7 ms·

SnapDiagram – Instantly Convert Hand-Drawn Diagrams to Digital with AI

108 points by tompreneur 2y ago

tompreneur 2y ago
Hey Hacker News, I'm excited to introduce SnapDiagram, an AI-powered web app that allows users to seamlessly transform hand-crafted diagrams into polished, digital visuals. Whether you're sketching ideas during a brainstorming session or mapping out a quick process flow on paper, SnapDiagram can help you bring those rough drafts into the digital world, instantly and effortlessly. How it works: - Snap a photo of your hand-drawn diagram using your phone or upload an image from your computer. - Our AI processes the image to recognize shapes, text, and connections. - Get a clean, editable digital version that you can export in various formats, share, or enhance further. Checkout how it works on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cq8B7vTXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cq8B7vTXw
- groby_b 2y ago
  Congrats on building this into a working app! But as far as I can tell, this is simply a workflow that e.g. ChatGPT and Claude have supported for quite a while now. (It's what I do with my whiteboard diagrams) Which means you'll probably need to think of a value add to help it gain traction. I'm curious to see where you'll be taking it!
  - humansareok1 2y ago
    The people willing to pay 20$ to learn to use ChatGPT/Claude to accomplish this probably doesn't have much overlap with the people willing to pay x$ to have a clean web interface to do just this one task.
    - groby_b 2y ago
      IDK - the "help me get stuff done" crowd seems to use LLMs fairly frequently. If I'm wrong and they're disjoint markets, more power to tompreneur. But even then, it means his moat is very thin. (It might have been a different proposition when doing this took major prompting gyrations, but multimodal LLMs have gotten pretty amazing in the last few months) Of course, if it's just a hobby project, it doesn't matter. But if this is in search of traction, it very much does.
jaysonelliot 2y ago
This is an outstanding first release. I hope stylizing the diagrams automatically for visual impact is on the roadmap.
- tompreneur 2y ago
  Thanks for the support jaysonelliot! Yes! the first iteration of this new feature would allow the user choose from certain predefined styles.
adamsocrat 2y ago
I was searching something like this to convert my maps, charts drawings in iPad to Obsidian. But 1 diagram/month is so not enough. Yes 3$ for 50 diagram/month is looks like a better option compared to the free but it's still a paid option. It is cumbersome for me to start another paid service let alone another risk of trust I am putting myself in. Make it free option 15 diagram/month and let people try your site fully so that who uses it that 15 diagram can switch to paid option.
- tompreneur 2y ago
  Hey adamsocrat, thanks for your interest in SnapDiagram! If you tried it and fulfills your needs, we can provide you with one month free of charge of the basic plan. So you can decide if it is worth it, and help us improve it.
- thelastparadise 2y ago
  Curious, would you be more likely to pay for a service like this if you could pay per use with a very low friction checkout?
- tptacek 2y ago
  Counterpoint: no matter what product you ship, someone is always going to tell you that you should have a free plan generous enough that they won't need to pay for it, and if you listen to them you'll go out of business. The object of this game is to be creating enough value that people who love your product willingly pay for it, not to create just enough value that people who dabble in your product use it once in awhile.
  - adamsocrat 2y ago
    The problem is here not free plan generous enough, free plan that lets you enough taste from the desert that you want to have the whole piece.
- humansareok1 2y ago
  I mean sure I want people to clean my house and mow my lawn for me for free too but services have costs...
Syzygies 2y ago
I want to go in the other direction: Take computer-generated math animation and make it look like Walt Disney was in his office "relaxing" while fifty artists drew each frame in a better version of my artist's hand.
- tompreneur 2y ago
  This is a cool idea
smcleod 2y ago
I don’t see why you need a seperate app / subscription for this. Claude does this very well, as do local VLMs such as InternVLM. They generate mermaid graphs which you can use directly or import to excalidraw.
- humansareok1 2y ago
  Do you think average joe knows about let alone knows how to use Claude for this?
  - smcleod 2y ago
    I mean you just type “create this diagram”…
