

Show HN: Stencils.io – Graffletopia alternative for free OmniGraffle stencils - subbu
http://stencils.io/

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usablebytes
I'm one of the authors. We hope it's a good start of a collection for
OmniGraffle users. Requesting everyone to contribute; submit more stencils and
make this place great.

~~~
jcater
This is a great idea! I was shocked to see the stunt pulled by graffletopia
given the community goodwill it had. Hopefully you can fill the void left by
their dickish move.

FYI, clicking on "Submit a free stencil" takes me to a warning:

> We're sorry. This document is not published.

~~~
sbarre
"Dickish move" is a strange way to put that. Do you think their service is
free to operate?

If you're an Omnigraffle user, you've already paid for a professional-grade
application, and the stencils offered by Graffletopia are inarguably huge time
savers.

$24/year, even if you only use one stencil in one project, should be an
expense not even worth mentioning (15-30 billable minutes?) for most
professionals. Certainly when compared to the time required to create all
those assets yourself instead.

Anyhow, to each their own, but I don't understand this kind of angry reaction
when a free service becomes very popular and decides to start charging a
completely reasonable fee for their offering.

Especially from an entrepreneurial community like HN.

~~~
rrrx3
The problem is that they are charging money for things that are free to
distribute. I think most of the Graffle creators would be upset with this
development if they were aware of how disingenuous this was. In fact, they
(Graffletopia) are taking advantage of the fact that most of the items are not
licensed in any way. For example:
[https://www.graffletopia.com/stencils/1197](https://www.graffletopia.com/stencils/1197)

This guy could very easily put his graffle on github (as Viget has done here:
[https://github.com/vigetlabs/Twitter-Bootstrap-for-
Omnigraff...](https://github.com/vigetlabs/Twitter-Bootstrap-for-Omnigraffle)
and License it as MIT, GPL, whatever.

$36 is not a reasonable amount to ask for. Nor is $24, especially in the days
of Amazon S3 hosting, or even putting a slick static page up and pointing
contributors and downloaders to Github. I respect the marketplace aspect,
letting posters set a price on their work and taking something off the top.
That's not dissimilar at all to what the Tuts+ and Medialoot marketplaces do.
But they don't charge you to download their freebies, and charging someone for
a membership to download more than one free item a month is total bullshit.

~~~
subbu
stencils.io is actually a static webpage with direct links to the stencil's
original locations.

~~~
rrrx3
Thumbs up to you for doing it the right way.

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scottfr
What are the pro/cons as compared to Graffletopia?

Graffletopia seemed to be perfectly functional to me.

~~~
subbu
Graffletopia used to be completely free. You could download as many stencils
as you wished. Now its $24/year; you can download only one free stencil a
month. $24 isn't a problem. But charging for community contributed stencils is
disgraceful. As someone on Quora ([http://qr.ae/nm6Vf](http://qr.ae/nm6Vf))
said: _Actually, most of the good new stencils on Omnigraffle are no longer
free. But the problem is these are not included with the subscription = lame.
After downloading so many free stencils over the years, I don 't mind paying a
small annual fee. But what's the point if I still have to pay $20-50 for any
of the good ones?_

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james2vegas
Now if only there were a free omnigraffle alternative that can read these
stencils

~~~
subbu
There are a few: draw.io, Google drawing, LibreOffice drawing etc. But nothing
comes close to omnigraffle.

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goombastic
Looks good! I might give it a spin.

