Introducing Membership Plans

Julien Delange
Nov 3 · 3 min read

We are launching membership plans. In this article, we explain why we are doing this and explain our future plans for the coming months.

What is happening?

Starting today, we are rolling out membership plans. Specifically, it means that we are adding quota to accounts. Free accounts will be limited to 10 analyses a day and premium accounts will have 100+ analyses per day (or unlimited for gold). Membership plans start at $10 for the silver and $18 for gold. You can buy them through our website or directly via the GitHub Marketplace if you use our GitHub App.

Membership plan as seen on the GitHub Marketplace

Why are we doing this?

Since we launched code-inspector early this year, we started thinking about how to be able to grow the platform and be able to pay for further improvements (new features, better UX/UI, etc). We explored several ways to do this. Three options came to our mind:

  1. Ads: put ads into the product. We did not choose this option because it would not only impact the product visually but also lead us to share user information with third-party data. Privacy and data protection is something we have at heart and we believe this is not the right path forward to build a good, sustainable product and business.
  2. Investors: another option is to take investor money to grow the platform and keep all features free as before. However, this brings two issues. At first, it means that we postpone the day we charge customer for our product (something that will happen eventually). But it also means that we give up some ownership of the platform (investors want to have a share of the business), which might also impact our agility and speed of execution.
  3. Memberships: start charging users for some premium features and/or intense usage of the platform. Based on our number, less than 5% of the users would need to upgrade to a membership. If they do so, that would bring us enough cash to develop new features at a faster pace. This is why we are trying this option now.

We believe our membership plans are reasonably priced and some professionals will find great value in our product to pay for increased quot. For some users that cannot afford to pay, especially students and researchers, we are putting in place a specific program. If you are in this category of users, please contact us and we will give you a membership for free (after verification of your enrollment with an academic institution).

Looking Forward

In the next months, we will launch a new dashboard with an improved user interface and seamless user experience. This new interface will definitively improve the visualization of all analyses done on your code. We will also start working on new integration tools (starting with Slack), as many of our users requested.

We believe this decision is the right step forward to develop our platform. If you have any question or suggestion, please contact us, we would love to hear your comments and feedback, not only about this decision but as to how our platform should evolve.

Code Inspector Blog

Everything you need to know to improve the quality of your code and reduce your technical debt. Join the movement of high quality code: https://www.code-inspector.com

Julien Delange

Written by

In tartiflette we trust. Founder of @code_inspector. Staff @twitter. Currently out of order.

Code Inspector Blog

Everything you need to know to improve the quality of your code and reduce your technical debt. Join the movement of high quality code: https://www.code-inspector.com

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