    - washadjeffmad 2y ago
      Microsoft offers "certification" for Copilot usage. I stopped offering to build custom demos for AGI pipelines last year because people just didn't get it. April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" pretty simply covers why, because as very much not a product-person, I frequently fall prey to "if you build it, they will come" mentality.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I feel like we are building a very large and complex interface between human beings and the internet, so that we are becoming more like mechanical nodes on the network, where slowly the idiosyncracies of individuality are being erased. That's not unique to AI, but AI is a major component of it now. I can imagine future scenarios where every part of our communication is passed through an AI filter until we are all perfectly tuned to be mindless consumers of information. This SnapDiagram does it for sketches, and LLMs do it for text. Soon everyone will sound very similar and the system will be able to remove any aspect of individuality that is troublesome to it with a mere parameter tuning. The little picture is just a conversion to a more readable diagram. The big picture is the slow erasing of the human spirit.
- hntcz 2y ago
  Damn, well put!
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  So all the highly unique, contextually relevant and aesthetically pleasing AI art that I am seeing pop up in blogs, chats, documentation, presentations, etc where before there would have been nothing or maaaybe some ultra-generic clipart, this explosion of creativity is slowly erasing the human spirit? Nah. Looks like the opposite, if anything. "It all looks the same" -> there's plenty of room for better prompting and models. Just look at civit.ai -- the "sameness" problem is just low skill with the new tools. The floor used to be "looks like a kid drew it," now the floor is "looks like the default StableDiffusion style." Replace with whatever domain you are interested in, I am using art as an example because it is comparatively further down the maturation curve. In any case, the ceiling is high and it still takes effort to reach, but the bar is raised everywhere.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > So all the highly unique, contextually relevant and aesthetically pleasing AI art that I am seeing pop up in blogs, chats, documentation, presentations, etc where before there would have been nothing or maaaybe some ultra-generic clipart, this explosion of creativity is slowly erasing the human spirit? Nah. Looks like the opposite, if anything. None of that art represents the individual experience of a person any more. It's all a psychotic averaging. I've seen that art too and I find it disgusting. I don't see anything people are producing with AI as representing the human spirit. I see it as humans being plugged into a machine pushed to create and create and for what? What's the next step? It's horrific and should be destroyed.
alok-g 2y ago
@Tompreneur, I would like to learn more about the features: - What types of diagrams does this support? E.g., could the diagrams include some cartoons, artwork, icons, besides generic shapes like ellipses and arrows like shown in the video? - What editable formats are supported? SVG? - Privacy policy stuff. Would my diagrams be stored in the account? (I prefer not. I like it stateless.) I am happy to try to find above answers myself, however, do not want to create a login just for trying. Also, I prefer site-specific login systems as opppsed to BigCo login IDs like Google mentioned. I need to digitise about 15-20 diagrams. If it would work for these, I am ready to pay $10 for these. (I've seen the pricing at $3 for more diagrams than what I need.)
- tompreneur 2y ago
  Hi alok-g, thanks for your interest in SnapDiagram! The application focuses mainly on converting simple diagrams of connected shapes with text. May work with some simple icon, but probably won't work for cartoons or complex artwork. The editable file is compatible with https://app.diagrams.net https://app.diagrams.net. If you need an SVG, you can import your editable file there and export it as SVG. The application does not store your diagrams permanently. These have a max TTL of 12hs.
  - alok-g 2y ago
    >> converting simple diagrams of connected shapes with text All 10+ AI-based diagramming solutions I see on the web are like that.
sidcool 2y ago
One diagram per month for free.
cal85 2y ago
What’s the “Editable file” format?
vzaliva 2y ago
