Hi everyone! I’m building ComposeLab, a community-...

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[Riad]

Hi everyone!
I’m building ComposeLab, a community-driven platform where Kotlin and Compose developers can share UI components, animations, patterns, and reusable ideas.

The goal is to create a space where we can all:
• discover great Compose/KMP components,
• learn from each other’s implementations,
• share motion/UX inspiration,
• and speed up our development by reusing high-quality building blocks.
I’d love to get your thoughts:
👉 Do you think a community platform like this is valuable for the Kotlin/Compose ecosystem?
👉 Would you be interested in sharing your own components or ideas?
👉 What features would make it genuinely useful for you?

Your feedback will help shape the direction of the platform, thanks a lot for your time 🙌

ComposeLab Demo.mov

[Tgo1014]

Would be cool to have some recipes or see some nice code for some cool UI things. Is it live already?

[Pablichjenkov]

I think it is a good idea. There is Composables.com from Alex Style which is really good but having a competitor is not bad. I think it is a good idea to put it under a paywall or perhaps a marketplace for devs to sell components. I remember there used to be a lot of marketplaces for bootstrap and web components

[Stefan Oltmann]

Composables.com is not a community, that’s the difference.

For UI design inspiration I use Dribbble.com and I would imagine such a platform as something similar, just with interactive preview.

What was displayed in the video really looked compelling.

[Pablichjenkov]

Correct, valid the clarification

[Stefan Oltmann]

Pablichenko raised the right question… how will this be financed?
Is it like Lottie’s where you can give your composables for free or sell them (with the platform taking a cut)?

I see an „upgrade“ button in the top right corner, so you clearly have a idea to make money in mind.

[Pablichjenkov]

On another note, klibs.io contains a UI filter category but man, how hard is it to find anything specific in klibs.io.

[Stefan Oltmann]

Yeah, it really is. You still need to go to their GitHub and hope they have proper screenshots.

[Stefan Oltmann]

Watching the video again I see sponsor slots for ads in the grid. So the idea might be to make money like instagram does. That could work.
The question is: After the platform costs are covered and you took your cut, will some revenue be shared with content creators?

[Stefan Oltmann]

That is usually not something I pay much attention to, but since I recently lost my job I am starting to wonder whether I could earn some money with my side projects. So if I build a really cool component for one of my products what incentive would I have to extract it and put that on an platform with ads instead of just sharing a Gist (ad-free)? That’s a question that comes to my mind.

[Riad]

Thanks a lot for all your feedback guys !

My original idea was to make everything completely free, similar to Dribbble or CodePen.io.
But with the real costs of hosting (storage, video previews, CDN, bandwidth, server resources), I quickly realized that a fully free platform isn’t sustainable long-term.

So the plan for now is simple:

👉 A fully free version for everyone, supported by light AdSense ads just to cover infrastructure costs, nothing intrusive. The goal isn’t to turn the platform into an ad wall.

The vision remains to build a community-driven space where developers can:
• share components, animations, and patterns
• learn from each other
• get UI/UX inspiration
• explore interactive previews
… basically a Dribbble/CodePen-style platform but dedicated to Kotlin & Compose.

Later on, depending on interest, I might introduce:
• a creator mode where devs can optionally sell components
• revenue sharing if ads or sponsorship slots generate income

But the core idea will stay the same:
open, community-oriented, and made for Compose developers 🙂

[Stefan Oltmann]

Sounds good, makes sense. 🙂
So the „upgrade“ button is just a mockup thing and won’t be there in the final version?

[S.]

the upgrade button will take effect depending how often chatgpt has to reply to this thread. gotta cover the AI costs as well

[Stefan Oltmann]

To generate significant income for revenue sharing you’d need to bump up ads, which will turn it into an ad wall. So you’d need to stay light on ads long-term.

[Stefan Oltmann]

To save on hosting costs & keep ads to a minimum some more hints:

Cloudflare has free CDN for everyone.
For Open Source projects they also provide a free Paid Workers account (worth $5/month).
They call it Project Alexandria.

Tebi.io provides 25 GB of free S3 storage. That’s quite a lot.

And of course you know that GitHub pages offers free static website hosting for the main page. Cloudflare does that, too.

Those free offers will get you a long way.
I use the same services and managed to keep https://stefan-oltmann.de/oni-seed-browser ad-free.

I got $50 in donations this year, too, so I have some buffer for additional server fees.

I believe my community would rather want to donate something to cover costs than seeing ads.

[Stefan Oltmann]

I don’t know if you plan this community product to be open source.
In general for open source projects you get some extra support from companies like Cloudflare and of course the community.

[Riad]

Thanks @S. for this contribution very useless 😂

[Riad]

@Stefan Oltmann For this kind of project i can't manage all by my self, I will just delegate my job to firebase app hosting how makes the job as fast as possible, That’s why I’ll delegate most of the hosting and backend work to Firebase Hosting and Firebase services. It gives me great performance out of the box, minimal ops, and it lets me move fast without having to maintain servers.
I still keep Cloudflare in mind for CDN and caching if needed, but overall I want something fully managed so I can ship features quicker
Btw, I also have a colleague who managed to keep his project alive entirely thanks to donations thanks for all!

[S.]

obviously there's not much "use" and value in jokes other than laughs and giggles. but you sure can't hold it against me that your first answer sounds like a chatgpt response, with the formatting, language and especially the stark difference to your last reply

[S.]

oh, and "useless" reiteration

[Stefan Oltmann]

Yes, it looks like an answer revised by ChatGPT. It has the typical formatting.
I sometimes revise my messages, too, so I’d not consider that a problem.

[S.]

except that this doesn't really look like revising, or if that's the case then tell it to be less like PR spokesperson. I just find it rather impolite to reply with AI text without looking at it first. but sure, go nuts

[S.]

btw rather than publishing components etc completely for free on github you could consider writing some blog posts around them. there you can place your own ads and build a brand. and some people even end up with a premium version themselves

[Stefan Oltmann]

Fair point. For someone regularly sharing components it indeed makes sense to do this in blog posts or medium articles rather than a Gist. Noted. 📝

[Riad]

yeah @S., i used ai for that one.
i was busy with work and it was quicker to turn my french message into english with gpt.
nothing rude meant, just trying to answer fast

[Stefan Oltmann]

I can see how this feels impolite, @S..
Maybe I just got used to it by now.

[S.]

just don't go after other people when they make jokes about it

[S.]

but yeah, it's everywhere

[Stefan Oltmann]

When communicating with customers I type the full answer by myself and paste that into ChatGPT with a „revise:“ in front.

[Stefan Oltmann]

just don't go after other people when they make jokes about it

I apologize and removed the reaction.
I genuinely was thinking you are trolling and didn’t get that you felt offended by the AI generated answer. 🙈

[Stefan Oltmann]

In these cases the use of AI is acceptable for me.
But I get annoyed when people publish AI generated medium articles, which always contain lots of errors. But that’s another topic. 😅

[S.]

no, all good.
but on that topic I'm also not sure how profitable blog posts are anymore at this point. traffic is going down a lot (if you don't count AI crawlers)

[Stefan Oltmann]

You have to live with my broken English response here, because I’m scared to revise my messages now. 😬