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Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects
- shefaliprateek 10y agoHey Guys! Congratulations on the launch. I have a question, if you dont mind. I'm someone, who's been trying to build out simple SAAS business myself and wanted to understand the impact of using price arbitrage as a sales strategy. (which in Castor's case is dramatically underpriced compared to geckoboard and others.)
- wiradikusuma 10y agoJust my experience with SaaS, usually they start with ridiculously low price to capture the market. After you have established yourself, you can increase your price and grandfather early customers. You can even force your free users to upgrade to a paid plan by stating that ("upgrade now to lock old price! limited time only!").
- pc86 10y agoThat's a pretty strained definition of "force" if you're still offering the free tier.
- kayoone 10y agoWhat makes this different/better from the million of similar products or is this some kind of YC company ?
- timlyo 10y agoWas I the only one who found that website really annoying? Everything animated, chat popping up when I didn't want it.
- johndoe4589 10y agoNo you're not. Personally I find it really annoying. I hope this is a fad, along with the photos showing through "holes" as you scroll down a page. At least this is a landingpage and not a long form article, but even as a landing page I feel it is distracting. Why can't people just make really good design like you'd have in print, on a relatively static page. I guess it's the medium that calls for it. Hey, we have Javascript and CSS3 oh my! Let's do something cool! edit: it's one of those things that looks cool, and is ok in moderation. But when it's used too much it's just distracting. It calls my attention, but not for the right reasons. It stops me from being in my own flow and reading the page the way I want to read it.
- CaptSpify 10y ago> it's one of those things that looks cool, and is ok in moderation. But when it's used too much it's just distracting. I always likened it to salt: A little on my food enhances the flavor. A block of salt ruins my meal.
- marcosdumay 10y agoIt's for the wow-factor. It will stay impressive until everybody starts doing that and people start to correlate those animations with bad UI. And, it's likely that an impressive site increase sales, so it will likely spread a lot yet.
- johndoe4589 10y agoAs an aside, I noticed the above-the-fold design is very similar to [ElementFE](http://element.eleme.io/#/en-US http://element.eleme.io/#/en-US). What's up with that? Did this particular design with the slanted line originate somewhere else or are they the same people perhaps?
- dd112 10y agoI've seen this style on a few different sites. I think it's just a design fad, not something that was copied from the site you mentioned specifically.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zuzun 10y agoIt creates a smooth visual flow. Straight horizontal lines chop your website into blocks. This, on the other hand, separates your content without breaking it apart. Your link is a good example because it also has these overlapping graphics that "hang" into the next section. Stripe [1] makes heavy use of this. [1] https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/
- johndoe4589 10y agoWow.. that is a much more striking use of the "slanted" layout. Superb.. it has a little bit of "materialize" feel to it but without the cold / harsh aspect of material (imho). Or maybe Material isn't done very well in most sites / apps I've used (often times they tend to have a ton of space that's not really "white space", just badly designed empty space.. Google loves to do this by forcing mobile app layouts into a desktop site). Also this is a great use of animations. The page is fairly static, and animations are used in interactions (mouseover mostly). Adding this site to my inspiration bookmarks :)
- captn3m0 10y ago>If you need more than one dashboard or want to send data directly from you're app or server [...] s/you're/your
- dd112 10y agoThis looks nice! Can anyone recommend an opensource/self-hosted alternative? Would really like to set something like this up in the office but would prefer to host it on my internal network. Plus I like to tinker with things :)
- anilgulecha 10y agohttp://grafana.org/ http://grafana.org/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- andruby 10y agoWell there's Dashing from Shopify which has been around since 2012. We use it at the office and are happy with it. https://github.com/Shopify/dashing https://github.com/Shopify/dashing
- reacharavindh 10y agoApparently dashing is not being maintained anymore. Check its homepage. http://dashing.io http://dashing.io
- sairamkunala 10y agodashing is a pretty stable product. Its like a simple framework you can customise anything you need in it. We used it in our team to serve alarm metrics till it was deprecated in favour of Grafana. Grafana is a push model, while Dashing is a pull model. Grafana is pretty tough on RAM and svg usage. Try to use pngs and the UI is harder to adopt.
- gempir 10y agoIMO it doesn't need updates. It's stable has tons of widgets and works out of the box. Loving it even though I have never touched ruby before. In combination with graphite I can make some cool statistics and graphs
- weego 10y agoOne of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how do I know how to feel about anything I'm looking at. I know the answer to that can be "you should know your product" but I'm not sure that answer is enough.
- AznHisoka 10y agoyou know.. I have been an user of some of these paid dashboards and you hit on a very good point! historical context is something I always felt was missing. i end up having to store the history myself and comparing it but it would make sense for these dashboards to be "smart" and actually do a little more than just display the current data.
- jaxn 10y agoYou can do this with Klipfolio. That is the one I am currently using.
- Gys 10y agoI thought it was just me. I even emailed a commercial supplier and they replied (more or less) that its not a high priority.