Nice job! This is something I would use. However, the pricing plans are not friendly for occasional users. I maybe use it 10 times a year, but the only option is a monthly subscription. I wish they also had pay-per-use plans. This illustrates the annoying trend for software products to insist on monthly subscriptions. I understand that businesses want recurring revenue, but many users would rather pay upfront or per use.
- seattleeng 2y ago
  I get your point but its $3/mo or $18/yr. If a diagram isnt worth 1.80 to you then you probably wouldnt have bought it even with pay as you go
  - sramam 2y ago
    I have always wondered if projects like this would be better off having a pay-as-you-go-model. One example: - Minimum account balance to start: $10. - $1/use - Then top-off as you need - no balance expiry (outside service going bust)
    - seattleeng 2y ago
      A credit based model with minimum add amounts like that does sound like a great alternative if people prefer usage based pricing. From what Ive seen usage pricing actually drives a lot of anxiety even if the end cost is lower
    - jen729w 2y ago
      Auphonic has this model and I’ve been a happy on/off customer for 10+ years now. (They do audio processing.)
for_i_in_range 2y ago
Cool idea and implementation. Great job. I personally hand draw diagrams and then recreate them in Balsamiq (old school). I, myself, won't use it because there's a lot of creation and innovation that happens in the transition phase when going from hand-drawn sketches to creating the diagrams.
Dig1t 2y ago
Oh man this is a great idea. I can't count the number of times I've spent an hour in a meeting diagraming stuff on a whiteboard and then taken a picture of the whiteboard on the way out. This would be super useful for documenting the results of meetings like this.
vunderba 2y ago
You can actually do this now - I've taken a great deal of my hand written workflow diagrams, snapped a picture of them, and asked chatGPT to convert them to mermaid UML. It was one of the more impressive demonstrations of multimodal AI. You can also import mermaid into Google's Draw.io app if you want to reflow or change the theme.
- emahhh 2y ago
  I did something really similar by converting handwritten math to LaTeX. This use case (and yours as well) can be really useful and works well just by using ChatGPT. In many cases people are just building wrappers of gpt-4o, but I can see some room for improvement by building on top of OpenAI’s APIs.
- smcleod 2y ago
  Even better - Excalidraw supports importing mermaid - and it has a built in AI tool where you can bring your own LLM via an API to generate diagram without even leaving the app.
- samstave 2y ago
  an FYI-You-should-too -- I am a huge fan of telling claude to give me mermaids and swim diagrams of most of the logic and code I am iterating with. I like to do the following: "Review this code and give me a readme, include mermaid, swim diagrams to draw the logic." Claude is great because it renders the mermaid in the artifact (most times). then I can copy the mermaid into a mermaidlive (I still havent found the best mermaid site because some of them choke on the mmd output of claude and I dont know how to fix it sometimes... for example - here is a mermaid where I was looking into how the universities, professors and families of SBF, Holmes and Ellison were tied: https://i.imgur.com/njFKvmJ.png https://i.imgur.com/njFKvmJ.png Here is a mermaid of who sits on the agra committees, who funds their campaigns, and who did they make investments into wrt to the sugar lobby: https://i.imgur.com/FGGcvxL.png https://i.imgur.com/FGGcvxL.png Having chatbots do mermaids is fn fantastic
howmayiannoyyou 2y ago
Credit card sign up not working. Would prefer to pay via Amazon Pay, Google Pay or Stripe given past history with Paypal.
codersfocus 2y ago
I have a need for something like this. I want to convert hand written / drawn stuff to SVG. Not to a defined diagram schema though, just freeform SVG. Any suggestions on alternative tools? For pricing reference, I would be incorporating this into my app, and users might convert 1 page a day. For what I would earn, your pricing model would be completely unusable. I will have to build either a CV pipeline or use NNs, I imagine. Not sure which is the better approach for my task.
janice1999 2y ago
No privacy policy link on your landing page is a red flag and will discourage users.
weidezhang 2y ago
very cool and a very useful tool to integrate with drawio and lucidchards or visio maybe ?
weidezhang 2y ago
very cool tool.
xra_11 2y ago
Can't you do this with https://flowchart.fun https://flowchart.fun?
- tonerow 2y ago
  No, you can’t upload an image- it’s just via prompt. SnapDiagram looks really useful!

