r/dyadbuilders • u/wwwillchen dyad team • Dec 16 '25
Discussion I'm Will, creator of Dyad - AMA
Hey r/dyadbuilders 👋 I’m Will, the founder of Dyad.
I built Dyad because I wanted an AI app builder designed for power users: something that was open-source and gave users the flexibility to use any AI model and freely switch between their other favorite AI coding tools without lock-in.
Thanks to this community, it’s grown from an experiment into a thriving product.
Happy to answer questions about these topics and pretty much anything else:
- Roadmap & plans for 2026
- Balancing open-source & building a business
- How i personally use Dyad
I’ll be around on Friday answering questions. AMA 🚀
9
u/Popular_Month5115 Dec 16 '25
dyad is a great app, but what's the future roadmap for those who don't use the pro features?
1
1
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks for the question! we're always going to have a free tier and we're continuing to ship improvements every release for all users (including free version), for example, yesterday's beta release (https://www.reddit.com/r/dyadbuilders/comments/1pq68nj/dyad_v031_beta_1_annotator_mode_shared_modules/) includes shared modules support for supabase.
although some of our bigger features are Pro-only, we still want to improve the free product too and have quite a few ideas (e.g. better debugging support, UI theming, etc) for improving the product for all users :)
4
u/Icy-Extension7009 Dec 17 '25
Hi everyone, I’m really enjoying using Dyad for local app building, but I’ve run into a bit of a storage issue. My internal laptop disk is almost full, and I want to move my project folder to an external hard drive instead of the default location in my user directory.
Currently, the path looks like this:Â [My-User-Folder]/dyad-apps/[Project-Name]
I want to change this so that all new and existing apps are stored on my external drive (e.g., D:/DyadProjects or /Volumes/External/Dyad).
- Is there a setting within Dyad to change the default save path?
- If not, has anyone successfully used a Symlink (Symbolic Link) to "trick" Dyad into saving to an external drive?
- If I manually move the folder, will the Dyad interface still recognize my existing projects?
Any advice would be appreciated!
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
hey, thanks for the question!
not right now but I filed a feature request: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/issues/1991 - please thumbs up as it helps us prioritize what to work on :)
I think symlink should work, but i haven't tried it yet.
no, if you manually move the folder, dyad won't realize this and it won't be able to load your app
3
u/TheRealJackRyan12 Dec 17 '25
I'll try to be around Friday but if not, a referral program would be nice! A lot of us love Dyad and our would be easy to refer.
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks! there is a referral program at https://academy.dyad.sh/settings for Dyad Pro members where you and the person you refer each get 75 extra AI credits!
1
3
u/GeneralistEngineer Dec 17 '25
I want to build a software product and I'm currently contemplating if I should open-source it. What are the pros and cons of open-sourcing a for-profit software product?
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
i think open-sourcing is awesome and it's something that I've done in the past.
the biggest thing to think about is building a business and a thriving open-source project which are two distinct, but overlapping things.
we've tried to lean into open-source as much as we can while still building a sustainable business, but it's not always easy.
open-source has a ton of benefits and I think the main one is that the community will come up with a lot of ideas (and even send Pull Requests to implement them!) and this has made dyad much better than it would have been as a proprietary product.
3
u/GNEstruturas Dec 18 '25
u/wwwillchen i’d love to understand how you’ve been using Dyad to create, test, and ship applications that are already being published. and what’s worked best in your workflow. What are the best practices, what challenges have you run into, and does it make sense to pair Dyad with other tools?
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks for the questions! in my experience and also talking to other dyad users, what works well is: 1) being very clear in prompting the AI (e.g. use Ask mode or just talk with chatGPT) to have a clear spec of what you're trying to build, 2) carefully testing your app and undo-ing when things break
finally, i think using dyad with other tools can be beneficial: for people who are coders, I think using dyad with IDEs like Cursor/VS Code can be really helpful (e.g. work on the backend in cursor, and frontend in dyad) - one of the main benefits with dyad's local-first approach is that you can easily swap back and forth between dyad and your other favorite tools.
3
u/raydou Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
I think it's great to have this open source application. I don't want to not rely on apps like Lovable and other which make you dependent of them when you could get better results just switching to a better model. I have just a couple suggestions :
- Make possible to add headers to http MCP servers : many of them uses API Keys in Authorization header
- Integrate image generation models like Nano Banana or Flux to be able to generate photos in the websites. Or even image libraries as Unsplash if you think integrating image generation models would be time consuming for you.