- dotBen 10y agoWhat you are looking for is a BI (business intelligence) tool. Those typically include dashboard but also look at trends - both automatically and programmatically via your own scripting. Looker is probably my favorite currently but it depends on your needs really.
- weego 10y agoI know what you're saying, I'm often bad at meandering past the point I'm thinking of with a non-focused example. I guess in a nutshell I feel like these dashboard products, while well meaning and often very well crafted are just throwing things at your eye sockets. Showing data because you have data is not a solution in of itself.
- agopaul 10y agoThe documentation homepage (https://docs.getcastor.com/ https://docs.getcastor.com/) has a broken link ("Getting Started with Castor")
- nrjames 10y agoWhat is the best way to get a web-based dashboard -- Castor, for example -- displaying on a wall-mounted television? Is it possible to do it through an AppleTV?
- dyladan 10y agoI'd use a raspberry pi set up as a kiosk. If you google 'raspberry pi kiosk mode' there should be a fair handful of simple tutorials.
- nrjames 10y agoAwesome - thanks for the advice!
- jonasmaturana 10y agoHi nrjames, I'm working on a small service that will let you do that using a Raspberry Pi 3 and about 10 minutes of your time. Would you be interested in super early access? It would be awesome to get some feedback as I'm trying to solve that exact problem: Get a dashboard on a HD tv in an easy way.
- _joel 10y agoAgreed, they're cheap and functional. We have a couple powering a Grafana dashboard and a Dashing one. It's pretty trivial to set them up using Raspbian and create a script that loads the browser full screen and then the dashboard of choice. If you need to display more content on fewer devices then Grafana can also do playlists so that you can rotate content, plus there are some browser plugins to let you automate tab focus (so a few tabs with a dash each and one displayed every 30 seconds, for example).
- thesehands 10y agocurrently using the web based browser in our Panasonic TVs in the office.
- vbernat 10y ago
- GordonS 10y agoIs this pricing sustainable? I just can't see how there is enough demand to keep this afloat at $40/year?
- wallzz 10y agoyou should check the readme, I got a 404 error at https://docs.getcastor.com/getting-started.md https://docs.getcastor.com/getting-started.md
- AgTech_Expert 10y agoHow Castor different from any of the other data dashboard alternatives that exist? Is there anything that sets it apart from its competitors?
- koolba 10y agoNew year, new SaaS dashboard company... It's nice to see transparent pricing though I wonder how realistic it is. $4/month for unlimited everything, regardless of customer size? While it's nice to see pricing thats 1-2 orders of magnitude less that competitors (seriously look it up), forget turning a profit, you could easily get net-negative per customer on bandwidth pricing alone. The trailer says, "Castor is a service edited by 10033111 Canada Inc. By using Castor, you agree to our terms and conditions." yet it doesn't have a link to the terms of service. Also, not judging too much but "10033111 Canada Inc" sounds like the name of a company created by a computer that makes companies.
- xyzzy_plugh 10y agoIt's a numbered corporation, an easy way to set up a company in Canada. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_company Named companies cost more, IIRC.
- koolba 10y agoJust read a bit more about numbered corporations in Canada. That's a pretty neat solution to ensuring uniqueness of corporate names. It's like the non-tech equivalent of a central service issuing sequential IDs.
- iamzozo 10y agoBtw, it's interesting, that a guy wanted to imigrate to Canada, in this post, with this HN item id: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033111
- koolba 10y agoHaha! I found that too after Googling the number. Thought it was a weird coincidence as well.
- pjssjppjs 10y agoThat's a bad name for selling it in Germany. It is used as the name of Atomic waste trains [1] here and these were often in the press, because of protests agains further production of atomic waste and the assumed ineptitude of a potential final diposal site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#Germany
- Kiro 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor Besides, having the same name as a nuclear waste container seems like a really trivial issue compared to the usual "your name means something dirty or offensive in my language".
- xmatos 10y agopromising. it even has a clock widget :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuDS0ntaJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuDS0ntaJY
- ishwarn 10y agoNoticed a small typo here https://app.getcastor.com/#!/login https://app.getcastor.com/#!/login "Sign up an login using an identity provider:" should be "Sign up and login using an identity provider:" Also, uBlock origin is hiding the facebook/google login buttons for me.
- nanoanderson 10y agoThis looks exactly like Panic's old StatusBoard https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-status-board/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-status-board/
- andrethegiant 10y agoYep. Glad to see someone else carry the torch since StatusBoard has halted development.
- njx 10y agoCongratulations! from a fellow dashboard maker (infocaptor) You need to add more connections and increase the price. I don't know how many will take you seriously at $4/month.
- blaget 10y agoThanks everyone for your encouraging feedback! We've processed (most of) the bugs + typos, and realized a quick video to showcase Castor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLqvLqeNI9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLqvLqeNI9M). We're also working on public dashboards (ie. share your dashboard with anyone/any device without the need to login) and that feature should be shipped in the next few hours. Thanks again!