Pricing: A Message from the Founders of Cloudsmith

Hello folks, Alan and Lee here. 👋

When we started on this incredible journey, back in early 2016, the world of Artifact Management, DevOps (or DevSecOps as it would be), and Software Supply Chain was a very different landscape, with much less awareness of the scope. That’s not how we viewed it at the time. We knew that “solving” it was a monumental task, but one worth doing.

Before 2016 we solved very different problems for different businesses, and we needed a solution like Cloudsmith to help with end-to-end software delivery. It didn’t exist in the form factor that we needed (Cloud-native/born, fully managed, simple, easy to use, hard to misuse, security from base principles, enforced proper artifact management, etc.)

So we set out with the mission to solve problems of scale/complexity for software organizations via Cloud-native Artifact Management by providing easy end-to-end visibility and control of assets, data, and dependencies, from source to delivery. A slightly wordy way of saying we will help you manage software delivery from developers to the point-of-use.

To us, this meant building away from the “old” world of on-premises and elevating the use of Artifact Management from its archaic meaning of “making a package” to the holistic end-to-end process of bridging the gap between CI (build) and CD (delivery); something we now call Continuous Packaging (CP), which is the process of Artifact Management.

Little did we know just how much blood, sweat, and tears would be necessary to get us from that mission to the ultimate vision of becoming your software supply chain, solving problems at scale with a single global source of truth for all software. We needed a world-class team, world-class software, and the credentials, financials, and support to back those up.

Doing so hasn’t been easy nor inexpensive. We had wanted to be a product that was cheap and accessible to every single developer on the planet, but that didn’t align with our target market of who we were helping solve problems. Nor did it enable us to scale the business to execute the vision. To help, we started exploring the economics of the business.

This took the form of (a) fund-raising for the business to put the burden on us, (b) evolving the product to find better product/market fit, and (c) testing pricing over time to match better into (a) and (b). We’ve covered the fundraising elsewhere (we’re Series A), but (b) and (c) were still necessary to build the right product and the product right.

So here we are, in 2022, having arrived at our second pricing change. Yes, it’s a “big” one by some accords, but when digging into the details, I hope you’ll see that we have tried to deliver more value. It may be surprising to some, but it incorporates years of feedback and testing, and we hope it aligns better with product/market fit.

The truth is, pricing is impossible to be perfect. There are always tensions between different use-cases and personas, and optimizing for one often puts it at odds with another. That's why you see services making tweaks here and there because what is chosen at the start of the business, is almost always wrong. Testing is important.

So, the outcome is to use the (a), (b), and (c) from above to deliver on our promises of providing the world’s best product with the world’s best support, of making (your) developers' lives easier, of building and helping to secure the Software Supply Chain using the best-of Artifact Management and the processes within it; but at a price point that makes sense for the target market, we're solving for.

For those asking if we need help building it, the answer is yes! Cloudsmith is passionately built by engineers, for engineers, and without an incredible team, it’d be impossible to deliver on the sky-high mission and vision we’ve set. We’re always looking for developers, security experts, community builders, customer-centric product folk, etc. 👉 Come and join us.

The bottom line, though, as always, is that as our customers, we sincerely appreciate your patronage and hope you will continue to grow with us as we continue to grow with you. We couldn’t do it without you (seriously). As a team, we’re incredibly excited about where Artifact Management takes us in solving the Software Supply Chain. We hope you are too.

As always: happy packaging! 😊📦

Alan & Lee

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