
Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours - davidjgraph
https://www.draw.io/about.html
======
stephengillie
This is great marketing. Tie in your promo to the highly-popular, highly-
dubious event as an advertising tie-in to multiply its effectiveness -- as a
fringe story involving the event, you're going to have your message repeated
automatically by others interested in the event.

You guys just reminded me that a Visio competitor exists, and you got me to
try it. You did this by using a marketing message which entertained me --
don't buy now because "tomorrow's doomsday". You gave me some entertainment
value in exchange for taking my valuable time. Thanks.

~~~
snowmiser
Google Docs also has a drawing program that I regularly substitute for Visio,
but I do hope to see these Doomsday sales become a trend today.

~~~
Nux
Libreoffice Draw or Inkscape can also be used.

~~~
pserwylo
Do you use there straight out drawing capabilities? Or is there someway/plugin
which allows the drawings to have the semantics of a graph (e.g. Line routing
or layout managers.

FYI I use yEd because it deals with all the semantic stuff very well.

------
JoeCortopassi
I know I'm missing something, but looking at the landing page, I can't
perceive any way to capitalize on this. Is Draw.io always free, so this is a
joke, or am I missing something obvious? All I see is the "Don't Sign Up"
button at the bottom.

Granted, it's an early day for me today, so I'm not exactly firing on all
cylinders

~~~
sequence7
Don't worry it's late in the day here and took me a while to work it out. It's
a joke, draw.io is always free.

~~~
Jagat
So how do they generate revenue for hosting and stuff? Donations?

~~~
davidjgraph
Selling indecent pictures of the developers. We're looking for a domain to
post them on, humblebundle.com was already taken, sadly.

------
davidjgraph
This way there's no shopping cart to go down. And anyway, it's the end of the
world, what we gonna do with the 25%?

------
pbateman
Would you be willing to offer a larger discount if I bought multiple seats? I
want to roll this out across my company before our fiery doom arrives
tomorrow.

~~~
davidjgraph
To be honest, for the next 24 hours we're focusing pretty much solely on
flagrant hedonism. And flame-retardant suits.

~~~
pbateman
My flagrant hedonism is largely dependent on charts so you can see why I'm
keen to arrive at some manner of deal. How about "buy one get one free"?

~~~
davidjgraph
How about I give you the full source code (normal retail price 999,999), you
do what you like with it and in return you give me the keys to your car with
the boot stocked full of beer?

~~~
socialist_coder
I think your humor is lost on many users here. Is this normally a product you
have to pay for?

Given that the source code is on GitHub I would assume not but, but I'm still
confused.

I also don't have a Sign Up button so I can't tell what the deal is with that
either.

~~~
davidjgraph
No, it's always been free, but hopefully that will be buried far down in the
comments. There's nothing to sign up to, everything's free. You can link it up
to your Google Drive account if you want to use that as storage, but that's
just a permissions thing.

~~~
socialist_coder
ok knowing that, this is actually a lot funnier =)

------
danielwozniak
I decided not to sign-up since they asked me not to.

~~~
davidjgraph
The sign up/don't sign up button is dynamically generated based on the
perceived desirability of the user. I wouldn't take rejection badly, the main
thing is to learn from it.

~~~
philbarr
How did they determine the "perceived desirability of the user"? Seems a
little presumptious to me - I didn't even know what it was until I clicked the
link, and the first thing they say is "we don't want you."

Well guess what - now I don't want you either.

~~~
Permit
He's joking. He's the co-creator of draw.io.

~~~
philbarr
Yes I get that now. Unfortunately, it's difficult to hear the ironic twang in
his voice on an internet forum.

------
josscrowcroft
Crap I already paid $300 for this yesterday before the sale started - can I
get a refund?

~~~
davidjgraph
Yes, I'll get straight onto that. Tomorrow.

------
king_magic
How have I never heard of draw.io to begin with? This is glorious.

Great marketing as well :)

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l0c0b0x
Fine, make fools out of those freeloaders (me), making them/us think they will
get a product free for the rest of their lives (which is supposed to last to
24 hours, RE: Doomsday).

I get it.

------
bcambel
Funny and effective

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js4all
Little typo in the line: "The full source code to both draw.io and the
underlying mxGraph library is available on gituhb"

~~~
davidjgraph
<https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io/pull/7> ?

~~~
kgermino
>git _uh_ b

Minor, but unprofessional in light of the $000,000.00 price :)

~~~
davidjgraph
Yeah, that's fixed in production now.

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rmoriz
GraphML export/import would be awesome

~~~
davidjgraph
We have got that sitting around somewhere, didn't realise anyone wanted it.

~~~
alsothings
+1 I'd love that.

~~~
ryan9379
I could use it also. It would help me migrate over from yEd.

~~~
davidjgraph
[https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/tree/master/java/src/com/m...](https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/tree/master/java/src/com/mxgraph/io/graphml)
. It's all there in the back-end, I'll switch it on after the break.

------
simonhamp
I want to give them money just for how good their landing page copy is...
hilarious! Great work :D

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mark-r
Tell me, how did you arrive at the 100% off figure without getting a divide-
by-zero error?

~~~
davidjgraph

      try
      {
        // Do something
      }
      catch
      {
        // ignore
      }
    

_puff_

------
emehrkay
Interesting, I just had my company pay 200 bucks for omnigraffle because I was
using it to make UML. This would had been perfectly fine.

Thanks for posting

------
novalis
This thing gets guitar tablature notation and I am in for 10 licenses. Either
way, great publicity stunt.

------
martinced
Who started this marketing thing? ; )

I have to say this is pure genius: I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA
IDE at 75% off (once the site shall be back up).

Whoever started it it's amazing to see other companies quickly react: I guess
seeing servers melt under the load of people ordering products made some able
to react fast.

The only thing that is too bad it's that it seems very hard to reproduce:
rarely are there such doomsday scenario that gather _that_ many attention :-/

~~~
SquareWheel

        I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off
    

Could you clarify on that? I thought it was a genuine sale. Not sure what the
trick is.

~~~
joelhooks
Ya, my immediate move to purchase several high quality JetBrains products was
purely because of the 75%, not the silly "doomsday" bit. That's cheap.

~~~
SquareWheel
Oh, I'm sure they're just having fun with it. It's just a silly theme for the
sale.

------
lurker14
I don't get it:

<http://www.jgraph.com/mxlicense.html> is a non-free license, but
<https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/blob/master/license.txt> is non-commercial
Creative Commons

Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

<https://www.draw.io/about.html> says

"As Pro Plus® ++

Unlimited Users Unlimited Drawings Full Source Code

$0 / diagram / cpu / user / hour"

And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your
page? -- Fortune 500 usually negotiate compensation for using their logos like
that, which a vendor of a free product wouldn't have time/incentive to deal
with.

~~~
davidjgraph
> Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

Sure, if you pay for it. mxGraph is dual licensed, being the copyright
holders, we can do this.

> And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your
> page?

By having the clause:

"JGraph Ltd is permitted to reference you as a user of the Software in
customer lists on the JGraph web-site, in presentations to clients and at
trade events."

In the mxGraph commercial license. A few customers remove it, most don't. Some
have asked for their logo to be removed, we always comply. But these are all
paying customers of ours that have that term in their license.

