Why We're Pausing Development  on Miyagi

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Webflow announced it’s new AI assistant yesterday.

It’s everything we were building Miyagi to be & more.

It can design, work with the CMS and even build react apps.

Not only that, but it’s fast. Webflow used private API’s for it, so it's likely much faster than Miyagi could be unless those APIs were released publicly.

Over the last few days, we’ve been thinking a lot about what’s next for Miyagi, and unfortunately we’ve decided to pause all future development on Miyagi.

Why Stop Now?

While some of you might think this is an overreaction to a product that isn’t even out yet, here’s our logic:

There is no way we can compete with Webflow in 3 core areas: performance, features, and price.

Performance

‍Our biggest limitation with Miyagi was the Webflow APIs that were available to us. All Webflow has to do is use private APIs that perform better and have more capabilities, and that alone would make the tool better, not to mention the huge benefit of being a native tool along with access to other parts of Webflow that we wouldn’t be able to access.

Features

‍One of the thoughts that crossed our minds was to try to build features that the AI assistant didn’t have at launch, such as a Figma integration, built in knowledge of popular frameworks, etc. But ultimately any of these features could just as easily be added to the Webflow, so it’d only be buying time. 

Price

‍While I don’t know what pricing will look like for the AI assistant, Webflow has some core advantages over us. Webflow likely will have access to enterprise level pricing from AI providers like Anthropic, which would allow them to operate the AI Assistant with lower overall costs. On top of that, Webflow could choose to just operate the AI assistant at close to breakeven pricing and use it as a tool to bring new people to Webflow, whereas for us we have to make some profit on top of the cost that goes to AI providers. And ultimately even if we were able to be the cheaper product, we still wouldn’t be able to compete on performance and features. 

Ultimately considering all of these factors, we at Amply have decided that the best course of action for us moving forward is to stop putting resources into Miyagi.

What does this mean for Miyagi?

We’ll still keep Miyagi up and running for the time being for anyone who wants to use it. We’re just pausing all future development on Miyagi right now, and will determine the what we do with it once Webflow releases the AI assistant. We may fully sunset it at some point, but we've toyed with the idea of open sourcing it and pivoting it to be more of a community product, rather than a tool that we're trying to make a profit on. We'll see if there's enough demand for that in the future.

Final Thoughts

It sucks to have invested so much time & energy into a product only to have it all come to an end 1 month after launch. The reality is though, we always knew that Webflow would eventually build something like Miyagi, we were just hoping we had more time.

And hey, while this didn't pan out the way we wanted it to, it's still pretty cool that we had such a similar idea to what Webflow was building - and kudos to the Webflow team for building something even better than we could. As a Webflow user, I couldn't be more excited for the direction Webflow is going in and am stoked to play with all the features they released.

In the end, I’m incredibly proud of our team and what we were able to accomplish. We took an idea we had in June and in 2 weeks created a brand, website, & MVP. Just over a month later we launched on the Webflow app marketplace. And since launch grew to 600+ users.

I'm also grateful to all of you who have used Miyagi, offered feedback, participated in the Beta, and supported us through this journey. It's been so fun to getting to know you all and see your genuine excitement for Miyagi.  

What's next?

As for me, Miyagi has been close to a full time effort for me over the past few months, so I'll now be spending my time doing what I was doing before - leading the development team at Amply and striving to help Amply be the best Webflow agency out there. This will also include taking a bigger role on the marketing side of things at Amply - we want Amply to be a well known name in the Webflow community and we will continue to work towards that.

And lastly - we’re not done building for the Webflow community. We’ve learned so much through this process and are excited to continue to build apps & resources that will help the Webflow community. We’ve already got some stuff in the works, stay tuned :)