Show HN: Singlelink – an open-source micro-site platform
singlelink.co
singlelink.co
I'm Jim, co-founder of Singlelink. We're a three-man team based in Raleigh, NC that loves open-source software.
Our goal is to bridge the gap between micro-sites and websites by creating an open-source micro-site platform with the ease of tools like Linktree and the plugins/themes & extensibility of WordPress.
Some context for why we built Singlelink. Previous to this, we were a WordPress development & hosting agency that built countless amounts of custom websites just for them to all become "plugin spaghetti". This lead us to originally trying to build a custom WordPress installation image we called Neutron that was simpler & leaner while retaining the ability to "do anything", but it never quite worked out.
After extensive feedback from our early adopters, we transitioned to building an open-source & extensible platform that allows you to build simple micro-sites while also allowing you to modify the codebase and add new themes/plugins where needed. For us, that meant building on top of technology like TailwindCSS, NuxtJS, NodeJS, and Postgres to encourage community contributions, opening up a marketplace for users to build & sell their themes & plugins, and to genericize the platform so users can build on top of Singlelink rather than that with it (platform vs tool).
We're currently 100% free (pre-revenue) & open-source , and are only planning on making billing closed-source in the future so that Singlelink is accessible as possible for self-hosted users. If you choose to use our freemium cloud-hosted service, billing starts at $8/Month for power users, but we plan for our primary source of revenue to be marketplace commissions from community plugin/theme sales so we can keep our feature-set as accessible as possible.
It's still in beta while we're ironing out bugs and adding plugins & monetization, but we hope you can find it useful.
Please, let us know your thoughts! We love feedback :)
Hope I explained myself well! :)
Just like WordPress & wordpress.com, you can self-host Singlelink with a platform like DigitalOcean or AWS to get instant access to our paid features! (singlelink.co is 100% open-source at the moment, and the only thing we plan to close-source is billing)
I hope I answered your question! Appreciate the comment :)
My thought process: "Oh, they'll show ad-network ads on the free tier, I guess that's OK. How much is the tier that removes ads?" and then I couldn't find a tier that mentioned it.
I think it'd be much clearer if the free tier said something like "shows Singlelink watermark/logo", and the next tier up said something like "no Singlelink watermark/logo"
I've just added this to the website now, I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention!!
Unfortunately, we've been adding features in left and right on demand and just haven't had time to optimize profile delivery yet since it hasn't been in high-demand, but that's next on our roadmap.
We're about to add in our one-click export to static, which will cut out all the existing Javascript on the page and optimize all assets before delivery, and then trigger re-builds on every change to your site.
There will ultimately have to be a user-set balance between performance and feature-set however, as just like WordPress not all plugins will be able to be pre-compiled.
(Aside from that, I'm continually astounded when I see services like these and notice that the prices listed are per month rather than per year. I'd expect this to be $10–20/yr or thereabouts, tops, but then I see that the non-free tiers start at $8/month and wonder to myself, "Who actually pays these kinds of prices, especially for these kinds of services?")
All the screenshots on the neutron.so landing page are blown out of scale (>1×). I'm browsing with the window on the right half of the screen. The image https://neutron.so/git-websites.png for example is 520px × 340px, but it's scaled to 768px × 502px, so it's not nice to look at because of how fuzzy it is.
Openstack is confusingly named, colliding with OpenStack.
1. Singlelink is 100% open-source, meaning if you'd prefer to self-host it and not pay the $8/Month to us, you can! :)
2. Thanks for the notifications about Neutron.so and Openstack. We sunsetted these awhile back internally, but never put out a proper notification so that's something I'm going back to do now since it's not clear.
Thanks for the comment (and notification about that typo), I really appreciate it!
That hadn't gone unnoticed. (Good choice of a license, btw.)
The comment about the prices was not a specific complaint, just an observation about a trend that has always been surprising.
15 requests 18.65 MB / 3.55 MB transferred Finish: 2.22 s DOMContentLoaded: 529 ms load: 2.23 s
All of that just to render a simple"micro site" that displays a little text and 6 links.
We've been adding features in left and right on demand and just haven't had time to optimize profile delivery yet since it hasn't been in high-demand, but that's next on our roadmap.
We're about to add in our one-click export to static, which will cut out all the existing Javascript on the page and optimize all assets before delivery, and then trigger re-builds on every change to your site. This will cut out the bloat you're seeing now.
TLDR: You're right, it's unnecessary. But we're actively fixing this! :)
And it's a very reasonable concern. Admittedly, I get ~2mbps/down at home so it takes a bit to load and I'd been surprised that nobody else had commented on this until today. I've pushed it to the top of our v2.2 roadmap so it's our highest immediate focus now (will have a fix within a week).
