divdev_

Looks super cool, love what you guys are doing

Nice! Does it work with Notion or Airtable? Is it fully no-code?

If you would be willing to automate that, why not using the existing vis reg tools? Is there something custom that you have in the setup that prevents you from going with the cloud or OSS solution?

I am building the tool in the space and am genuinely curios if people are aware of this type of frontend testing and if they find it useful. Also it's pretty interesting to find some painpoints that I would love to solve with our product.

Hey! I am building a visual regression testing tool to help make frontend testing more accessible by general public(even people who don't know test automation much). This approach easy to setup and quite easy to maintain compared to other automated testing approaches!

I am also happy to discuss any topics frontend testing and get the feedback on our oss tool

potential customers(decision makers) are generally tech leads, frontend leads in larger companies. They hang out in subreddits & some slack communities. React/Vue/other frontend meetups are a good point as those people usually hang out there - thanks! anyways, even if I know where they hang out - what are some not-annoying ways of approaching them?

Nice writeup! trying to following the same approach for my startup - great documentation for the win!

I've put this example with Next.js/Storybook/Playwright but it could be anything like Remix/Ladle/Cypress - the tools which you are using on the frontend can be easily replaced by the ones that you prefer!

We have improved our FAQ section to make sure it reflects why we need the permission. We have really tight github integration and creating status checks on github is impossible wihout GH permissions. We ask for the bare minimum!

We are different in a way that we offer holistic solution not really bound to storybook. You could do lots of other visual tests with lost pixel e.g. make tests of your react or vue pages or even crazier, test your results of playwright and cypress tests!

Good that we have it at least somewhere discoverable! Thanks for the feedback, we will improve on this!

What would actually make you understand that immediately?

Thanks a lot for the feedback, we should do better job at explaining the benefits of the solution to the people not familiar with it! We will improve on this

Hey people! Our OSS project https://github.com/lost-pixel/lost-pixel has been very welcomed on Hacker News so we pressed on and built a cloud version of it! Presenting it here today for your feedback and as always would be happy to chat & discuss Visual Testing with you!

Thanks a ton! Another great answer which I will use as a roadmap! Back to buying GPU question - why not renting it on some cloud provider? I have mac - not sure how external gpu fits in the picture here.

Awesome! Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks, quite an extensive guide really appreciate it!

really interesting approach! if it works - it works, no questions asked!

exactly this is the current workflow for many people who are using visual regression tests!

Visual regression tests rock! Be sure to ping me (@divdev_ on twitter) when you will be doing that - would be very eager to pair with you on this and help you set everything up!

hey! Absolutely, Lost Pixel is designed to be able to test anything which can be opened in a browser window. So any technology and configuration should be quite flexible to be tested as long as the host is publicly accessible from your runner of lost-pixel engine. So in your case if you can run your environment somewhere and point lost-pixel there it should work as expected! Feel free to reach out if you need help - we are happy to chat and assist you! Github discussions or @divdev_ or @chriskalmar on twitter are both good ways to reach us!

We are not backed by any VC - just indie hacking that's the greatest prerequisite to comparing ourselves to Chromatic. At the SaaS level we want to bring value to the community by:

1. allowing visual regression testing integration in any part of your flow(locally for free, paid on the platform) with any need for visual testing(stories, pages, components, cypress, playwright). Chromatic is focused on building upon their fundament - storybook. 2. making it affordable. Everybody agrees to one thing - the prices to visual tests are bonkers when it comes to SaaS. We embraced the fact that people want flexible and cheap as much as they want fast and expensive. We will allow to run actual engine on your premises making our pricing significantly cheaper, we will allow storing images on your side which will again make it ridiculously cheap for you as you won't be paying markup that we otherwise could induce on those things. 3. not being protective of our codebase for core part of the offer. We want community to build the top-notch visual regression testing engine with us to serve the community!

Hope it sheds some light into bigger picture, otherwise Chris & I will definitely add the table for comparison with Chromatic & Percy. this is very legit point, thank you!

We don’t at the moment differentiate, but it is definitely a feature on the roadmap. There are multiple ways to solve this and we are considering quite some of them:

1. Grayscaling browser before screenshot 2. Using custom diffing engines that enable for ignoring regions like odiff 3. Trying to be smart and analyzing images with machine learning to identify how meaningful the difference is (moonshot but worth exploring)

Our approach to this in general is that if false positive like this happens we can just batch approve all the differences and be ok with that as it was a subtle rendering change not dependent on us or our direct third party dependencies.

Hey! Thanks for the nice words, yes we do - thresholds is indispensable part of Lost Pixel, after all we don’t want to battle the tests which are 2-3 pixels different, those should pass by default.