Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours

https://www.draw.io/about.html

by davidjgraph • 14 years ago

176 61 14 years ago

draw.io

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

This way there's no shopping cart to go down. And anyway, it's the end of the world, what we gonna do with the 25%?

danielwozniak• 14 years ago

I decided not to sign-up since they asked me not to.

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

The sign up/don't sign up button is dynamically generated based on the perceived desirability of the user. I wouldn't take rejection badly, the main thing is to learn from it.

philbarr4• 14 years ago

How did they determine the "perceived desirability of the user"? Seems a little presumptious to me - I didn't even know what it was until I clicked the link, and the first thing they say is "we don't want you."

Well guess what - now I don't want you either.

orenmazor• 14 years ago

It told me it doesnt want me to sign up, so I did anyway. out of spite.

soundoflight• 14 years ago

I can't even figure out how to sign up.

rmoriz• 14 years ago

GraphML export/import would be awesome

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

We have got that sitting around somewhere, didn't realise anyone wanted it.

alsothings• 14 years ago

+1 I'd love that.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

This is great marketing. Tie in your promo to the highly-popular, highly-dubious event as an advertising tie-in to multiply its effectiveness -- as a fringe story involving the event, you're going to have your message repeated automatically by others interested in the event.

You guys just reminded me that a Visio competitor exists, and you got me to try it. You did this by using a marketing message which entertained me -- don't buy now because "tomorrow's doomsday". You gave me some entertainment value in exchange for taking my valuable time. Thanks.

snowmiser• 14 years ago

Google Docs also has a drawing program that I regularly substitute for Visio, but I do hope to see these Doomsday sales become a trend today.

Nux• 14 years ago

Libreoffice Draw or Inkscape can also be used.

at-fates-hands• 14 years ago

Speaking of Google, their Doodle today celebrates the Grimm Fairy Tales. Not sure if they did that on purpose, but it sure ties in to the whole "doomsday" theme going on.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

Personally I use LucidChart, mainly because it actually just works better than Visio for creating flowcharts (the connector reflow logic is nicer).

bcambel• 14 years ago

Funny and effective

pbateman2• 14 years ago

Would you be willing to offer a larger discount if I bought multiple seats? I want to roll this out across my company before our fiery doom arrives tomorrow.

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

To be honest, for the next 24 hours we're focusing pretty much solely on flagrant hedonism. And flame-retardant suits.

pbateman2• 14 years ago

My flagrant hedonism is largely dependent on charts so you can see why I'm keen to arrive at some manner of deal. How about "buy one get one free"?

js4all• 14 years ago

Little typo in the line: "The full source code to both draw.io and the underlying mxGraph library is available on gituhb"

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io/pull/7 ?

kgermino• 14 years ago

>gituhb

Minor, but unprofessional in light of the $000,000.00 price :)

shdon• 14 years ago

The typo is that it says "gituhb"

lwhi• 14 years ago

https://gituhb.com/jgraph/draw.io/pull/7

l0c0b0x• 14 years ago

Fine, make fools out of those freeloaders (me), making them/us think they will get a product free for the rest of their lives (which is supposed to last to 24 hours, RE: Doomsday).

I get it.

simonhamp• 14 years ago

I want to give them money just for how good their landing page copy is... hilarious! Great work :D

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

Crap I already paid $300 for this yesterday before the sale started - can I get a refund?

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

Yes, I'll get straight onto that. Tomorrow.

martinced• 14 years ago

Who started this marketing thing? ; )

I have to say this is pure genius: I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off (once the site shall be back up).

Whoever started it it's amazing to see other companies quickly react: I guess seeing servers melt under the load of people ordering products made some able to react fast.

The only thing that is too bad it's that it seems very hard to reproduce: rarely are there such doomsday scenario that gather that many attention :-/

philbarr4• 14 years ago

Maybe there's a lesson in this for us: if you can tie your marketing to current events then you'll get greater recognition. I'm no marketing guy, so I bet this is pretty much marketing 101 and I'm probably quoting the already-well-understood.

I don't think you need another doomsday, use any current event; and you don't need to have your product be related to the event in any way. Sitepoint[1] always do a Christmas sale, for example, and web design books and Christmas have nothing in common.

I think anyone could tie anything to themselves:

- "have a look at our Olympic offers"

- "we have Royally stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Royal Wedding]

- "we have stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Christmas / Thanksgiving]

...er...er...you get the idea.

[1] http://www.sitepoint.com/

SquareWheel2• 14 years ago

    I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off

Could you clarify on that? I thought it was a genuine sale. Not sure what the trick is.

joelhooks• 14 years ago

Ya, my immediate move to purchase several high quality JetBrains products was purely because of the 75%, not the silly "doomsday" bit. That's cheap.

charliesome• 14 years ago

it is a trick to get you to surrender your money in exchange for goods and or services

mark-r• 14 years ago

Tell me, how did you arrive at the 100% off figure without getting a divide-by-zero error?

jeltz• 14 years ago

Trial multiplication.

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

  try
  {
    // Do something
  }
  catch
  {
    // ignore
  }

puff

Groxx• 14 years ago

  0 / 0 rescue "100%"

emehrkay• 14 years ago

Interesting, I just had my company pay 200 bucks for omnigraffle because I was using it to make UML. This would had been perfectly fine.

Thanks for posting

JoeCortopassi• 14 years ago

I know I'm missing something, but looking at the landing page, I can't perceive any way to capitalize on this. Is Draw.io always free, so this is a joke, or am I missing something obvious? All I see is the "Don't Sign Up" button at the bottom.

Granted, it's an early day for me today, so I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders

sequence7• 14 years ago

Don't worry it's late in the day here and took me a while to work it out. It's a joke, draw.io is always free.

Jagat• 14 years ago

So how do they generate revenue for hosting and stuff? Donations?

lurker14• 14 years ago

I don't get it:

http://www.jgraph.com/mxlicense.html is a non-free license, but https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph/blob/master/license.txt is non-commercial Creative Commons

Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

https://www.draw.io/about.html says

"As Pro Plus® ++

Unlimited Users Unlimited Drawings Full Source Code

$0 / diagram / cpu / user / hour"

And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page? -- Fortune 500 usually negotiate compensation for using their logos like that, which a vendor of a free product wouldn't have time/incentive to deal with.

davidjgraph15• 14 years ago

> Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?

Sure, if you pay for it. mxGraph is dual licensed, being the copyright holders, we can do this.

> And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page?

By having the clause:

"JGraph Ltd is permitted to reference you as a user of the Software in customer lists on the JGraph web-site, in presentations to clients and at trade events."

In the mxGraph commercial license. A few customers remove it, most don't. Some have asked for their logo to be removed, we always comply. But these are all paying customers of ours that have that term in their license.

king_magic• 14 years ago

How have I never heard of draw.io to begin with? This is glorious.

Great marketing as well :)

novalis• 14 years ago

This thing gets guitar tablature notation and I am in for 10 licenses. Either way, great publicity stunt.

Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours

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