
Show HN: Stackdraft – create and present 3D cloud architecture diagrams - mkarnicki
https://www.stackdraft.io
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mkarnicki
Hi all,

This is my very first post on HackerNews, although I’ve been a silent follower
of this amazing, diverse community for years now.

My name is Michał Karnicki and I wanted to share what I've spent the last 6
months on, days and nights, and most of my savings. I'm equally excited and
nervous to share it with you all :)! Stackdraft is a fully bootstrapped
project.

The longer version of this story is actually available on the Pricing page, so
I'll keep it short and sweet. Stackdraft allows you to create AND present 3D
cloud architecture diagrams. You're not fixed to a single cloud provider or
the isometric projection. It currently support AWS, GCP and DigitalOcean icon
sets, but I have plans for more fancy 3D models as well, besides other things
I mention on the website. Inspired by both the good sides and limitations of
other diagramming solutions, I decided to try create my own. And that's how
Stackdraft was born.

Stackdraft is in Beta, that's why there's an Early Adopters plan on the
pricing page. I'm hoping to get some initial users seriously interested in the
project as a tool for their work, close registration (so I'm not overwhelmed -
haha I wish, eh ;)?), and use the feedback from them to polish the tool. If
you're interested in cloud architectures, please help me shape the future of
Stackdraft and consider subscribing - there's 14 day trial, 30 day money back
guarantee, and it currently costs a BigMac set per month :).

There is a famous quote by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn: If you are
not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too
late.

So here I am! More than happy to answer your questions :). Thank you for
checking out Stackdraft!

~~~
mkarnicki
All right guys, looks like I can get some sleep now ;). If there's more
questions, I'll definitely reply to them tomorrow, thanks!

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geoah
This seems like a nice (and non aws-only) replacement for cloudcraft, thank
you.

I wonder why both services limit their assets to only architecture-level
components and provide people a generic library with assets for uml or other
diagrams. I'd definitely be interested in a 3d alternative to eg lucidcharts.

~~~
mkarnicki
Thank you for your kind words. Yes - Stackdraft was partially inspired by
Cloudcrafts sole focus on AWS. I don't blame Tomas though, only on surface
supporting multiple providers seems like an easy task - I'm sure it's not. At
this early stage of Stackdraft I focused on diagramming and presenting and
naturally plan to add more advanced features.

To answer your second statement - I think it's a matter of doing one thing
only and one thing well. While I do plan to support sub-resource level items
like containers, I doubt the tool will reach as far as UML/software modeling,
at least not in the foreseeable future. Do note I received lots of feedback
from a LucidCharts users, who draws architecture diagrams, and in general
there's a few good parts of LucidCharts I'd like to take example from.

Regardless, I will always welcome any ideas for Stackdraft, so thank you very
much for your feedback :)! I appreciate you took time to leave this comment.

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caio1982
Nice graphics, I really liked it is "multi-provider" :-)

~~~
mkarnicki
Thank you! I really hope to improve the graphics further with postprocessing,
more custom 3D models, etc.

Yes, 'multi-provider' was one of the reasons I built it :). You can naturally
mix the icon sets as you wish, if you have cross cloud infrastructure, which
is becoming more popular these days for HA purposes.

Thanks for your comment!

