Plan Updates…Updates

The week before last, we mentioned some changes we wanted to make to the platform. We rolled one of them out (private repos requiring a developer plan) and then subsequently rolled it back.

It wasn’t the right call, and it didn’t address the issues currently on the platform

The first issue:

• Actors creating multiple accounts on the platform to use resources without paying

The first solution:

• We needed to make the free plan uniquely identifiable

So, what if we went off GitHub? Well, sadly that’s what we’ve been doing. But people have been been creating multiple GitHubs, which has lead to more and more strict rules (e.g 180 days account ago, minimum activity, etc), which is starting to block people out who are good actors.

We could also add credit card requirements

Lots of other companies do this. But, we really don’t want to. We’ve worked over the past year, building a really great experience, so that people without credit cards would be able to use the platform.

We want to support:

• Students who are learning to code
• Others without credit cards, particularly from developing countries

So, if we want to support all these usecases, we end up basically creating multiple ways for people to “Verify” themselves on the platform

But now, if users need to verify before they deploy anything, that kinda kills the whole “momentum” of the experience. Our dev.new flows, stuff that makes it really easy to show your friend, becomes obsolete.