Co-founder of Creo here. We realized that providing common features like auth, components, group permissions, and white-labeled deployment adds significant value, especially for those seeking an opinionated solution. While these tasks are relatively straightforward to achieve, they can be time-consuming due to the numerous options available.
I want to be convinced because building internal tooling is hard.
But I sense that your solution should actually be an open source repo starter and not a $30/month plan based on number of users. That seems absurd because we are still the ones building most of the tool.
auth - why do I want to use your auth over the many tried and tested auth solutions for Next.js? Where are you hosting the user data? Or are we hosting the auth data ourselves?
Components - there is a hundred dashboard component UI libraries. Some of them are very extensive and good. Why do I have to pay for this?
Group permissions - this seems fairly straight forward to implement. Some auth solutions also have this built in.
White label deployment - what does this even mean? Next.js deployment is easy enough on Vercel.
In terms of AI offering, it’s not much different than asking ChatGPT and I already pay them $20/month.
I hope it doesn’t come off mean because I do want something that is more powerful than retool but easier than coding from the start. I just don’t see the value at all in this.
> we are still the ones building most of the tool.
You will always have to build the piece of software that's specific to your needs. A framework can only make it simpler. Today, we are writing code; tomorrow, you'll need to prompt/draw/imagine in your head (hopefully) to get something built.
> auth - why do I want to use your auth over the many tried and tested auth solutions for Next.js? Where are you hosting the user data? Or are we hosting the auth data ourselves?
To set up auth, you'll need to set up keys, webhooks, and SSO for the providers. Just to mention, the auth is not part of the boilerplate; the auth is applied when your repo is deployed, as we embed your repo on our platform.
We are also using Supabase internally, so that's where the user data is hosted. You can of course build your solution with one of the many solutions out there. But we wanted to keep it simple keeping in mind all the use cases of a regular internal tool. For example, it may change to something else as we offer SAML, etc.
> Components - there is a hundred dashboard component UI libraries. Some of them are very extensive and good. Why do I have to pay for this?
You are right, there are many options, and most of the time, going ahead with any of the maintained ones works out with no issues. We want to be one of those many. Right now, we are using shadcn/ui, but later, we will develop/extend components that are frequently used in internal tools with a reduced number of properties. Our UI library will be open-sourced; it's not something you will have to pay for, and you can use it with any of your projects, as it's an npm package.
> Group permissions - this seems fairly straight forward to implement. Some auth solutions also have this built in.
Yes, it's straightforward, but time-consuming to build. I have yet to see a built-in solution where you can configure things like which team/group should have access to which tools. Most built-in solutions stop at assigning groups/roles, and it's because tools (or some generic entity) may not be relevant to their users (unless it's a solution for internal tools).
> In terms of AI offering, it’s not much different than asking ChatGPT and I already pay them $20/month.
We want to be on top of the game in terms of the AI when it comes to any knowledge that Creo should have, like its components, how to glue them together, error handling, and being fast with feedback loops (not taking a huge prompt and minutes to build the entire app like many other solutions). ChatGPT could be really good, but it will be spitting out unopinionated code, and to get it to produce code in a certain way, you'll need to prompt it heavily. Think of mentioning "Use shadcn's card in light theme" every time you want a card component. The value here is in the context being provided by default.
You are basically charging money for things that frameworks like Django already have built-in, and have already had built-in for decades. There are so many good free options for this sort of thing. If a company already pays developers, there's absolutely no way they won't just build things themselves.
All of your selling points are things that business people think are difficult but any developer worth their salt will tell you is no problem.
Edit: to add a bit more info here... think of it this way: I am a frontend developer. I can build a specific dashboard in about 2 months, using things I am already familiar with and will look great. Instead, I can use your product and reduce the amount of time it will take to 1 month, but lock us into paying a monthly subscription for the rest of time. How could I possibly convince somebody to buy that?
Well, if it costs $10,000 all-in to pay a developer for 1 month, and Creo costs $30/month, then it would take 27 years to break even on having a developer spend the extra month building it from scratch.
I had a flick through the docs but I don’t quite get how deployment / connection to dbs etc works.
My experience this these tools is that they generally end up having a convoluted system in order to let you use the tool while connecting to your own dbs without handing over access or you hand over access.
1. You clone our starter, which is a Next.js boilerplate with our UI package (uses shadcn): `npx creoctl@latest init`
2. You run npm run dev, and this starts the local server. You'll get a chat prompt on the screen where you can ask the AI to make the changes, and it'll write the changes to the disk, or you can write code by yourself in your IDE.
Additionally, we do have an AI offering as well, which has the information about the components, check out this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDTk1SmtpXw