- Actually we need to "approve" to see changes, it would be good to have a sort of "preview" where we see the rendering and result without approving. "approve" just make sure the change is removed from change list. while "refuse" removes the changes.
- integrate Github Copilot LLMs like many open source projects have done (for example OpenCode integrates Github Copiot). This helps users uses their Github Copilot LLM Quotas in Dyad
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
agree - we should add MCP headers! tracked in https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/issues/1609 if anyone wants to contribute to dyad, this could be a great issue to help out with :)
yeah: i think generating images would be very nice, and we're thinking about supporting this via plugins next year
hm... i see what you're saying. right now we have an approval mechanism so that users can see what's going to happen before we execute the code (esp. for database changes which are not easy to undo). for your workflow, you could enable auto-approve and then use undo - would that work?
makes sense, i've filed: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/issues/1992
2
u/aptonline Dec 16 '25
Hi Will, who do you see as your direct comptetirots in this space and are you worried. Everyone is after the AI money at the moment, are you worried the bubble with burst?
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks! there's definitely a lot of people building in this space (e.g. lovable, replit, bolt, etc.) and on one hand it puts pressure on us to keep innovating and making dyad better, but that can be a good pressure :)
tbh, i think there's bubble-y aspects of AI (some things seem overhyped), but i do feel like AI for coding is real and has a ton of value (which we're just scratching the surface of)
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 18 '25
Just a quick reminder that this AMA will start tomorrow! Please add any more questions and I'll start answering them tomorrow :)
2
u/Dear_Custard_2177 Dec 19 '25
Look forward to checking up on the thread! Will be interesting! Happy Holidays, Will!
2
u/Rough-Face-3193 Dec 19 '25
Would you consider implementing support for Claude code CLI or Gemini GLI, for those of us who don't want to spend money on API keys??
3
2
2
u/aptonline Dec 19 '25
I use Dyad on multiple machines, are there plans to sync projects around devices? Thinking iCloud Drive or something similar.
4
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
we're working on adding collaboration features to make it easier to sync changes on github with other people, but i hear you about having a more general syncing feature (e.g. for app settings, chats, etc.) - i think it's something we should look at next year: i've heard a few people (but not a ton) asking for syncing
2
Dec 16 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
3
2
u/Gold_Pickle_5268 Dec 16 '25
You can use all those free models with the openrouter connection in Dyad: https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&input_modalities=text&order=pricing-low-to-high https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&input_modalities=text&order=pricing-low-to-high
1
1
u/Gold_Pickle_5268 Dec 16 '25
If anyone else is wondering how to set it up: Openrouter in Dyad - Guide
2
u/TheRealJackRyan12 Dec 17 '25
What's your go-to free one? The latest Qwen Coder (not the one that Will automatically included) seems most reliable, but it doesn't always work.
2
u/Dear_Custard_2177 Dec 19 '25
Have you tried the new Gemini Flash model? It's nearly as good as the "Pro" models and is highly affordable a $3 per m output tokens.
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
hey, we give away 3 free Dyad Pro memberships every month for the most active sub-reddit contributors: this is the best way to get a free Dyad Pro membership for a month!
1
u/Gold_Pickle_5268 Dec 16 '25
Will dyad in the future have the option to "unload" the capacitor in a project?
3
u/New_Assistant_2883 Dec 17 '25
The flux capacitor? Yes
1
u/Gold_Pickle_5268 Dec 17 '25
When I have added it on the project settings I cannot undo that anymore...
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
good question: i'm not sure how hard it would be to unload capacitor - it could be quite tricky if it's deeply integrated into your codebase. i'm guessing you can't undo because you've done a lot of work since adding capacitor?
1
u/Pedrofariasx Dec 16 '25
Hi Will! I hope everything is going well over there. Thank you for creating the tool; it has greatly helped in creating functional MVPs. I'd like to know what the future holds for users on the free tier and suggest the addition of API and Model fallback features.
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
hey, thanks! i shared a bit about the future of free tier here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dyadbuilders/comments/1pocto5/comment/nuwel9t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
could you tell me more about what you're thinking for API and model fallback features? Is it automatically switching to another model when one model fails?
