This week we took another brief detour to revisit our pricing strategy and make sure it matched the ICP's ("Ideal Customer Profile") in our pipeline. As such, we introduced a slight change to the "Free Tier" that limits you to 10 monthly downloads. After that, you'll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans or simply wait until the next month's usage period.

If you fall under the "Free Tier" plan, you can view your usage via the account dropdown at the top right of the page per the image below:

A screenshot of the Admin Dashboard

In general, we felt that this change reflects our continuing commitment to provide some free services while encouraging folks to participate financially in the new developer economy. After all, our general theses is that more developers will contribute and better work will be done - if there are financial incentives involved. And, generally speaking, we don't believe developers should be expected to work for free.

As part of this effort, we did explore the idea of a hybrid pricing model that would combine both an upfront subscription (like we have today) combined with a usage-based model after a certain number of downloads. However, after running the numbers, we felt that that would only lead to higher prices which would likely price out a huge portion of the developer community. After all, the economies of scale in software are tremendous. And, we generally want to grow the pie rather than simply taking a larger slice.

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