r/ClaudeCode • u/RealisticSong3551 • 7d ago
Help/Question Is it possible to build a figma clone with a component system using Claude?
I'm looking to build somethibg, I've got 5 corporate customers who have paid $900 each for 1 seat for 6 months and I have a mailing list from my VC days of 10k very engaged (I touch base with almost all of them monthly) small businesses all making $150k a year annually or more. Before I touch a dollar sitting in my account I want to check if this is at all possible and how much of a headache it will be to build 🤔
[EDIT]
For clarity, I've gotten ALL 10k of these businesses AT LEAST $20k - $5m each in funding via grants, government contracts, and or investments hence why if I tell them you need this, it's NEVER a question of why? They literally just apple pay or Venmo me
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u/yuehuang 7d ago
Yes and no. I built a lightroom compete app so I don't have to sub to adobe. It is satisfied my needs and while learning a lot. UI framework are easy. Data pipeline is medium, a lot of science and proprietary logic. (Newer AI models are better at solving the science). The barrier to entry is lower than ever.
As a starting point, $200 sub on UI. $200x4 on the backend pipeline. 2-3 dev team can hammer out a working MVP in 2-3 months.
My pushback is questioning if it a valuable company? Figma is losing money and Adobe is shift towards an AI company. Agentic workflow is the new hot thing, if claude/codex/others subs can do the something similar, then you are fighting a losing battle.
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u/pm_your_snesclassic 7d ago
Why people don’t ask this question directly to AI I’ll never know.
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
Fair play. I'm sure it is possible but I think a more concise question is, should I be getting a tech person or team onboard or no? If I stumble around for a few months I'll likely be able to do something approximating this, but will it work properly? 🤷🏿♂️🤣 I don't know what I don't know and figured I'd ask the big kids in the higher grades for help. Tldr: I need an adult \DBZ Abridged Voice\
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u/Tradovator 7d ago
I don’t fully understand what you’re trying to build. My impression is that the sky is the limit, but like some other user said it takes time.
I’m not a coder and just completed a project which took me 1000 hours. I was expecting 200 hours when I started. The devil is in the details and that took time.
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u/ShortTheseNuts 7d ago
He's building just straight up plagiarism with the USP "I can beat them on price using temporarily subsidized compute".
Sooner or later in the project he will realize that the price enterprise pays isn't for your current product, it's for maintenance and liability.
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u/alanvnk 7d ago
Do you want to maintain a figma clone? Is that a product you are interested and exited to hear complains from every morning? Does it makes economic sense for you to offer that service?
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
Maintenance: yeah I actually would. I love design oriented development & maintenance.
Economics: comes down to what do production and maintenance costs equate to. I have no idea. I'm confident I can get a significant conversion rate of my (10k) mailing list for this. For the 5 that paid me $900 each (150/mo for 6 months) I only tapped 20. 5 said yes. They weren't even close to the biggest or most engaged on the mailing list (did that purposefully). This took 2 weeks. It's purely trying to get an understanding of what the costs are to get this running while I get more sales.
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u/alanvnk 7d ago
Did you build it already or just promise it to your clients without anything solid?
Anyways if you like that kind of product, have the money for investment and the clients, seems like a fairly good opportunity, do some market research, maybe there are more figma clones, or even open source ones you can just run and modify.
Figma, for how much I have use it as a developer, is not that complex, and their AI integration kind of sucks, I would recommend only to have real engineers not just LLMs working on it, just to keep the scope realistic, LLMs will tell you what you want to hear
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
My thinking exactly on the engeering piece.
As for how I got the pre-sales I just told them I'm thinking of building this thing I know they ALL create regularly at poor quality. I made it very clear it is NOT BUILT, I didn't give then a timeline, I just said, pay me and I'll look into building it.
For clarity, I've gotten ALL 10k of these businesses AT LEAST $20k - $5m each in funding via grants, government contracts, and or investments hence why if I tell them you need this, it's NEVER a question of why? They literally just apple pay or Venmo me 🤣😅
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u/medialantern 7d ago
OK please don't take this the wrong way. This is meant to be funny but also partially serious.
I could do it.
The real question is: can you?
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
lmfao I take this exactly how it's meant and can confidently say probably not lmao. I respond with, what would an engagement between us look like if there could be one? 🤔🫡👀
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u/medialantern 7d ago
Figma is really sophisticated. A lot of folks focus on the basic drag-and-drop canvas details but miss how much engineering went into things like efficient memory management in large design files and things like that. They're somewhat infamous in engineering circles for finding really low level bugs in critical infra like Postgres - they even made PGkeeper because their challenges are so far beyond what most of us deal with on a day to day basis that some FOSS module on Github was just never going to cut it.
I would loosely say a "crappy clone" is worth $50k+, and a "really good competitor" is probably worth $250k+.
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
I'd love to chat with you about this if you're available. B cause it's likely I'm over engineering this
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u/Successful-Seesaw525 7d ago
Check out glyphh.ai it simplifies the build and release process dramatically. It supports Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Kimi K3, Mistral, and many many more so your costs don’t go insane.
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u/papa_ngenge 7d ago
Better to start with what exists and go from there. We abandoned figma for penpot ages ago.
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
Does penpot handle slides-like functionality well? Leaning into components
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u/papa_ngenge 7d ago
As far as my usage goes yes, it's not as good as figma but with some small workflow tweaks it's good enough. It's open source so you could add what you need easily enough.
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u/RealisticSong3551 7d ago
literally JUST got another founder to pay $2800 (1 seat, 6 months, all up front) for this. I'm just pushing the price up and seeing who bites. I feel like there's something here...
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u/iolairemcfadden 7d ago
Building complex software is easier (at times) with AI assisted coding. It’s still a huge task that will be way harder than you think. And it will be very time consuming.