Hi y’all, this is Dylan, a Pipedream engineer and co-founder. We launched today to get early feedback from developers on what we’ve built and we’ve received a lot of thoughtful comments. Thank you to everyone who signed up!
I especially appreciate the discussion around how and why Pipedream is free, and the concerns around the lack of a visible, scalable paid tier. Those concerns are valid and I want to give you a little more insight into our thinking on this and what the future holds.
Workflows created by one developer can be forked, run, and modified by others. We all build a lot of the same integrations across companies and believe if this code is shared and executed on a common platform that’s purpose-built for running these workflows, it’ll save us all a lot of time.
We’ve worked with thousands of alpha users to understand how they’re using the product and considered what features enterprises ultimately will want and need to pay for. These include: higher workflow limits, private workflows and actions, SLAs, premium support, and more. We didn’t launch with that today because we’re focused on getting feedback from individual developers who will be the majority of users moving forward.
Of course, you can’t run a business solely on free workflows. We’ve set some limits on these workflows that help us control excessive use [1]. Our team has a wealth of collective experience scaling software companies on the business and tech side, and we have confidence that we’ll be able to retain a generous free tier while building a sustainable business.
I empathize with the skepticism of Pipedream and of hosted platforms in general, and welcome any more specific questions. We truly love feedback. We’ve implemented some ideas that we believe facilitate the developer experience for building workflows but are looking for y’all to test that, validate or invalidate it, and give us specific thoughts as you have time.
I especially appreciate the discussion around how and why Pipedream is free, and the concerns around the lack of a visible, scalable paid tier. Those concerns are valid and I want to give you a little more insight into our thinking on this and what the future holds.
Workflows created by one developer can be forked, run, and modified by others. We all build a lot of the same integrations across companies and believe if this code is shared and executed on a common platform that’s purpose-built for running these workflows, it’ll save us all a lot of time.
We’ve worked with thousands of alpha users to understand how they’re using the product and considered what features enterprises ultimately will want and need to pay for. These include: higher workflow limits, private workflows and actions, SLAs, premium support, and more. We didn’t launch with that today because we’re focused on getting feedback from individual developers who will be the majority of users moving forward.
Of course, you can’t run a business solely on free workflows. We’ve set some limits on these workflows that help us control excessive use [1]. Our team has a wealth of collective experience scaling software companies on the business and tech side, and we have confidence that we’ll be able to retain a generous free tier while building a sustainable business.
I empathize with the skepticism of Pipedream and of hosted platforms in general, and welcome any more specific questions. We truly love feedback. We’ve implemented some ideas that we believe facilitate the developer experience for building workflows but are looking for y’all to test that, validate or invalidate it, and give us specific thoughts as you have time.
dylan [at] pipedream [dot] com
[1] https://docs.pipedream.com/limits/