Spirit — The animation tool for the web.

I remember seeing this few months ago when it was still a concept/private beta, can't wait to play with it now that it's finally out! What features do you plan on adding to this soon, @patrickbrouwer?

How does this compare to animating in say Premiere Pro and then exporting and using Lottie to render it? From the looks of it this is much more lightweight and hence maybe easier to learn?

What a "dutch" pricing model haha. I usually like seeing the app before spending money on it. But I'm surprised that there's not even a screenshot of what the tool looks like and how it might work. Looking forward to giving it a try when there's a trial version.

Feedback: This looks good, I can't confirm if it's good cause I haven't tried it. I have no desire to try it because of your home page. It doesn't backup it's claims with evidence (in this case a demo or more specific information). It says cute things like "Super Powers" and "Intuitive and Easy" but it doesn't do anything to show how intuitive and easy it is. It says it has a timeline editor. but no images of it. Wouldn't that be important? It seems like nowadays we want people to sign up first and delete later. It's frustrating to see an application landing page with so little details about how it works or what it does. Yes you could just download the application and try it... just to be greeted with a license purchase screen!

I've been waiting for this since 2016 when you announced it, a GSAP timeline editor is very much needed, but I am super disappointed that you chose a subscription-based model just for the sake of making more money. What happened to the one-time fee for a year worth of updates and free use? This really makes no sense to pay on a monthly basis since I'm not using your resources all the time, it's not like it's cloud based or anything. Very disappointed.

Too expensive, everyone has subscription greed. $12 a month. Get Tumult Hype for a one time fee, does the same and so much more.

Looks very cool, but I'm not about to pay a subscription fee for this (especially when it costs more per month than Setapp!)

For such a product there must be tons of video content to back its claims. At least you should have a video showing all those cool features in action. Now i have to download the whole stuff to get to know what it is. But don't worry about me. i'll definitely give it a spin. I've already tried out HAIKU and it had all the bells and whistles but at the end of the day it felt very clunky and it was very difficult to create an animation in it. I hope this to be my goto tool for creating micro interactions

Kind of surprised at some of the negative comments. It isn't super difficult to roll your own basic animation for the web but slightly increase the complexity of the animation and things get tricky fast. If this tool saves you an hour per month, it's worth the price. But the UX of the timeline editor does need some work. Here are a few thoughts based on working with it for about an hour today. 1) Popping up the timeline editor in a new window is ok if you've got a massive monitor but a real pain if you're using a laptop. I'm using a 15in Macbook Pro and it feels too small to effectively use. Maybe it would work better as a tab in developer tools rather than a popup. Or if it's a popup, take over the full screen and show the element being animated above the timeline. 2) I don't see a way to line up keyframes from different elements. It's nice to be able to quickly drag a keyframe out and see how that impacts the animation but it's hard to make micro adjustments to get things to line up perfectly. I ended up giving up on using the interface and manually adjusted the exported JSON file. 3) I tried to build an animation to draw shapes which requires the stroke-dasharray and stroke-dashoffset hack to work. This requires you to load your shape into the browser and pull up the console to measure the length of the shape to figure out what to use in the dasharray. Then after copy and pasting the length, the timeline tends to round my floating number to an integer which is pretty frustrating. I think if someone is using an animation with a dasharay, there should be a button to measure the length of the shape and insert it as the value for the keyframe.

I would say they need to do a lot more tutorials or guides so beginners can get to grips with it easily.

Pros:

Smooooth as butter animations.

Cons:

Steep learning curve.

A great tool for animators, designers and creative developers out there.

I would quickly change the business model or pricing especially in your early stages if you want to avoid losing tons of potential customers, it's either that, or it's waiting for one of the big boys to completely rip off your concept and have it incorporated in their software suite... in fact, I think It's going to be a simple matter of time before that happens, so your competitive edge is probably going to your first mover advantage that you have now.

Not a lot of people are going to pay 180 dollars for a half feature that costs more than a TWO year subscription of SketchApp or even the Adobe Creative Suit.

Edit: Im almost a 100% sure Airbnb is going to add this feature to their already free 'Lottie' design tool... so it's indeed a matter of time. For anyone interested: https://airbnb.design/lottie/

Pros:

Great tool for creatives.

Cons:

Insane price and/or broken business model.

Wow 12$ billed Yearly (144$), 15$ quarterly (that's 180$ Yearly😱). Not even a month based price. that is really awful. Just out of curiosity, who are your audience ? It should have been Freelancers and small Agencies- they are the first who cares about these kind of animations, and this price really TOTALY missed that audience. Freelancers are not going to pay half of their "Sketch" price on an small early stage animation software, they really can't. these animation are cool but they are not worth as a whole webflow account, really. It should have been like this 1) Free for use, with downgraded exporting. maybe without, like webflow. 2) 8$ for a *monthly* account you guys. especially if these are the features available today. it is really not worth better than that (yet! this is very promising if we get additional value and need less software around it) 3) 5$ for a yearly. thats 60$. this is high but fair for TODAY. If adobe will update Animate for these features (and they should have, for a long time), or webflow, or even Studio for invision- that whole thing is compromised. that's why i'd grab those newbies today, and those freelancers. get them addicted and loyal while you can. And with these prices? this product is only for enterprises :/

No Trial is ridiculous! Available soon is not an acceptable response. Product Hunt is failing me lately

Want to love this but you need a trial version or at least a lot more demos videos. And as many have already called out, make the pricing affordable for what you are competing against.

Offer some intro price or free version with a watermark or something. Add some templates or something to get people started.

Hope you listen to the community feedback, there is an interest...

Pros:

Looks promising

Cons:

Too expensive, no trial, requires player

a subscription model for a tool (especially at this price) that doesn't own an entire workflow (ui design / prototyping or production) seems insane.

@Patrickbrouwer, is there any possible way to use my designs in sketch/figma/illustrator/whatever ? It'd be definitely better to try out the spirit before buy it.

Really wish I could watch a video tutorial to better understand the product, without having to read through the Getting Started materials.

Nothing against Spirit in itself but to be honest I feel like this "web animations" thing is going out of control, just like we lost control of it with Flash. Plus, these days if you are designer you are expected to spend $50+ a month to design and prototype even the simplest app. At some point we'll realise we over engineered the process so much we'd be better off coding the thing rather than designing it using 3 or more different pieces of software.

Hi @patrickbrouwer , any plans for the windows version?

Disappointing that there's no way to try it before subscribing :(