I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model.

Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.

FYI for any new or casual Mermaid users, it comes with a built-in alternate layout called `elk` that I find does a much cleaner job on complex flowcharts.

See docs here: https://mermaid.ai/open-source/config/layouts.html

Graph layout is a very interesting, very hard problem.

There's even a yearly competition - started in 1994 - whose results are announced at the yearly Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.

It's not a subject I'm versed in, but can you talk more about your solution? Do you use a larger constraint solver or is it hand-coded?

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Competition: https://mozart.diei.unipg.it/gdcontest/

The 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization, to be held in Ontario, Canada: https://graphdrawing.github.io/gd2026/

n.b. It's an independent conference, not under the auspices of e.g. IEEE or ACM.

https://frankorz.com/merman/ Here's a pretty solid Rust reimplementation of Mermaid btw

This solves my biggest gripe with Mermaid.

It's an amazing tool, but I wish it were open source.

I regret learning mermaid. The ecosystem is absolutely terrible.

Looks cool. Price is pretty steep. Lucid chart is like $16/month.

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