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I made myself a Chrome extension called Headlamp that puts a red dot by each link, button, text box, etc., and clears them as I click or type while I’m testing a web app.

When I hand off a build to a client, if all the red dots are gone, I know I’ve at least TOUCHED everything.

If I’m working with another engineer, we can both see the dots in our browser and collaborate to clear them all while we test.



That's really smart.


Nice! Can you share it?


Sure! It’s not really bulletproof yet and could use some more features, but I’d love to get your feedback and bug reports. I’m thinking about turning it into real product…

https://headlamptest.com


> Headlamp is like having a second manager on the team.

I'm not sure I would use that endorsement...


Good point! Wrote that many years ago. It’s a side project I’m resurrecting.


Cool product, it's something I'd personally be interested in if free or one-off license, but as someone who just dabbles now and then (but including sometimes for business stuff) it's nowhere near worth the monthly cost for me. $50 one-off would frankly be possibly more than the value I'd get, but I'd definitely buy it in the hope it would be useful. (Appreciate, I'm not everybody and just because that's where I fit it doesn't mean your pricing needs to be aimed at me.)


I'm not saying the above poster is wrong, but never ever take pricing advice from devs.

Especially not devs on Hacker News.

If you want to sell this (and you may not), sell into QA or product leaders.

"Are you tired of deployments from your devs with dead links? A yearly license of red light is only $6k for a team of 20"


I'm not even a dev, as I said I'm just a dabbler so certainly wasn't suggesting they build a business plan around my willingness to pay, was just adding a data point in terms of hobbyist interest :)


I tried to make my comment as aggressiveness as possible, but it still sounded harsher than I wanted.

I wanted to communicate to the other poster: - You (swores), are probably correct about everything - You (swores), and I, probably aren't buyers

There may be a ton of buyers out there who aren't us


Thanks for the feedback!

It’s free to use for now. I’d like to bill heavy corporate users someday. Not sure what the criteria will be for that.


Maybe I misunderstood from glancing at the pricing table, what is the difference between "public projects" (free) and "private projects" (enterprise $50/m)?

My assumption from glancing at the page was that I'd only be interested if I could have the full version, and that I might be willing to buy a license to own it but not to pay a subscription to keep using it. Mainly because I don't mind an impulse purchase that's half hoping to turn out worth buying and half supporting a dev / product creator I think worth supporting, whereas if something wants money every month I want to actually know it's going to be a good use of money long-term, which is a much higher bar to clear in my mind.

A side-thought: if it turned out to be a useful enough tool that I started getting colleagues to use it, and incorporating it in work done for clients, then I'd prefer it to be open source and ideally easy to customise / potentially white label.


Thanks for the feedback.

I don’t know what to do about pricing, only that I’m leaning towards a freemium model where hobbyists and occasional users pay nothing.

It is a cloud-based service with ongoing costs to pay and work to be done, so I think it’ll be subscription-based.

I would love to do this full-time if there is enough interest to justify the effort.

For now, I’m really excited about welcoming some real users other than myself and getting lots of bug reports and feature requests. Please give it a try and get in touch with me over email!




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