Launching Dropzone Plus
After 9 months of work, I am finally able to release Dropzone Plus today! A web service to handle the data of your forms.
Backstory
About 7 years ago, I released the open source library Dropzone.js. To my delight it was a huge success and many many people worldwide used and appreciated it.
But maintaining a library like this over many years is difficult. Every year there’s a new JavaScript frontend, install tool, bundler, etc… And then there’s new browsers and new browser bugs.
With so many users, you also get plenty of support requests, most of them on GitHub, which makes it very difficult to actually see what really needs fixing, and over time I started to ignore most of the feedback I got for it.
Finding a solution
Last year I took some time to think about the future of all this. Dropzone was something that I had to think about constantly, and that gave me the feeling that I was letting an enormous amount of people down. Abandoning the library was something that crossed my mind repeatedly. And then I thought «What if I find a way to earn money off of Dropzone, so I can properly support it and get paid doing so».
Making Dropzone.js a paid library was completely out of the question for me (and wouldn’t have worked anyway). So I tried to think of a service that I could offer my users, that would allow me to earn some money to keep Dropzone alive.
That’s why I’m now launching Dropzone Plus — a paid service that handles the other side of forms: the server.
Dropzone Plus — a service for your forms
I tried to make it as cheap as possible with $4 as the entry level subscription tier and I think it might solve a problem for many people that are currently building web forms.
You can use it to simply send form data from static websites, and/or let users submit files to it.
I’ve built the server infrastructure with Kubernetes hosted on Digital Ocean so I can scale rapidly and have a stable and secure environment. I will write a post about the technology I used soon after this one. I think that the client side will also interest lots of people.
I hope that some of you can enjoy this service. Please try it out, and give me feedback and things you’d like to see added. I’m happy to add lots of features in the near future.
Hopefully this will give me the freedom to properly support Dropzone.js again. There’s many things I want do to improve the library.
I’m exhausted. Be well and see you soon.
