Great idea, and I was excited to try it (and even pay for it!) until the requirement to sign up and the hijacked back button. Also, in my Firefox, your white box as a background appears transparent and so your text is just on top of a _very_ noisy background.
On the missing Terms of Service, you have the Data Use notice, but it essentially describes how you're using our email, not any code that we would need to upload to you. In the day and age where we're having daily discussions on copyright violations and people hoovering up any data or analysis they can find, I definitely want a sturdy legal agreement in place before I ship IP off to someone's systems.
Seconding other comments about having it run as a local program in some way, I have a lot of different tools that I use in my IDE to explore codebases, utilize LSPs, etc. One of the big ones is how I utilize semantic color coding (https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e) to quickly parse function / variable names, and usually a standalone app gives me a lot more ability to control things like that. Having it local (and not communicating remotely) means that I _also_ don't have to worry about you hoovering up my codebase.
Otherwise, excited to see someone implement an idea like this! I can be very visual with certain kinds of diagrams and code bases and was unhappy with how few tools I felt visualized those organizations well.
> I was excited to try it (and even pay for it!) until the requirement to sign up
How much would you be willing to pay? I feel like if you say that, and you like a product on HN, it's helpful to provide feedback (although it's not show hn, so idk if they'll see it). One time payment of $100? $5/month subscription? 10/month?
If social-sign-in is too much of a barrier (it was two clicks for me, and my email is pretty public, and I can switch to another account within the browser), then I'd be very surprised that you'd be willing to pull out your credit card and deal with the hassle of a purchase or subscription.
Also, saying that you'd be willing to pay for the product is meaningless if it's much less than the effort to often build and maintain for the business.
Maybe I am wrong, and you're willing to pay 1000s if only for those few small issues, but sometimes small hurdles like sign-ins are a good way to filter out customers that should be turned away because they're not as invested in the product. I would even argue that an app that requires no sign-in comes off as non-serious because any non-trivial app requires sign-in; the ones that don't are often very simple and the type of thing most people wouldn't pay for.
You raise some good points, and having built multiple tools and a business that failed, I'm well aware of the tradeoffs between the cost to build and maintain vs. potential revenue growth.
However, I'm confused by, "If social-sign-in is too much of a barrier..." Nowhere in my comment is that what I was bugged by. I've signed up for plenty of random services with disposable emails (or, sometimes, even less-disposable ones). As for the barrier to entry, I've worked with plenty of tools / libraries that took me hours to potentially get up and running, so again, not a barrier-to-entry problem.
I find your opinion on "not requiring sign-in" pointing to trivial apps baffling. A quick "dnf list installed | wc -l" shows that I have over 5000 installed packages. While many of those are libraries, I have everything from IDEs, Browsers, CAD applications, software ecosystems, tools (both visualization and otherwise), and more. Sign in simply tells me that when you shut down the service or change it in some way that breaks everything and makes it worse in a few years, that I have no real recourse.
As for a lot of "hosted" services, I'm personally weird because I have a homelab and like doing a lot of self-hosted stuff, both as a hobby and for my own privacy reasons. This means that a lot of the "We're hosting it _for_ you!" arguments don't hold water for me, and frequently don't feel like the right fit for the product, instead being driven by business. But I also get the need to _have_ a business at all - the competition is brutal. As an example, when MS is willing to devote an incredible amount of resources towards building an "open source" IDE and an incredible number of people are willing to build free (beer & speech) plugins on top of it, how do you even begin to compete? I've seen a lot less mention of Sublime text in the last few years and everyone and their mother seems to be using VSCode.
So, to go back to the pricing, right now I'm not sure. This feels like the ~$100 / year for a personal license project. If it was $10 / month, that's probably worth trying out for at least a single month and seeing if it does have the expected value. As others have alluded to, since this is a standalone tool, that means there is friction for using it alongside / outside of your IDE. Is it valuable enough to overcome that and remember to alt-tab over to it or keep it surfaced among a hundred other windows and tabs? Maybe!
On the missing Terms of Service, you have the Data Use notice, but it essentially describes how you're using our email, not any code that we would need to upload to you. In the day and age where we're having daily discussions on copyright violations and people hoovering up any data or analysis they can find, I definitely want a sturdy legal agreement in place before I ship IP off to someone's systems.
Seconding other comments about having it run as a local program in some way, I have a lot of different tools that I use in my IDE to explore codebases, utilize LSPs, etc. One of the big ones is how I utilize semantic color coding (https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e) to quickly parse function / variable names, and usually a standalone app gives me a lot more ability to control things like that. Having it local (and not communicating remotely) means that I _also_ don't have to worry about you hoovering up my codebase.
Otherwise, excited to see someone implement an idea like this! I can be very visual with certain kinds of diagrams and code bases and was unhappy with how few tools I felt visualized those organizations well.