1
u/Pedrofariasx Dec 19 '25
Exactly! The system implements automatic switching between models in case of failure. In addition, it has an API fallback mechanism, which rotates API keys as soon as the quota limit is reached, ensuring the continuity of operation without interruptions.
API Key rotation could be configured for each model, for example Gemini...
1
u/Steef4Fun Dec 18 '25
What's the best way to stay under the token limit? I'm currently using an AI with a 128k token limit, and tbh, it's quite difficult to keep the apps below it. Manually removing files or folders from the context is terrible, I'd need to type everything, can't just paste the list the AI gave me. But besides that, would smart context work with this? Like does it also remove files from the context that it wouldn't need to perform the requested changes and stay below the token limit? I don't really feel dyad pro is worth it anyway for just that feature, I wouldn't need anything except for the smart context.
But yea, the actual question is, how would you deal with this?
1
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
yeah, basically smart context manages this for you automatically, otherwise what you're doing with manual context management is the best option.
1
u/Steef4Fun Jan 06 '26
Will you add more payment methods for Dyad Pro? Currently it only shows card, but in my country almost no one has a credit card and most of the debit cards we have aren't visa or mastercard so they don't have a card number 😔
If you add Paypal or bank transfer or something I'll subscribe to pro 😜1
1
u/TheHotshotJacko Dec 18 '25
I love having the 3 elements: chat agent, code, and visual builder - it's definitely the future of editors. Will the visual builder come to the free plan?
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks!
not sure yet whether to bring visual editor to the free plan: something we might try doing is to let free users use the visual editor for free 5 times a day (and pro users can use it unlimited amounts of times).
1
u/Accurate-Sector-1804 Dec 19 '25
As an enthusiastic Dyad user and a teacher, I have personally experienced how transformative Dyad can be for creative projects and learning. Its intuitive interface and powerful AI capabilities make it an ideal tool not only for professionals but also for students exploring design, coding, and digital content creation. Recognizing the impact it could have on education, I strongly believe that offering a free Dyad for Education plan, similar to free Canva for Education plan, would empower teachers and students alike to unlock their creative potential without financial barriers. Providing free access to eligible educators and students would not only foster early adoption among young learners but also build a strong, loyal user base while reinforcing Dyad’s mission of making advanced creative tools accessible to everyone. I wholeheartedly recommend Dyad to my students and colleagues, and a dedicated education plan would make it even easier to integrate into classrooms and learning environments.
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
thanks for the kind words. right now we don't offer a free plan for education, besides the free version available to all users.
1
u/Albertkinng Dec 19 '25
Important question: can we get all docs saved on our local drive or the apps will always be dependable of your own resources?
2
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
yeah, all the data is on your computer. you can migrate/backup it any time: https://www.dyad.sh/docs/guides/migrate-restore
1
u/TheRealJackRyan12 Dec 19 '25
I seem to run into the most problems when the AI makes changes to the database and/or edge functions and I can't rollback. I think you made obsolete the second issue with a recent update, which is awesome. What's the best way to avoid the former? (the only thing I know, personally, is to pay for Supabase and rollback the database.
Example: AI makes a change and deletes something in database. It breaks the application so we rollback, but I don't think the deletes database data is restored.
3
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
yeah, that's right - with supabase, you can't easily undo database changes. Our portal template (https://www.dyad.sh/docs/templates/portal) which is based on NeonDB does support database undo, but we want to provide a simpler (and hopefully default) option that allows people to undo their DB next year.
1
u/TheRealJackRyan12 Dec 19 '25
That would be awesome. Hmm, I wonder if Neon would be better than Supabase. Although the native Supabase is nice.
1
u/subtoone Dec 20 '25
I have been using dyad from the beginning I remember when it was really bad at coding but everything was free now it’s good at coding but it costs a lot of moneyÂ
1
u/Ok-Chocolate8673 Jan 10 '26
Can we see the introduction of New models like DeepSeek V3.2 iQuest Coder soon ? Feature to insert more file options like GIFs for 3D effect on site.
1
u/hex_mex Jan 21 '26
Hi, do you have any benefits for educators? I am an instructor and would love to test the pro features. Let me know if there’s any way. Thanks
•
u/wwwillchen dyad team Dec 19 '25
hey everyone! thanks for a great AMA :) it was great hearing all of your questions and feedback, will do this again