8base Now has a Free Tier

How do you price a product that's built using 1's and 0's? While cost-based pricing may work for many tangible products, digital/online products are simply a different ball-game; particularly Software as a Service (SaaS)! For SaaS products, everything boils down to value.

In the early days of 8base, our team made a very conscious decision to put off launching a free-tier. Unlike many software companies, we looked at a free-tier as something that the product had a lot of growing up to do in order to support it. Why? Promising someone that something is "free forever" is a really big promise! Especially when a product is young and its company hasn't proved that – when it does grow up – users will experience enough value to eventually pull out their wallets.

That said, in the past several months 8base has hit some significant milestones in both developer adoption and feedback. Through multiple-channels we've reviewed 100's of interactions between developers and 8base. As a result, we've become absolutely certain of two things:

1. A significant percentage of our developer community is deriving tremendous value from the 8base platform and now use it as a core technology in their projects.
2. These awesome developers using 8base are representative of 1,000,000's of others who experience the exact same pain points of speed, efficiency, and complexity.

In short, we feel that 8base is at an amazing moment in its journey. We know that our product is solving real-world pains in a way that developers appreciate and want more of. Meanwhile, there are millions of more developers out there experiencing the same struggles.

With this in mind... Several months ago 8base announced the product's General Availability on HackerNews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876256). That announcement made a splash! 1000's of developers visited the 8base site with 48-hours, driving 100+ signups and other engagement. From all the feedback that was received we uncovered a common and unmistakable trend.

Developers want to try before they buy. Not only that, they expect to do so on a free-tier.

Thus, without further ado! We'd like to announce some of the great changes we've introduced to our pricing for developers.

1. FREE TIER - It allows developers to build using almost all of 8base's features; free-forever but throttling the API. This makes everything on the backend/console usable while not supporting production use.
   

2. NEW PLAN - Our $8 plan was renamed as HOBBYIST and we’ve introduced a new $49/mo plan called DEVELOPER. The new plan has better limits at lower prices per unit and lets developers utilize their own auth provider – which used to only be on the $149/mo plan.
   

3. MORE STORAGE - We 10X’d storage for the same price in every plan and reduced charges for overages.
   

4. LONG-RUNNING JOBS - To accommodate long-running jobs, we've changed the way we charge for serverless functions to a combination of memory usage and time (Giga-byte minutes). 
   

We're super excited about these pricing updates! They will serve to encourage more developers to try out 8base and start building something amazing.

Happy Developing!

8base Team 🚀