One of our biggest objectives, when we started Codacy, was to help as many developers as possible manage software quality better. We had this as an objective because we were aware of the time spent tackling technical debt, in meetings without data points and on gut feeling driven decisions.
Today we want to be closer to this first objective: we’re making Codacy free for teams up to 4 developers with our new Startup plan.
Why are we doing this?
From our experience, the number one priority of smaller teams/companies is to ship products as fast as they can. They do this to make sure they can seize an opportunity or a milestone to get them to a next stage. As such, software quality comes many times second to bringing the right product to market.
However, when teams grow, quality becomes the bottleneck. Teams start seeing a curb in production because there is accumulated technical debt which slowly becomes the theme of any roadmap. Also, when teams start hiring, they see that velocity at any cost can only take you so far and sustainability/maintainability are critical parts of a healthy long-term project. In some cases, when companies don’t address this early enough, teams even lose key people because managing technical debt is not a long-term source of happiness.
More often than not, companies realize this too late. When the quality bottleneck arises, we’re many times already reacting instead of planning ahead. In a world that spends $1.7tn in fixing bugs and $1.1tn in technical debt, we genuinely believe caring about quality from the very beginning is core and will be a competitive advantage.
We’re living by these beliefs and we’re presenting our product for free to teams of up to 4 people with our new Startup plan.
This means that you can use our product to automate and analyze quality for any number of public and private repos for free and up to 4 developers working.
Why does it make sense from a business perspective to Codacy?
Growing as a company, and having increasingly larger companies as customers, we’ve come to understand that to truly be impactful we need to serve the future large companies.
There are two main ways we hope this can help us.
The first way is word of mouth. We are hoping that by providing our product for free, teams can spread the word to get more developers and organizations using our product.
The second way is reducing the barriers for developers in a company to use our product. We hope that, in each large company, we get to be useful to several smaller teams that can then benefit from consolidating their analytics and quality automation integrations. This already happens at scale; we’re only making it more accessible.
We’re investing a significant part of our revenue as our current customers can migrate to the new free plan. But we’re taking a long-term approach and, by helping new exciting companies ship the next generation of Market-winning products, we’re winning.
What’s next?
If you’re our customer and you have 4 seats or less, you will now be able to transition to our new Startup plan. Please reach out if you need any help in this transition.
We’d like to hear from you. We have built our company on the continuous, kind and constructive feedback that we get from our community. We will continue listening to you and make sure we act upon your thoughts.
We need your help spreading the word. Please do tweet, email and go far and wide.
Serving you is the reason we exist, and we’re happy we get to do this.
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