r/instructionaldesign — public pain points

• Incumbent SaaS Betrays Loyal Users with Opaque Price Hikes, Feature Removal, and Data Lock-In

  Long-time users of dominant tools like Notion are being hit with shock price increases (one user went from $96 to $240 — a 150% hike after their 'grandfathered' discount was silently killed), discontinued features (Notion Mail deleted with only months of notice), and AI models moved behind extra-priced 'Notion Credits' even as those models got 50% cheaper to run. Pricing pages are described as 'extremely convoluted,' and because all their data is trapped in the platform, users feel they have no choice but to pay or rip out years of work. The pain is intense and public (top posts, mass cancellations, explicit 'I refuse to bankroll a money-grubbing company'), yet no solution exists: there is no auto-migratable, portable, transparently-priced alternative and no way to hedge against vendor lock-in. This is the exact opening for indie developers — build a trustworthy, portable, honestly-priced replacement and users will flee to it.

  7 mentionsr/instructionaldesign
• Legacy Course-Authoring Tools Force Creators into Brittle AI-Prompt Workarounds to Hit Deadlines

  Instructional designers and course creators are stuck with dominant authoring tools (Storyline/Articulate) that are slow, complex, and file-bound: learning the tool takes months, projects live in local files with opaque connectors that nobody can maintain a year later, and rebuilding a simulation means starting from scratch. The workaround creators now describe is telling: they abandon the tool's native workflows and instead fire off a few LLM prompts, paste raw code blocks into Rise, and get the same output in 10-25% of the time. That is a screaming signal that no purpose-built product exists for fast, maintainable, AI-native course production - creators are hand-duct-taping a general chatbot to an LMS-slice tool and calling it a workflow. The pain is severe (weeks-to-months of production time per course, unmaintainable deliverables, no repeatable process), the incumbent shows no sign of fixing it, and the 'solution' today is a fragile prompt-and-paste hack that breaks at scale across 100+ lectures. A desktop product that turns an outline into consistent, maintainable, production-ready course assets without the legacy tool tax would be adopted immediately.

  1 mentionsr/instructionaldesign

← NichestarterGTM CoachNicheReach