Pricing Philosophy - codemagic-ci-cd/company-handbook GitHub Wiki

This document contains information about Codemagic pricing philosophy to educate and make conversations about pricing more productive.

What are some values and principles of our pricing philosophy?

  1. Codemagic monetizes professional use.
  2. Transparent and easy to understand.
  3. Pricing should not be a reason people go to a competitor.
  4. Codemagic free version helps create new users and customers.
  5. Users should be able to create a proof of concept of Codemagic for free.

Codemagic monetizes professional use

This means we identify very specific features that indicate professional use and price those accordingly. Examples:

a) Collaboration features are a good indicator of professional use (single developer vs development team).

b) Requesting for invoice or wire transfer indicates that the company cannot simply use a credit card and has some finance department and qualifies for an enterprise plan.

c) We moved scheduled builds and code signing identities from paid version (teams feature) to the freemium version (personal account) because it is not a good indicator of a team and many individual developers use these features and therefore stay with us for longer because of it.

Transparent and easy to understand

  1. People need to be able to ask for a budget or understand how much the service will cost in order to evaluate us. Uncertainty and not understanding what are costs involved is a deterrent rather than the attractive quality of a product.
  2. having transparent and easy-to-understand pricing helps to compare one provider to another.

Pricing should not be a reason people go to a competitor

If people turn us down because our pricing just doesn’t make sense and they can’t ask for budget or it’s ridiculously more expensive for their use case then it presents us an opportunity to grow and find new product-market fit with that segment or improve our positioning for the segment we have good fit with.

The Codemagic free version helps create new users and customers.

There have been several cases when people discover our product when learning either in hobby projects or in school or some other way. Later those same people recommend us to their friends or colleagues when starting new projects.

In short, the more users get value from Codemagic, the better. We are helping people learn CI/CD with our product which is good in the long term.

Users should be able to create a proof of concept for free

If a customer wants to try us out but needs to enter credit card details or contact sales then we believe that they are more likely to try out other products first. If those other products are satisfactory they never even evaluate Codemagic.

Therefore making it possible to evaluate Codemagic without involving sales or jumping through hoops internally is important.

How to propose pricing changes

When proposing a change there is ALWAYS pros and cons. You should approach this problem from a product-market fit angle.

  • Do you think we are not monetizing professional use?
  • Is there some fit we are missing out on?
  • If we introduce proposed changes what are some trade-offs?
  • Would it be possible to analyze the impact of change before doing any product changes or running a marketing campaign e.g. just by analyzing billing data?