Why I redesigned my free Twitter viewer

Twitee is a free Twitter viewer: you can read public X profiles, tweets and replies without an account. In November 2026 I shipped version 2.0.0, a redesign of every page in all nine languages the site supports.

The tools worked fine. The problem was that the site looked like a cheap tool.

Looking cheap costs trust

A free Twitter viewer asks for a lot of trust. People arrive from a search result, paste in a username, and decide in a few seconds whether the site is safe. Free tools in this space have a reputation for fake "private account viewers" and sign-up walls that show up after the third search. If your site looks thrown together, visitors put you in that group before they read a word.

The old Twitee looked thrown together. It had grown one page at a time, so every page was a little different. Next to the other viewers people compare it with, it looked like the least trustworthy option, even though it was the one with no sign-up, no credits and no paid plan.

What "looking trustworthy" meant in practice

Mostly it meant making the site behave like a product someone maintains:

• One look for every page. The Twitter profile viewer, the video downloader and the blog now share the same colors, buttons and icons, so they look like they belong to the same site.
• Pages that hold still. Nothing jumps under your thumb while a page loads. Content that jumps around is one of the fastest ways to look shady.
• Faster pages. The site loads less than it used to.
• One clear starting point. The home page opens with a single box for a username or x.com link, next to a globe of live trends from 60+ countries.
• Menus that work the way you expect, with a keyboard or a tap.
• A phone layout I'd actually use, with a full-screen menu and the same tools as desktop.

What I refused to change

Trust also means not surprising the people who already use you. Every tool works the way it did before, and old bookmarks and links still open the same pages. The site is still free, and it still says plainly what it can't do: private accounts and deleted tweets aren't available.

Was it worth it?

It's too early for numbers, since version 2.0.0 has only been live for a few days. I posted a short Twitee v2 changelog on Indie Hackers. What I can say is that the site now looks like the tool it always was, and I'm no longer embarrassed to put a screenshot of it next to the others.

Try it at twitee.co.