Show HN: Rails UI

https://railsui.com/

49•justalever•1h ago

Comments

microflash•1h ago

Is this another Tailwind wrapper? Yes, it is.

arm32•1h ago

But this one costs $799 a year.

merelysounds•1h ago

Pricing page if anyone else is curious: https://railsui.com/pricing

"Solo" plan is $299/year (1 seat), "Team" plan is $799/year (30 seats), larger plans are "inquire now".

cousinbryce•1h ago

God grant me the confidence of whoever vibe coded this

hebejebelus•1h ago

The repo was created in May 2023, and it seems like the bulk of commits were made in 2024, before vibe coding was really a thing. I think it's pretty harsh to dismiss projects in this manner.

justalever•1h ago

Thanks for noticing. It's all hand-made with a bit of AI to talk me off ledges on the gem structure/architecture front.

tptacek•1h ago

I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.

I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.

bionsystem•24m ago

There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.

9rx•18m ago

> 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.

Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set the lower bound. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.

The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.

justalever•1h ago

Yes, for a 30-seat license.

justalever•1h ago

Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.

tptacek•34m ago

What does this even mean? Tailwind isn't like Bootstrap; it's a way of structuring styles, not a design language of its own.

css_apologist•1h ago

ugh this looks dated even by 2016 standards

when will developers learn UI actually matters

bootstrap was a mistake, and lowered the bar for everyone

justalever•1h ago

This you? https://flow-control.dev/

enraged_camel•1h ago

I would advise refraining from posting sick owns like this in your own Show HN threads.

css_apologist•51m ago

i wish :(

graypegg•1h ago

I might be missing something, but was this project started in 2016? I'm not sure what line in the sand you're drawing. That was some minima for developers "knowing UI actually matters" I presume?

volkk•1h ago

i don't get these types of products anymore. i think they're useful in their own way, but i can literally create styles with claude/gemini in a heartbeat and not have to pay some insane fee.

justalever•1h ago

Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.

runjake•1h ago

Time (and money) will tell.

My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.

unfunco•1h ago

I think you missed a trick not naming it Railwind UI.

hebejebelus•1h ago

I used this about a year ago when I went through a short Rails phase. I was a bit surprised not to see more Rails-specific UI libraries considering how batteries-included the rest of the framework is, and at the time I didn't really 'get' tailwind. I'm not in a Rails phase anymore, but nice work on the library!

justalever•1h ago

Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Agree on the UI front. It seems to be the most "unconventional" thing about the framework. Always struck me as odd, but I suppose it makes sense given how an app needs to adapt to a brand, audience, and market.

brooke2k•1h ago

maybe I'm just dumb but a lot of these elements don't seem to work? the "..." buttons don't open any flyout, the dropdown doesn't open up...

otherwise looks cool though

justalever•56m ago

Hey! A lot of the UI on the theme preview site and on railsui.com isn’t fully functional. It’s mostly there to show the design and layout of the components, not the underlying logic. The railsui gem itself has more complete, working components and pages.

fogzen•59m ago

I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.

justalever•51m ago

Been there! I see this as a solo dev or small startup tool, great for building 0-1 ideas faster (which is what I use it for). Unless they’re working on greenfield apps, established teams probably aren’t the ideal fit.

mattkevan•20m ago

Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?

Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.

One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.

samtheprogram•54m ago

If you’re showing off a UI framework, I shouldn’t be accidentally scrolling left and right on the page on mobile / my iPhone. Couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the page to look at components while accidentally activating horizontal scrolling.

justalever•43m ago

Will get this fixed, thanks!

darkwater•27m ago

It happens on Firefox on Android as well

justalever•23m ago

Thanks

piskov•43m ago

Broken in Safari on iphone. For example:

- table background moves left when table is scrolled horizontally

- actions in table and dropdown do nothing on tap

- text on buttons is selectable (really?)

justalever•35m ago

Gotta love Safari. Thanks for spotting.

agentifysh•40m ago

im always surprised that Rails is still relevant

i havent used it since 2006 opting for php and django

i might give it another shot, any reason you like this more than django or other frameworks

justalever•35m ago

In general, I like it for the speed. I can build an MVP in less than a weekend using Rails, Rails UI, and some AI for some one-shot copy and random repetitive stuff.

Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.

unethical_ban•11m ago

I have hardware acceleration disabled in Firefox and my 5800X spins up trying to render the background wave. At least that's a known choice I made.

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Show HN: Rails UI

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