Hot take: that $35 CSS animation library saved me a weekend of work

Picked up a lightweight animation library called Animate.css last Friday for a client landing page with six hero elements that needed staggered entrance effects. Writing it all from scratch in keyframes was going to take me hours, so I dropped the cash and had it done in like 20 minutes. Has anyone else found a paid tool or snippet that actually cut your dev time in half?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessawebb7d ago

Honestly that "saved me a weekend of work" part hit home. My buddy Jake was building this site for a local bakery last month and he spent like three whole days coding scroll animations from scratch. He was losing his mind. Then someone told him about GSAP and he bought the club membership for like $50. He had all the products fading in on scroll in under an hour. He texted me a video of it working and I could hear the relief in his typing. Sometimes it really is worth just paying for the thing instead of being stubborn about doing it yourself.

riverk826d ago

i get what you're saying @tessawebb and jake's story is funny but honestly i kinda disagree. sometimes the struggle of figuring it out yourself teaches you way more than just buying the shortcut. like yeah it saves time but what happens when you need to customize something the library can't do? you're back at square one.