108 points by tompreneur 2y ago

Hey Hacker News, I'm excited to introduce SnapDiagram, an AI-powered web app that allows users to seamlessly transform hand-crafted diagrams into polished, digital visuals. Whether you're sketching ideas during a brainstorming session or mapping out a quick process flow on paper, SnapDiagram can help you bring those rough drafts into the digital world, instantly and effortlessly. How it works: - Snap a photo of your hand-drawn diagram using your phone or upload an image from your computer. - Our AI processes the image to recognize shapes, text, and connections. - Get a clean, editable digital version that you can export in various formats, share, or enhance further. Checkout how it works on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cq8B7vTXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cq8B7vTXw

groby_b 2y ago
Congrats on building this into a working app! But as far as I can tell, this is simply a workflow that e.g. ChatGPT and Claude have supported for quite a while now. (It's what I do with my whiteboard diagrams) Which means you'll probably need to think of a value add to help it gain traction. I'm curious to see where you'll be taking it!
- humansareok1 2y ago
  The people willing to pay 20$ to learn to use ChatGPT/Claude to accomplish this probably doesn't have much overlap with the people willing to pay x$ to have a clean web interface to do just this one task.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    IDK - the "help me get stuff done" crowd seems to use LLMs fairly frequently. If I'm wrong and they're disjoint markets, more power to tompreneur. But even then, it means his moat is very thin. (It might have been a different proposition when doing this took major prompting gyrations, but multimodal LLMs have gotten pretty amazing in the last few months) Of course, if it's just a hobby project, it doesn't matter. But if this is in search of traction, it very much does.

jaysonelliot 2y ago

This is an outstanding first release. I hope stylizing the diagrams automatically for visual impact is on the roadmap.

tompreneur 2y ago
Thanks for the support jaysonelliot! Yes! the first iteration of this new feature would allow the user choose from certain predefined styles.

adamsocrat 2y ago

I was searching something like this to convert my maps, charts drawings in iPad to Obsidian. But 1 diagram/month is so not enough. Yes 3$ for 50 diagram/month is looks like a better option compared to the free but it's still a paid option. It is cumbersome for me to start another paid service let alone another risk of trust I am putting myself in. Make it free option 15 diagram/month and let people try your site fully so that who uses it that 15 diagram can switch to paid option.

tompreneur 2y ago
Hey adamsocrat, thanks for your interest in SnapDiagram! If you tried it and fulfills your needs, we can provide you with one month free of charge of the basic plan. So you can decide if it is worth it, and help us improve it.
thelastparadise 2y ago
Curious, would you be more likely to pay for a service like this if you could pay per use with a very low friction checkout?
tptacek 2y ago
Counterpoint: no matter what product you ship, someone is always going to tell you that you should have a free plan generous enough that they won't need to pay for it, and if you listen to them you'll go out of business. The object of this game is to be creating enough value that people who love your product willingly pay for it, not to create just enough value that people who dabble in your product use it once in awhile.
- adamsocrat 2y ago
  The problem is here not free plan generous enough, free plan that lets you enough taste from the desert that you want to have the whole piece.
humansareok1 2y ago
I mean sure I want people to clean my house and mow my lawn for me for free too but services have costs...

Syzygies 2y ago

I want to go in the other direction: Take computer-generated math animation and make it look like Walt Disney was in his office "relaxing" while fifty artists drew each frame in a better version of my artist's hand.

tompreneur 2y ago
This is a cool idea

smcleod 2y ago

I don’t see why you need a seperate app / subscription for this. Claude does this very well, as do local VLMs such as InternVLM. They generate mermaid graphs which you can use directly or import to excalidraw.

