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Spoak is an online interior design service made to be ‘easy, fun, and accessible to all’. Well, at least that’s what their website says. We headed over to spoak.com to find out how well this browser-based tool compares to the best interior home design software out there.
Spoak: Pricing & plans
- Three tiers, one for individuals, one for teams, and one for businesses. No free plan, and some puzzling in-app purchases which should really be free. Plus you have to give your card details if you want the 7- or 14-day trial. Not a good look.
Although Spoak offers a free demo near the bottom of the homepage, this is not a free service, nor does it offer a free plan. It comes in three flavours. ‘Play’ is focused on the solo designer. It allows you to work on up to 10 public designs, comes with various features, and have a 7-day free trial, for $15 a month (choosing to pay yearly would save you 20%)
‘Power’ is more aimed at businesses and teams, where you can add up to ten seats to your account (at the cost of $40 per seat per year), and gain the ability to make your projects private, among other additional features. That account would cost $50 per month and has a 14-day free trial.
Finally, there’s ‘Enterprise’, which is more of a bespoke tier for high-end businesses, and as such the cost itself is also bespoke.
On top of that, there are purchasable add-ons. For instance, both ‘Play’ and ‘Pro’ allow you to have 3 and 10 active designs respectively. Need more? You can, for a price. We were disappointed to see that the Spoak watermark can only be removed through one of these purchases. This feels a little like the company is milking their customers.
The free trial is not without its risks either as you need to hand over your card details in order to access it. In an age where so many services let you try them out without having to do that, this does leave a bad taste in the mouth, as you then have to remember to cancel your subscription before it’s even started.
Considering their site states that “You are solely responsible for properly canceling your account” and that “Spoak does not offer refunds”, you have to wonder how many people lost money forgetting to cancel a trial in time, and how much of that contributes to their business model. It’s not a good start. Let’s hope the service wins us over…
You can check out Spoak by clicking here.
Spoak: Getting Started
- Spoak offers a lot, from mood boards to 2D floor plans, and more. The interface could be better when it comes to choosing your project, but once in, it’s very easy to get down to business.
Your home page offers a sidebar on the left, where you’ll access your designs, projects, community forums, job fairs, and clients. The main section features a selection of items for you to choose from based on what the algorithm thinks you’ll like, and above that, different types of projects, such as ‘Mood Board’, where you put objects together and see if their various styles work with each other, or ‘Vizi’ which is a mockup of the room you’re trying to recreate in real life. ‘Floor Plan’ would be a top down 2D mockup of a room, while ‘Elevation’ is a front facing 2D view of a room.
Weirdly, whichever one of these four types you choose, you’ll be brought to the exact same page, where further templates are presented to you. Why ask you to choose initially if the result doesn’t alter where you go next?
Anyway, your options are broader there, with empty rooms, pre-set backgrounds, product comparisons, and more – there’s even a section for outfits, making design concepts… more wearable. Each category has a good number of templates to choose from, and you also have the choice of starting from scratch if you prefer.
Spoak: Designing
- Adding objects is easy. So is creating a room from scratch. Some concepts work better than others, but the whole thing feels marred by too small an inventory: some, like ‘Outfit’, barely have any.
We found designing to be a relatively simple affair. Working on a floor plan for instance was very easy, with a strong intuitive feel. It’s all done through clicking and dragging. Take walls, for instance: you can add them, reposition them, and resize them, simply by clicking on specific parts of that element. Then, you add windows and doors which automatically reorient themselves as you drag them, to match the wall’s orientation. As we said, easy. Next comes the decorations. For those, you click on the ‘Assets’ category and scroll through until you find what you want, or better yet, use the search field. Add, reposition, resize, done. Full marks for ease of use.
There’s even an ‘Inspiration’ button, which loads up similar designs in a sidebar to the right, to offer you ideas of what to do next.
So far so good. ‘Head-on Elevation’ is more simplistic, but still lets you create front-facing 2D designs with a simple drag and drop. The ‘Mood Board’ is designed to throw ideas around, and mix and match furniture and decor. It’s all good.
What doesn’t work so well are the ‘Pre-set backgrounds’. These should help you immerse your design in a more realistic environment, but the customizability felt very poor. For instance, you’re able to paint the walls, which sounds great. Unfortunately, doing this washes out any decoration or detail that was present on said wall, leaving you with a rectangle of colour. Sure you can change the opacity, but then you end up with a blend of the previous colour with the new one.
Worse still is the poor choice of elements to add. Depending on the type of project you’re working on, there isn’t actually that much to choose from.
What we didn’t appreciate was the fact some items were shot in front of a background. Add them to a project, and that background is still there. There’s a background remover tool, but it doesn’t come free. You can manually remove the background yourself for free – a tedious and thankless task – or use the ‘magic’ button which costs one credit a pop (we had 40 to play with in our 7-day trial). But our main question was… why? This feels like penny pinching: imagine the number of people who would choose to pay to remove the background of the exact same object.
Finally, the Outfit section sounds like a fun idea – on paper – mix and match different outfits, that kind of thing… except we couldn’t find outfits to add to our ‘Mood board’. Yes, there’s the odd cap, but another evening dress, a dinner jacket, a pair of jeans? The search field comes back empty. Maybe more will be added in time, but for now, that section is barely a curiosity.
Should I buy Spoak?
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