Just trying to build this one step at a time wherever the community takes it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking
Followup: I created a test and clicked the preview link and it shows "page not found". Not sure if it's because it takes a while or what, but if so then there should be a note somewhere about that. Also I have no idea how to publish this thing. I'd expect the publish option to be somewhere near the preview link. I then checked settings to see if it'd be in there for some reason but nope. However I did see the detail information. Honestly I think this should be the first screen and given a different name (possibly just "Details") since I wouldn't really classify these things as Settings. If I wasn't poking around I would have just assumed you weren't able to change these details because of that.
I see there's a "tour" option, but just wanted to let you know my reactions based on intuition since that's what most people will be going off of.
So by default, pages come unpublished (so it says page not found), but recently the suggestion has been made to publicize pages by default and we're think that would be a big help here, but we'll also reconsider moving the publish select to a button near your profile link. In the meantime you can update the "Visibility" under "Settings" (I also agree this would be better as details), but admittedly it's a bit mislabeled and without any tour or onboarding it's easy to see why it's hard to find. I'll take a good look at how it can be improved this over the next week.
Let me know if you have any more feedback, this was super helpful!
As for the visibility link, I see it now. The issue there is my intuition wouldn't have thought that'd be in the middle of a form. Was honestly expecting it to be something "broken out" and a colored but since it's actionable (with I suppose the dropdown arrow to the side with the other options). My personal opinion for the best place would be in the preview area. Up above the preview like the singlelink is now I'd have a dropdown with the publish options, a separate "Publish" button under that (colored to draw attention), and then a hyperlink of your singlelink with a clipboard symbol next to it to copy the link.
Also under the settings it'd be nice to have a checkbox for a round photo or a square photo.
Edit: After playing with it more I see that it auto-updates/publishes the changes you're making. Due to that I agree that it should publish by default. A staging feature might be a good option for your paid plans.
As for the photo, you can set your image border radius to 0 in appearance to change this! But it's nowhere near as easy to use as I'd like (added days ago), so it's easy to see why this can be overlooked. We're adding presets soon too (small bits of css that can be layered on top of themes, ex: square or circle avatar photo), so maybe we can make these easily selectable from the settings panel? I'll have to reconsider this.
Thanks again for the awesome feedback, it really helps.
https://app.singlelink.co/u/hanniabu
At further inspection it looks like with each click of the recursive link it generated 20 tracked links.
It also looks like the analytics doesn't treat each link independently. If I change a link it just relabels it in the analytics rather than creating a new tracking item. Sorry to be raining on your parade and tearing this apart so hard lol.
In regards to analytics, we're currently treating links like "blocks" in preparation for our new link types feature (then a link could be an image, video, form, checkout, plugin, etc.), so if you were to want a new tracking item created it would be recommended to create a new item and delete the old one rather than edit it. In the future, we'll have easy link visibility and duplication settings to make this an easy process. If you have any thoughts on how you'd expect/prefer this to be, let me know!
Not only does it put a bad taste in my mouth (it looks like you're trying to obscure the fact that free has ads), a quick scan of the pricing page doesn't illuminate why I'd want to pay $8/mo for the next tier (which would remove the ads, I take it?).
It's also unclear if free supports using your own domain or not. The pricing page should probably make it a lot plainer that you pay to get a custom domain and no ads if that's indeed the case.
EDIT: The singlel.ink domain is a nice domain hack but the period breaks it in a weird place and I bet you're going to run into issues with it confusing people and them putting the dot in the wrong place.
We're sorry to hear you've got a bad taste in your mouth from our pricing page, I'll have to rethink how we present this. By "limited advertisement", we generally mean less than the competitors (no forced watermark at the bottom of your site), but there's no examples to demonstrate that. You make valid points about how we can better present our features to interested users - and we certainly don't want to hide anything.
At this time, we plan to keep custom domains free and charge on a per-profile basis, however we might end up having different tiers of custom domain support (one might be simpler than the other to setup).
Additionally, I will add that we've made all the features available in our paid tiers available free in our Github for those that decide to self-host. Our eventual goal is for the community marketplace (when monetized) to generate enough revenue to reduce paywalls on features and limit monetization mainly to marketplace purchases, but we'll see what traction we can get. In retrospect, I could emphasize these more on the website.
I hope I made myself clear! Again, I really appreciate the feedback, and we'll keep these in mind as we make changes of the next week! :)
Maybe I'll rotate the button colors & label to show different services (more of an example) or replace it with blob/placeholder text entirely? Thanks for the heads up!
Unfamiliar with tiny.page, but seems interesting!
What do you mean by tinypage.app being a "platform" customer?
About.me is a similar tool, but they're not open-source. This means you can't self-host your page for free if you wish, fork & make changes to the codebase if you want to add a new feature, or verify that the code handles your information how you would expect.
To us, this means about.me is a tool you can build with, whereas Singlelink is a platform you can build on top of.
Let me know if I can clarify any more, I hope this helps! :)
After a quick discussion within our team, we've pre-emptively changed this to "Pro" while think of a better title.
Thanks for speaking up, comments like this make Singlelink better for everyone! :)