humansareok1 2y ago
Do you think average joe knows about let alone knows how to use Claude for this?
- smcleod 2y ago
  I mean you just type “create this diagram”…
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    Microsoft offers "certification" for Copilot usage. I stopped offering to build custom demos for AGI pipelines last year because people just didn't get it. April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" pretty simply covers why, because as very much not a product-person, I frequently fall prey to "if you build it, they will come" mentality.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

I feel like we are building a very large and complex interface between human beings and the internet, so that we are becoming more like mechanical nodes on the network, where slowly the idiosyncracies of individuality are being erased. That's not unique to AI, but AI is a major component of it now. I can imagine future scenarios where every part of our communication is passed through an AI filter until we are all perfectly tuned to be mindless consumers of information. This SnapDiagram does it for sketches, and LLMs do it for text. Soon everyone will sound very similar and the system will be able to remove any aspect of individuality that is troublesome to it with a mere parameter tuning. The little picture is just a conversion to a more readable diagram. The big picture is the slow erasing of the human spirit.

hntcz 2y ago
Damn, well put!
schmidtleonard 2y ago
So all the highly unique, contextually relevant and aesthetically pleasing AI art that I am seeing pop up in blogs, chats, documentation, presentations, etc where before there would have been nothing or maaaybe some ultra-generic clipart, this explosion of creativity is slowly erasing the human spirit? Nah. Looks like the opposite, if anything. "It all looks the same" -> there's plenty of room for better prompting and models. Just look at civit.ai -- the "sameness" problem is just low skill with the new tools. The floor used to be "looks like a kid drew it," now the floor is "looks like the default StableDiffusion style." Replace with whatever domain you are interested in, I am using art as an example because it is comparatively further down the maturation curve. In any case, the ceiling is high and it still takes effort to reach, but the bar is raised everywhere.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > So all the highly unique, contextually relevant and aesthetically pleasing AI art that I am seeing pop up in blogs, chats, documentation, presentations, etc where before there would have been nothing or maaaybe some ultra-generic clipart, this explosion of creativity is slowly erasing the human spirit? Nah. Looks like the opposite, if anything. None of that art represents the individual experience of a person any more. It's all a psychotic averaging. I've seen that art too and I find it disgusting. I don't see anything people are producing with AI as representing the human spirit. I see it as humans being plugged into a machine pushed to create and create and for what? What's the next step? It's horrific and should be destroyed.

alok-g 2y ago

@Tompreneur, I would like to learn more about the features: - What types of diagrams does this support? E.g., could the diagrams include some cartoons, artwork, icons, besides generic shapes like ellipses and arrows like shown in the video? - What editable formats are supported? SVG? - Privacy policy stuff. Would my diagrams be stored in the account? (I prefer not. I like it stateless.) I am happy to try to find above answers myself, however, do not want to create a login just for trying. Also, I prefer site-specific login systems as opppsed to BigCo login IDs like Google mentioned. I need to digitise about 15-20 diagrams. If it would work for these, I am ready to pay $10 for these. (I've seen the pricing at $3 for more diagrams than what I need.)

tompreneur 2y ago
Hi alok-g, thanks for your interest in SnapDiagram! The application focuses mainly on converting simple diagrams of connected shapes with text. May work with some simple icon, but probably won't work for cartoons or complex artwork. The editable file is compatible with https://app.diagrams.net https://app.diagrams.net. If you need an SVG, you can import your editable file there and export it as SVG. The application does not store your diagrams permanently. These have a max TTL of 12hs.
- alok-g 2y ago
  >> converting simple diagrams of connected shapes with text All 10+ AI-based diagramming solutions I see on the web are like that.

sidcool 2y ago

One diagram per month for free.

cal85 2y ago

What’s the “Editable file” format?

vzaliva 2y ago

Nice job! This is something I would use. However, the pricing plans are not friendly for occasional users. I maybe use it 10 times a year, but the only option is a monthly subscription. I wish they also had pay-per-use plans. This illustrates the annoying trend for software products to insist on monthly subscriptions. I understand that businesses want recurring revenue, but many users would rather pay upfront or per use.

