I agree with your main point.
Youtube videos that are lectures with slide shows .. or PDF slide decks ..can also be a input / starting point..with some additional detection and parsing. Both can have multiple images in them.
Above the fold, there's a lot of pitch how Draw.io requires "No credit card, no trial periods, no BS." and "It's genuinely free - has been for years, always will be. That's why millions use it, and why converting your images to Draw.io format makes so much sense. Your converted files will always be editable, no subscription required"
Below the fold and at the very bottom, this service itself starts off at $5/mo on sale right now.
I would imagine this would confuse people. They might interpret that this service is free too, then be suprised at the "no free tier" and some are going to be outright angry and very vocal about it.
So I would change the messaging along the lines of "We help you convert images into Draw.io so you pay us just once for the diagram you want converted"
To enhance the message, I would further say "This is how much we sponsor Draw.io for enabling our own business" and write blog posts about the struggles to build the service or even open source the methods to fine-tune a model to do the conversion.
Good luck, this is valuable!
"It's that free diagramming tool that just works. No credit card, no trial periods, no BS", etc
There is stuff on GitHub that actually does similar stuff [0] [1] . We tried some pipelines a year ago for a project (understanding compliance relevant process diagrams) and it was still quite a challenge . Wonder what the state is now with all those vision llms and even if commercial how good that stuff is.
account-5•9h ago
It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.
jimmySixDOF•3h ago
noahjk•2h ago
Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams ...
I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML).
At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get new licenses), and which is easy enough for teammates of varying technical abilities to contribute to.
For Arch Diagrams, most people seem to jump to Draw.IO, which is nice, but I'm not sure how easily it can be version controlled (although I haven't tried). At work it usually falls into the "did you put your latest version on SharePoint" black-hole (we don't pay for the cloud syncing version of draw.io). I wanted to try Figma, since it's at least a bit more collaborative, but there aren't any good first-party templates, so maybe it's not the right place, either.
For DFDs, I'd like to try Mermaid, or D2, or PlantUML (scared by the syntax on that one, though). I've not tried any of these, right now we usually do these in draw.io too, but I feel like code-defined ones would be an easier to maintain option and can live in a repo easier.
Sequence Diagrams are currently usually done using the sequencediagram.org engine, which I'm not a huge fan of, but at least it's relatively easily handled text. I don't think there was a good VS Code integration last time I checked (I think it was some web emulator, not a built-in engine?).
ERDs, I'd also like to find a good local tool to probably just use SQL on the backend, so that it's one less conversion. I'm open to all suggestions for that, though.