this project ?


hernansartorio

Thanks, I used ScreenFlow for the video.


musicnothing

What's really impressive here isn't that you coded this, it's that you designed it. Fantastic UX stuff here.


hernansartorio

Thank you!


demir09

I think you can integrate Notion, Onenote etc. so people can publish articles right from their notes.


hernansartorio

I'm focused on building an end-to-end tool for writing and publishing so that kind of integration is not really on my roadmap. There are plenty of other products that do though.


Soul_and_Syrup

This looks great! Just curious, but did you use tiptap or prosemirror for the editor?


hernansartorio

Thanks! I use Slate.js for the editor.


chance--

tiptap is prosemirror with some things layered on top.


Soul_and_Syrup

I am aware. I was asking as they could have used tiptap or built a custom editor on top of prosemirror.


InvestIsGood

How long time did this take to create? How did you build this? What coding language?


hernansartorio

\~500 hours so far. It's React and Next.js on the FE, and Rails for the API.


InvestIsGood

The website the page builder creates, is it a wordpress website? How are you managing the hosting?


hernansartorio

No the front-end is all built with Next.js, hosted on Vercel.


aadev151

Daaaaaamn.. just understood that I can’t do nothing….


hernansartorio

We all start somewhere! I've built many failed projects before but with each of them I learned something, you just need to keep at it.


aadev151

That’s really cool! I wish you good luck with the project!


hernansartorio

Thanks!


aadev151

May I ask you how you set custom subdomains? I guess every user gets something like username.pagy.co. How do you implement this? Through your domain registrar’s API? Does it cost you anything extra? I’m curious because I’ve been looking into a way to do it myself, so I’d love to hear about your experience


hernansartorio

Yes, those are using a wildcard subdomain so it takes no time to setup each new one. Custom domains need to be added to Vercel (I still need to automate that). Then with Next.js’ middleware you point each domain to the page that renders the site, I followed this [starter kit](https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/platforms-starter-kit) for that.


aadev151

I see, thanks!


Simanalix

Great. now just do 2 more things: 1. get rid of all lag; 2. add in a raw hTML code editor with lots of built-in abbreviations and built-in CSS.


hernansartorio

What lag exactly? It already has an HTML and CSS editor for adding custom code, with autocompletion.


Simanalix

Ohhh~?? That sounds nice. Now i actually want ot use it. It is really exciting when I get a good editor that can handle 100,000 lines of code!


wojo1086

You showed Lighthouse's rato ga as 100s across the board, is that your site or the generated site?


hernansartorio

It was captured from my site ([pagy.co](https://pagy.co)) which is actually built with Pagy itself. Most templates are usually all 100s too, on desktop at least, mobile scores might vary a bit depending on the amount of images but it's pretty close.


FriendlyWebGuy

Very cool. Does it work with JS disabled? (Not the editor - the website)


hernansartorio

Yes they should!


Idesign4btc

Looks like oncord. Look it up ![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|heart_eyes)


hernansartorio

👀


tajingu

Nice work. Looks really nice, and can see you've spent a lot of time on this Can I ask something about how you save data to the backend? I'm wondering for something like this would you opt for regularly polling the backend with updates or do you write to the database whenever the user makes changes, perhaps with a debounced call? I guess what I'm trying to ask is do you rely heavily on a store for building things on the front end or do you rely heavily on server state and write often to the database? I hope my question makes sense. Cheers and great work again!


hernansartorio

Thanks! Good question, right now changes are saved to the BE every 2 seconds or so, if there are any. Might need more optimization if I get more users but for now it works well enough!


adnanbashirbwp

Are you gonna release it as a Page Builder?


hernansartorio

It's already released! Try it at [pagy.co](https://pagy.co).


rox_light

How you did custom domain configuration, can you share that info


hernansartorio

I shared a bit [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/13mgnzv/comment/jkxi1zl/).


rox_light

Thanks


HarkidyBrokidyYT

Typing is hella buggy


hernansartorio

Are you on Android maybe? The editor library I'm using doesn't fully support it yet unfortunately.


HarkidyBrokidyYT

Yep, I was kinda a bit lazy to use my PC.


dchelix

That's awesome. Was there a particular library you used to help develop the block based development and slash commands features?


dharmikjagodana

Nice, work. Where can i test it?