This is 3 tacos, maybe 3.5. I'll give it 4 tacos because I think there might be some use cases where this works better than it does for me.

It has a solid foundation and I can see this shaping up to a great product, but it needs a ton of QoL improvements first.

I am a web developer building 1 or 2 small websites per month for smaller clients. For many years, I have been using Markup io to get feedback from my clients on their projects. However, Markup have removed their free tier recently, and are now asking for $79 / month, which I can't justify for the minimal output I have.

So, I was looking for alternatives and was excited to find a potential candidate here on AppSumo. In hindsight, I should have taken advantage of their free trial offer, which would probably made me skip this instead of buying a Tier 3 license. But that's on me.

I have tried to use this for a few hours to see if I can use this in my workflow, but it's been a rather frustrating experience.

1) When I signed up, I accidentally filled in the password field twice, only to discover that the lower one was actually a field to add the name of my new workspace (yeah, I am stupid sometimes). So, now, in the backend, it reads "Hello ^%EyJhw*zNJrac9cSLJhKS" (or whatever it is), and when I invite other users, they get a mail saying they have been added to "^%EyJhw*zNJrac9cSLJhKS" as well.
The problem with this is, that there seems to be no way to change this myself. I would probably have to contact their support to get it fixed.

2) In the backend, there's an option to add another workspace. So I thought I could just create a new one with a proper name, and delete the old one. Well, that doesn't work either. The new workspace is actually not part of the AppSumo plan; it's a free trial now. And I can't delete this either.

3) I tried to add my first website. Unlike Markup and other similar products that work out of the box, a code snippet has to be added to the website for QualityHive to work. This is a problem in terms of GDPR in live environments, as the website will establish an external connection to the QH server whenever a user (not necessarily a developer or stakeholder) enters the website.

4) Even with the code snippet in place, QualityHive could not connect to my website. It only started working after I deactivated my security features & firewall. Again, not useful for live environments.

5) A new "guest mode" has been added to QualityHive recently, and this was the feature that convinced made me buy it. The problem however is that guests are just anonymous users. If you add three stakeholders to the project, and they all leave comments in the frontend, you don't know who said what. Competing solutions allow guests to add their names, or even their email address (or create a free account) if they want to get notified of replies to their comments.

6) I have tried several other solutions, and you usually have a sidebar in the frontend view where all the comments are being tracked. You can then click on a comment (or thread), and it will highlight the corresponding element in the live view. In QualityHive, the comments are a bit hidden. You can toggle a list with the comments, but you have no idea which element they belong to. You'd have to go to the QualityHive backend, click there, and it will take you again to the live site and highlight the relevant section. That just doesn't work for me (and my clients who don't have access to the backend). In my opinion, all the relevant info should be accessible from the frontend, making the backend optional to use.

I have to say though, the backend tracking is great. I believe this is the best solution for large / complex projects. For example, it has a Kanban board and the possibility to assign users to tickets. Things like JS errors and commenters' device infos are being tracked, which I have not seen in similar solutions.
But for my personal use case, I'd rather have better front-facing features than a state-of-the-art backend that I would hardly use.

So, for the time being, I have settled with a competitor that ticks all the boxes at a fair monthly rate ($4). But I'll keep an eye on QualityHive's progress, especially during the refund period. 😁 If they pull it off, it's going to be a great product (maybe already is, for some use cases)!