Meng To

Founder at @designcodeio and I teach designers code and developers design.

[Meng To @MengTo]

I recorded a 50-min tutorial on prompting top-tier landing pages with Gemini 3

[Meng To @MengTo]

@creativedev It does auto-convert. It’s not perfect but we do refund when people forget.

Free plans would work if it wasn’t for the bad actors. Requires deep pockets.

[Meng To @MengTo]

Best decision I made this year: switching to paid trials.

Free users were 50% of our token costs, brought abuse and spam, and rarely converted.

Paid trials converted better, lowered noise, and increased customers.

As a bootstrapped product, I’d rather serve serious users than compete with VC-funded free plans.

[Marc Lou @marclou]

Remove your free plan.

Free users are leeches. They increase support, server costs, and make you build features your paying customers don’t want.

Less than 3% of free users ever convert.

VC startups can afford free plans because they’re optimizing for growth, not profit.

If you’re an indie founder, never give away your product for free.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@BradleyYoungjr Ah each course always come with the goodies

[Meng To @MengTo]

I've been using Codex since day 1.

I built 3 massive web apps, 1 mac app and 1 iOS app with it. It's honestly the best app I've used this year.

Seriously thinking about creating a course on this. Anyone interested?

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Building apps has never been easier.

With Sites, Codex can turn your work, ideas, and plans into an interactive website or app your team can explore, use, and share with a URL.

Rolling out to Business and Enterprise plans, before expanding more broadly.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@creativedev So I actually meant pro trial. You get to try pro but gotta enter your cc

[Meng To @MengTo]

@mylifcc It’s using SwiftUI

[Meng To @MengTo]

@orelhassid GPT-5.5 medium is really fast and extra high is the gold standard for coding.

In terms of speed it doesn't beat Composer 2.5 though.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@simonch00 Yep and in this case they have to enter their credit card.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@olayanjuidris Sorry I meant pro trial, meaning that they do have access to paid features except that they need to enter their credit card.

Most iOS apps, I believe, do that.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@arpittalksstuff I did try Claude Code many times. So you're saying I should make a Claude Code course instead?

I would love to hear what makes Claude Code better than Codex.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@InvincibleEdge 3-day, working well for aura and neuform

[Meng To @MengTo]

Unfortunately the difference between Claude Code and Codex is just a UI. You can transfer all your knowledge about prompt skills, browser use, but better. It's just better organized and more chat-oriented.

I guess it's hard to know how much you need those features like mobile connection or threads or computer use until you make them part of your workflow.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@moothefarmer @CryptoFan1985 Sure my DM is open.

[Meng To @MengTo]

Yep, that's how I learn best, which is to make, iterate, and do stuff that I've never done before.

But making apps is just part of the story. You need to learn distribution. You need to ship a landing page with it and set up a bunch of stuff like payments, authentication, database, etc.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@benhylak Apart from the fact that it's confused a lot between using Chrome, default browser or Codex built-in, it's totally a game changer for testing and taking screenshots for context.

Computer use is another killer.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@AiTesty5 It's easy to make apps. I can make a hundred in a day by creating a 100 threads. But it's hard to make the one that really solves real problems and makes sustainable revenue.

[Meng To @MengTo]

Frankly I didn't think too much of it. I used Codex since day one, so that's about four months ago, and totally got into the whole idea of threads and building locally.

Then suddenly there's an explosion of people who start talking about Codex like it's the next best thing. So I guess it's time to start a course.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@moothefarmer @CryptoFan1985 There is a whole flow that we are driving right now and we are getting the whole team to start their YouTube (with success), Instagram, TikTok, and I built a bunch of tools just to solve the issue.

[Meng To @MengTo]

That is, if you think of design as designing in Figma. For a lot of people like me, design is when you build something, and you iterate, and you see results, and you come back to the drawing board.

Nowadays the drawing board is you chatting with your agents, generating images in image 2.0, taking screenshots, and then starting multiple threads.

[Meng To @MengTo]

@Abdulaziz747_Ai Image 2.0 is just the best image model at the moment and it's integrated into a Codex.

[Meng To @MengTo]

Habits are very hard to break, to be honest. For example I recently ran out of credits because I'm just billing too much on Codex and then I switched to Cursor and it took me a while to get used to it. Just from a trust perspective.

That being said when you start making something real and you start seeing results, it's going to give you that jump that you need. There are just so many features that are game-changing. For example computer use or mobile connection or organizing into threads.

And most importantly I think it's much, much harder to hit your limits with GPT-5.5. And this model is just a beast.