seattleeng 2y ago
I get your point but its $3/mo or $18/yr. If a diagram isnt worth 1.80 to you then you probably wouldnt have bought it even with pay as you go
- sramam 2y ago
  I have always wondered if projects like this would be better off having a pay-as-you-go-model. One example: - Minimum account balance to start: $10. - $1/use - Then top-off as you need - no balance expiry (outside service going bust)
  - seattleeng 2y ago
    A credit based model with minimum add amounts like that does sound like a great alternative if people prefer usage based pricing. From what Ive seen usage pricing actually drives a lot of anxiety even if the end cost is lower
  - jen729w 2y ago
    Auphonic has this model and I’ve been a happy on/off customer for 10+ years now. (They do audio processing.)

for_i_in_range 2y ago

Cool idea and implementation. Great job. I personally hand draw diagrams and then recreate them in Balsamiq (old school). I, myself, won't use it because there's a lot of creation and innovation that happens in the transition phase when going from hand-drawn sketches to creating the diagrams.

Dig1t 2y ago

Oh man this is a great idea. I can't count the number of times I've spent an hour in a meeting diagraming stuff on a whiteboard and then taken a picture of the whiteboard on the way out. This would be super useful for documenting the results of meetings like this.

vunderba 2y ago

You can actually do this now - I've taken a great deal of my hand written workflow diagrams, snapped a picture of them, and asked chatGPT to convert them to mermaid UML. It was one of the more impressive demonstrations of multimodal AI. You can also import mermaid into Google's Draw.io app if you want to reflow or change the theme.

emahhh 2y ago
I did something really similar by converting handwritten math to LaTeX. This use case (and yours as well) can be really useful and works well just by using ChatGPT. In many cases people are just building wrappers of gpt-4o, but I can see some room for improvement by building on top of OpenAI’s APIs.
smcleod 2y ago
Even better - Excalidraw supports importing mermaid - and it has a built in AI tool where you can bring your own LLM via an API to generate diagram without even leaving the app.
samstave 2y ago
an FYI-You-should-too -- I am a huge fan of telling claude to give me mermaids and swim diagrams of most of the logic and code I am iterating with. I like to do the following: "Review this code and give me a readme, include mermaid, swim diagrams to draw the logic." Claude is great because it renders the mermaid in the artifact (most times). then I can copy the mermaid into a mermaidlive (I still havent found the best mermaid site because some of them choke on the mmd output of claude and I dont know how to fix it sometimes... for example - here is a mermaid where I was looking into how the universities, professors and families of SBF, Holmes and Ellison were tied: https://i.imgur.com/njFKvmJ.png https://i.imgur.com/njFKvmJ.png Here is a mermaid of who sits on the agra committees, who funds their campaigns, and who did they make investments into wrt to the sugar lobby: https://i.imgur.com/FGGcvxL.png https://i.imgur.com/FGGcvxL.png Having chatbots do mermaids is fn fantastic

howmayiannoyyou 2y ago

Credit card sign up not working. Would prefer to pay via Amazon Pay, Google Pay or Stripe given past history with Paypal.

codersfocus 2y ago

I have a need for something like this. I want to convert hand written / drawn stuff to SVG. Not to a defined diagram schema though, just freeform SVG. Any suggestions on alternative tools? For pricing reference, I would be incorporating this into my app, and users might convert 1 page a day. For what I would earn, your pricing model would be completely unusable. I will have to build either a CV pipeline or use NNs, I imagine. Not sure which is the better approach for my task.

janice1999 2y ago

No privacy policy link on your landing page is a red flag and will discourage users.

weidezhang 2y ago

very cool and a very useful tool to integrate with drawio and lucidchards or visio maybe ?

weidezhang 2y ago

very cool tool.

xra_11 2y ago

Can't you do this with https://flowchart.fun https://flowchart.fun?

tonerow 2y ago
No, you can’t upload an image- it’s just via prompt. SnapDiagram looks really useful!