Introducing Codiga Membership Plans

The rollout of our new membership plans give users the option of continuing to use our features for free with a capped quota, or ugrade to a Silver or Gold plan for a small monthly fee and higher code analyses quota. In this article, we'll explain why we are doing this and explain our future plans for the coming months.

What are membership plans?

Starting today, we are introducing membership plans to our platform. Specifically, it means that we are adding quotas to accounts based on the tier they fall in. Free accounts will be limited to 10 analyses a day, and premium accounts will have 100+ analyses per day (or unlimited with Gold membership). Membership plans start at $10 a month for the silver plan and and $18 for gold plan. You can buy them through our website or directly via the GitHub Marketplace if you use our GitHub App.

Why are we doing this?

Since launching Codiga earlier this year, we started thinking about how we can grow the platform and fund further improvements (new features, better UX/UI, etc). We explored several ways to do this. Three options came to mind:

1. Ads: put ads into the product. We did not choose this option because it would not only impact the product's aesthetic, but also lead us to share user information with third-party ad platforms. Privacy and data protection is at the heart of everything we do at Codiga 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, like before. However, this raises two issues. Firstly, it means that we are simply prolonging the day we begin to charge our users 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 revenue to develop new features at a faster pace. This is why we decided on this option.

We believe our membership plans are reasonably priced, and some professionals will find great value in our product to pay for increased quotas. For those users that cannot afford to pay, especially students and researchers, we're committed to ensuring you have access to the tools you nned, so we're 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).

What's Next?

In the coming months, we will launch a new dashboard with improved user interface that offers a much more seamless user experience. This new interface will definitively improve the formatting of all analyses done on your code. We will also start working on new integration tools (starting with Slack), as many of our users have requested.

We believe this decision is the right step forward to further develop our platform, and allows us to keep improving our existing features, as well as creating new tools that will save our users time and stress in their day. 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 also your thoughts on how our platform should evolve.