Hey I’m Dave!
I’m very excited to share what I’ve been working on. Pingy is rolling out in March for Mac, and April for Windows. I’d love any and all feedback, comments or questions.
I can’t post links yet but here it is with a space in the middle 
https://pin.gy
Pricing isn’t on the site yet but I’m thinking it will be $9/month for individuals with team/agency pricing to be introduced later.
(Mod edit: made link clickable)
Looks really cool! Is this only for static sites or can you dev/deploy database-driven sites too? What does it use for the local dev env? And are you using ngrok for the tunneling, or something proprietary?
Very cool, especially the live share. The demo video does a great job of explaining how it works. What happens if you need a site with a back end like PHP or Ruby?
Side note, the client feedback part in the demo caught my attention. You should checkout my service https://pageproofer.com if you build many sites, addresses that specific issue.
Looks really cool!
Thanks so much
Is this only for static sites or can you dev/deploy database-driven sites too?
If you mean dynamically generated HTML then yes, for the moment Pingy doesn’t support that. It’s in the plans though. If your site is API driven (even WordPress supports this now) then it will work fine with Pingy.
What does it use for the local dev env?
What do you mean exactly? For compilation I’ve open sourced what I’m using: https:// github.com/davej/piggy-in-the-middle
And are you using ngrok for the tunneling, or something proprietary?
Yes, that’s basically correct.
Very cool, especially the live share. The demo video does a great job of explaining how it works.
Thank you
What happens if you need a site with a back end like PHP or Ruby?
If it’s just an API then it should work fine. If it’s dynamically generated HTML then Pingy doesn’t support that yet. It will soon though.
Side note, the client feedback part in the demo caught my attention. You should checkout my service if you build many sites, addresses that specific issue.
That’s really cool. I have spent a little bit of time thinking about collaboration and communication over a Live Share. This is actually very similar to what I was thinking. Very useful tool!
Have to say this looks pretty great. That video explains perfectly (btw how/who made the video?), and seems like something a designer could immediately see value in, instead of always re-uploading changes to their own server for client feedback. Hope this goes well for you.
What’s your marketing plan?
I’m not sure I see a value in that. The same effect is achieved with any web meeting these days, and with them I’m not locked to one service.
And if you remove that, what is left? Automatic deployment? Mmm… a script with tar/gz, scp, tar/gunzip would do that for free and much more flexible than a third-party service.
I’m just wondering is the service really provide enough value. I’m not really familiar with web designers world, maybe they are really this helpless with deployments?
I’m not sure I see a value in that. The same effect is achieved with any web meeting these days, and with them I’m not locked to one service.
I guess the difference is that they can actually use and browse the site exactly as it is, on any device. You’re not really locked in either, you can just stop using Pingy and go back to whatever you used before.
And if you remove that, what is left? Automatic deployment? Mmm… a script with tar/gz, scp, tar/gunzip would do that for free and much more flexible than a third-party service.
What about minification? HTTP/2? SSL? Server redirects? They are all completely possible to do with other services but there’s a lot involved to get it right. With Pingy it just works out of the box. Also, Pingy is much smarter than a tar and upload script… If you do a deployment and then change a file before doing a re-deploy then Pingy will only upload the minimum set of what needs to be uploaded.
I’m just wondering is the service really provide enough value.
I guess I’ll find out soon.
I’m not in your target market, but this looks really cool. The video was quite well done. May I ask who made it and roughly how much it cost?
For the product, does it also include a non-live (cached) share? Say you don’t want to do a full deploy and just want the client to check it out, but you’re in different timezones or just can’t find a good time to meet.
@shanelabs: That video explains perfectly (btw how/who made the video?)
@kohanz: The video was quite well done. May I ask who made it and roughly how much it cost?
I made the video myself with Screenflow and a few free/cheap stock video clips. I did the original voiceover but wasn’t really happy with it so I went to a local voiceover guy who did a proper voiceover in his studio for less than €100.
@kohanz: For the product, does it also include a non-live (cached) share? Say you don’t want to do a full deploy and just want the client to check it out, but you’re in different timezones or just can’t find a good time to meet.
Not 100% sure how this would be different to a deploy. A full deploy can be really quick and future deploys will only upload files that have changed. You can also put a password on deploys if you’re worried about privacy.
So Pingy is a staging site. And a web server configurator. And a deployment engine. And a hosting system.
Kinda hard to give it a one-sentence description, which makes it hard to position it.
I didn’t realize you were hosting the deploy as well - if it’s as simple as a single-click deploy, then yes, it completely fulfills that functionality. Nice work!
Well done!.. Real nice… Like Kohanz, I am not your target audience… I can appreciate the amount of work behind that though… man…
Hope you come back and share some data after you launch… A real nice project…
All the best…
At which point I’m interested to know whom the OP sees as the target audience?
From the video I can deduce that it is a web designer, making sites for paying clients. That designer apparently is not afraid of Sass, but at the same time is not skilled with server configuration?
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you want to do something. Web Design shouldn’t need to also encompass DevOps.
I would guess that most web designers don’t remember off-hand where the nginx configuration is stored, not to mind what the config syntax for a redirect is, or whether they need a 301 or 302 redirect. They end up googling this info, but whoops it isn’t working, oh I need to reload the server, what’s the command for that? That works, but it looks like my CSS is still cached, how do I invalidate that? You get the picture.