Ask IH: Review my side-project and my plan to generate income?
It's been roughly three months since I launched https://svgbox.net. I have been working slowly to improve it. So what is it? It's the simplest way to use web icons.
I have been a frontend developer for a while, and I always have found using icons a big PITA. Font files suck. Because you have build this complex pipelines to generate them if you're creating new icons. Also, you can't use animated/multi-colored icons. Inline SVGs are verbose, can't be cached, and aren't intuitive. They are also hard to use in CSS because you can't inline it easily in CSS.
Using SVGBox, you can use any icon as an image with customisable fill, or use our external library to load them.
I have managed to generate a buzz about it. Smashing Magazine featured it too. Currently, everything is free, mostly courtsey of forever-free Cloudflare CDN.
My plan is to add the ability to upload your own icons and create your own iconsets and charge people for it (Say, $12-20/month for it). This is kind of font-awesome model but I think I can do a much better job. I also see that serving icons is really, really cheap, so essentially I can have a limit that is much more generous than fontawesome's.
Love to hear your thoughts about it.
The icons look nice! Congrats! And is nice you can specify colors from the standard Tailwind palette!
I wonder, when you say you can do better than font awesome, what do you mean?
I like variety, because if not, all pages look like Ikea houses (once you see all use the same icons, the same fonts...) Anyways. I think your business model can work out, especially if you use font awesome as an example to learn. Remember that there is also a compounding effect hard to beat. Font awesome has been adding icons for a very long time, doing a frontal confrontation may not be the best strategy, but I don't understand enough about frontend as to actually say.