Show IH: CommentBox.io - launching next week! Would love some feedback first :)
CommentBox.io - No ads. No Tracking. Just Comments.
Hi everyone,
For the past few months I've been working on a project called CommentBox.io, to fulfill my own need for a robust hosted commenting alternative to Disqus. Three months later and I'm finally ready to put it out there!
I'm planning on launching on Product Hunt and Hacker News early next week, but before that I'd love to get some feedback from the community on the product and the website (https://commentbox.io). If you're so inclined, please don't hesitate to create an account and try it for yourself!
Thanks for your help!
Looks neat.
I like the illustrations. Did you use some service to create it?
My only concern is with regards to the bandwidth constraint on the pricing tiers - is there a reason that it is needed?
Additionally, my instinct is that your Professional tier can/should be more expensive than the Standard tier - with additional capabilities (perhaps hooks, analytics, etc).
Finally, it might be good to get a few testimonials before trying to launch on ProductHunt.
Frederic is correct, the illustrations are the excellent work of Katerina Limpitsouni at unDraw.co.
As for the bandwidth, it's similar in spirit to how Disqus distinguishes their plans by page views, except I believe bandwidth is a fairer metric to charge by. I've considered dropping the charges associated with bandwidth altogether and simply place a soft limit, where for example someone on the Personal plan using up lots of bandwidth will simply be asked to switch to a paid plan, but I find having charges is a more direct approach. As we get traction, I will reevaluate.
Regarding the differences in Professional vs. Standard, Professional is cheaper per volume, but more expensive on the lower end. In other words, someone on the Standard plan would be paying $5 minimum each month, while someone on the Professional plan would be paying $50 minimum. If your usage is such that you do not receive a super high number of comments, then Standard makes more financial sense, but if you do, then Professional makes more financial sense.
Good point about the testimonials...working on it! Thanks for the great feedback!
Illustrations are coming from undraw.co.
Looks neat to me :)
The question is how are you going to beat Disqus and what is your uniqueness?
Excellent questions!
The answer to your first part is that I don't necessarly need to beat Disqus, as the market is quite large enough. There are barely any competitors (though some have been gaining traction lately).
As for uniqueness, Disqus's "real" product isn't necessarily hosting comments, but selling data and serving ads. The end user is their product, which is something they are quite proud of: https://data.disqus.com
The value prop of CommentBox.io is to provide a simple, unobtrusive commenting experience, whilst respecting the end user's privacy and data. Beyond that goal, we're actually cheaper than Disqus, particularly on the higher end.
Thanks for your answer, I understand you. And I see your product is better than disqus (at least if you don't want to gather some data :)
But the problem is not only disqus - there are already tons of similar services, https://alternativeto.net/software/disqus/
How are you going to be distinguished from them?
What I think will ultimately set us apart is user experience. There are many examples of markets where there are great options all around that all solve a similar problem, but one or two always win out due to 1) style and 2) personal preference. Superficially, I think we beat Disqus (and others) in both looks and user experience.
Beyond that, there is a fundamental difference in philosophy between how CommentBox.io and Disqus treat data, and this is actually becoming an increasingly important consideration for consumers. This year has seen an uptick in privacy-minded alternatives to big-named solutions, so I'm hoping CommentBox.io will become the go-to solution for those privacy-minded consumers :)
Awesome landing page (clear)good product positioning and nice pricing structure.
I honestly would love to use it. But I feel like I can't because leveraging commentbox.io would mean extra "login" auth journey for already authorized users in my case. This is a "no go" for me unfortunately.
If commentbox would somehow support custom auth I would be a customer for sure;)
Great suggestion! Custom auth is definitely on the to-do list, but unfortunately didn't make it into the MVP. Coming soon though!
Makes sense to prioritize other use cases for MVP;) i tried the solution i liked its simplicity. Once custom auth is supported - count me in!;)
Given that writing your own comment system from scratch only takes a couple weeks, letting a third-party have control over core site data doesn't really make sense to me for what you're getting.
If this were a Django app with a web-based moderation tool then, but where the comments and voting data and such still lived in our database and were served by us, then I'd be more inclined to use and pay for that. (Albeit we wouldn't actually use it ourselves right now, possibly at some point in the future though.)
Albeit maybe the core target demographic is really people with blogs, in which case this might make more sense as is since they're already mostly using a third-party for hosting.
You are quite right that building a simple commenting system may take a developer a few weeks. But there is quite a large segment of people who are not developers who wish to quickly and easily provide commenting on their blog or publications.
The current leader in this space is Disqus, and the combination of both their ubiquity around the web and their serious lack of competition are both signs to me that there is a place for CommentBox.io
Thanks for checking it out though!
I created an account, it’s very simple to set up and use. Looking forward to what comes next.
Glad to hear!
can we use this in ghost blog??
I was in charge of assessing and integrating Disqus, HyperComments and similar products in a couple of big companies. Ping me, if you may need big Corp feedback and ideas.
Looks good already ;)))
Thanks for the support! I will definitely be reaching out to you in the near future!
Looks cool. Here is my feedback:
Hope this helps!
I agree that the color scheme is odd and almost looks wrong (as wrong as a subjective thing can be :). I've seen similar drab colors schemes when created by people with color blindness.
Totally respect your take on beauty and modernness. If it's not too big of an ask, do you have any examples off the top of your head of sites that do convey these qualities? You're right it is a personal take, but I think it'd be useful to compare and contrast what different people find beautiful :)
This is a point of confusion that I'm going to fix. I've heard it from a few people who were confused by that. The intention is that every comment requires a login, but checking "Anonymous" makes that comment publicly appear as Anonymous instead of associated with you.
To clarify the pricing, if you're on the Personal plan and you use less than 1GB bandwidth or less than 1K comments, its free. So if your bandwidth for the month was 999MB, it's free. If you hit 1GB or more, then the Standard plan pricing applies. 1K comments is a lot for personal blogs, but larger publications who post 2-3 articles a month can hit that threshold quite quickly, at which point the extra moderation tools you get in the Standard plan makes upgrading more appealing. I will definitely try to gather some more feedback about how potential customers perceive and understand the pricing, so thanks for pointing this out!
On the low end, I'm competing with free solutions, so I feel that the Personal plan is a good way to compete. On the business/high end, I am a bit cheaper than my competitors, but not by much!
Thanks for taking the time to review!
You've definitely given me a lot to think about! Excellent points all around. I think I've got my action items for today :)
Hello, is an Integration with WordPress planned? Disqus does. Thanks
Definitely. It's very high on the to-do list :)
Thanks @shaunpersad. Keep us posted. Any ETA?
Work has already started on it, so probably in the next 2-3 weeks, if not sooner. I'll be happy to send you a message once it's ready!
Do you have a timeline or plans for allowing users to log in with existing WordPress user accounts? I make a big effort to ensure my site's users don't need to use any other logins once they've created a site account, plus it allows for a complete picture of how users interact with the site.
CommentBox looks great so far; better than basically everything out there for WordPress comments. If commenters could log in with their site accounts, I'd switch today.
Please do!
Will the docs be updated to show how to install this on a React base blog?
Great question! There's already a React example in the docs here: https://commentbox.io/docs#usage-in-react
But perhaps in the future I could expand with mini-tutorials. Good feedback!