My first thought is... how is this free if it's similar to FIGMA?

It sounds like they have basically bundled in a lot of their own icons/svg stuff and that's their business model? But even then building such an app seems like a huge investment if it's just a platform to sell your icons. So I must be missing something.

And how does it compare to Penpot?

I have it installed, and while it's handy for opening Sketch files if you don't have a subscription, basic things like text handling and typography are rough. It's useful, but I wouldn't try and actually design in it.

Founder here. Could you elaborate on rough typography, please?

Founder here.

You have correct observations and ask the right questions.

1. We do promote our content. It's not enough to support the development. 2. We could afford a generous freemium. Unlike Figma, Lunacy is resource-efficient and has no pressure from investors. 3. However, collaboration requires cloud, so we'll charge for cloud storage.

TLDR Lunacy will be a highly generous freemium.

It opens (and saves) Sketch files as well

Might be worth pointing out that this is thanks to Sketch publishing specs[0] for their format, making it easy to write importers/exporters for. As far as I know Figma has yet to do this, so anything that reads Figma files is likely reverse engineered and prone to breakage when Figma inevitably changes their undocumented format.

If I were searching for a Figma alternative, its file format being documented would be a priority because otherwise, one is subjecting themselves to some degree of lock-in.

[0]: https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/

Their specs help, but we also support their old format which was basically a dump. We had to reverse engineer it.

Also, we'll import from Figma this fall. You're right, it's never easy. It's a bug valley of countless files that render a little distorted.

hadn't heard of it before but looks pretty sweet, esp since it's free