How do you price a tool so that it feels right for the developers and for the business?

Developers, developers… oh well you know the rest

When Steve Ballmer ran across that stage like a lunatic, I could share his sentiment at least on the fact that developers build the world and we should care more for them. Myself included as I’m a developer first and foremost.

I only feel we likely differ on how to get there.

It’s interesting to think about developers in a world where they are heavily targetted by AI-gurus that claim they are dead in the water. But, are they?

I don’t think so. In fact, I think developers, coders, programmers, engineers… however you want to label them (us) are definitely part of the future. We simply adapt as we always do.

Unfault is designed and built for developers. People or AI.

Fit the developer’s toolbox

One adaptation I believe is that developers are growing back their control over the toolbox they rely on to do their job. The 2010s saw the stack and pipeline grow in complexity. Whether you were building for a start-up, SME or large corporation, it felt like you needed Kubernetes, a hyper-scaler, an observability stack that could drain your finances in 10mn… developers were given hammers right front and center.

Some lost their passion along the way. Coding was less and less the focus.

The 2020s have seen a change, budgets can’t keep up and teams have started to find a way to keep costs under control. The arrival of AI has accelerated this drastically. Developers now look ate rebuilding their toolbox with more affordable tools they can compose to be re-imagined more rapidly.

This is how I have chosen to think about unfault’s pricing model.

Affordable is just right

As of this writing, the precise price isn’t settled yet. I want to conduct more research to see if my hypothesis is correct. You can find the gist on the pricing page.

The way I see this: unfault should have a straightfoward model.

Single plan
No per-seat
Flat price

Unfault is the kind of tool which basically states: either it’s useful or it isn’t. Pricing shenanigans isn’t where my mind is at to keep a paying customer. I prefer dedicating time to improve the tool than playing with pricing plans that will annoy the heck out of you anyway.

Will this change?

It will be a question. No doubt, if unfault grows popular enough, that organizations ask me to have a per-team plan for instance. If that takes place, this will be because there is a need for it, not because I want to lure users into one plan over another.