Building DrawKit #1: The Plan

I’ve decided to start a (hopefully) weekly blog series here, sharing the journey of upgrading DrawKit; the behind-the-scenes progress, and bring you along with me as I work on the platform each week.

But first, a bit of background.

I started DrawKit in 2018 while travelling through Europe, living the digital nomad life. The idea actually formed over a bowl of pasta in Budapest with a few friends. I’ve written a super detailed post on that whole journey, from building to launching in a few weeks while moving between Budapest, Edinburgh, and Prague, on my blog here.

In 2020, DrawKit was acquired and I joined an amazing team to build a new product – designstripe, and DrawKit became one of our companies. We worked on that for almost 5 years, but unfortunately the company didn’t make it, and I reacquired DrawKit at the start of 2025.

DrawKit hasn't had many upgrades for the last few years, and I'm excited to change that. I’ve got some big goals for the platform, and it’s those goals I’ll be documenting here as we go.

So! Officially, this is the first weekly update, but I’ve been working on DrawKit in the background for the last few weeks.

The immediate goals are centred around a lot of housekeeping; the current setup of the site isn’t sustainable, so here’s what I did this week.

Database migration

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The free tier of DrawKit allows people to download illustration asset packs for free, by emailing them a download link. The site previously used AWS and a custom configuration via customer.io to store and send these, but this broke during the ownership transfer, and I needed a temporary solution.

I moved this to Zapier + AWS + Mailersend as a quick solution, but that many Zaps running each month was very expensive, usually $400+ per month.

My more long-term solution was moving to Supabase + edge functions for storage and keeping Mailersend for email delivery.

I finally finished this week, and we’re a few days into this new system with things seemingly running nice and smoothly. I’ll keep monitoring this but I’m feeling optimistic!

DrawKit Studio

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The main focus for the next phase of DrawKit is going to be DrawKit Studio. Rather than being a static asset site, I’d love DrawKit to have an online editor that’s simple, delightful to use, and super valuable for indie entrepreneurs, marketing teams, agencies, and anyone needing visuals. Not just a Canva copy, but something very fun, and massively time-saving, to use.

I’ll share more about how I see this working in coming weeks, but for now my first step was setting up the scaffold of the project, to make sure I could! I’ve been learning to code for the last few months, and, while definitely still learning, I’m keen to get my hands dirty.

So this week I set up the core Nuxt project, got auth working with Supabase, locked down pages for non-authed users, and just checked things could work the way I’d want them to.

Now that the absolute basics are technically functioning, I’m going to jump into Figma properly and design each screen, before moving back to the code and building.

I work as a product designer, so the design of tools and platforms is very dear to me, so I’m very much looking forward to getting everything feeling delightful, and then jump back into building.

Next week

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However, there’s one focus for the coming week that’ll probably put a hold on design: the site is currently way over Webflow’s new bandwidth limitations. Like, 501% over. This has resulted in some insane costs, and the absolute priority right now is fixing that and bringing those numbers down.

I’ll be trying a combination of Webflow’s new built-in compression features, and Manuel’s product Flowdrive. Crossing my fingers, and will report back next week how the numbers are looking.

Once that’s manageable it’s straight into Figma and designing. Can’t wait to share with you what I’m thinking!