Though more people are stuck at home with their PCs and gaming consoles, times are still tough for small indie game developers that are often dependent on gaming conferences to both promote their titles and source investments and publishing deals.
Today, Sony announced that they had earmarked $10 million for a fund dedicated to helping out indie game developers that have seen negative impacts from the pandemic crisis. Earlier this month, Sony announced that they had formed a $100 million fund dedicated to COVID-19 relief, though that fund was more explicitly focused on healthcare workers and remote education.
Sony didn’t share much in the way of details around the fund, noting that more details would be available soon. Alongside the fund’s announcement, Sony shared that in order to encourage more PlayStation users to stay indoors, they were making both Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey available as free digital downloads on their digital store. The two bits of news are forming the basis for what PlayStation calls its “Play at Home Initiative.”
The titles will be available for free downloads from April 15 through May 5.
Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building.
Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual watercoooler, or done for the day. From there, you’ll know whether to do a quick ad-hoc audio call, cooperate via screenshare, schedule a deeper video meeting, or a send a chat message they can respond to later. Essentially, it translates the real word presence cues we use to coordinate collaboration into an online workplace for distributed teams.
“What Slack did for email, we want to do for video conferencing” Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno tells me. “Traditional video conferencing is exclusive by design, whereas Pragli is inclusive. Just like in an office, you can see who is talking to who.” That means less time wasted planning meetings, interrupting colleagues who are in flow, or waiting for critical responses. Pragli offers the focus that makes remote work productive with the togetherness that keeps everyone sane and in sync.
The idea is to solve the top three problems that Pragli’s extensive interviews and a Buffer/AngelList study discovered workers hate:
Communication friction
Loneliness
Lack of boundaries boundaries
You never have to worry about whether you’re intruding on someone’s meeting, or if it’d be quicker to hash something out on a call instead of vague text. Avatars give remote workers a sense of identity, while the Pragli watercooler provides a temporary place to socialize rather than an endless Slack flood of GIFs. And since you clock in and out of the Pragli office just like a real one, co-workers understand when you’ll reply quickly versus when you’ll respond tomorrow unless there’s an emergency.
“In Pragli, you log into the office in the morning and there’s a clear sense of when I’m working and when I’m not working. Slack doesn’t give you astrong sense if they’re online or offline” Safreno explains. “Everyone stays online and feels pressured to respond at any time of day.”
Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno
Safreno and his co-founder Vivek Nair know the feeling first-hand. After both graduating in computer science from Stanford, they built StacksWare to help enterprise software customers avoid overpaying by accurately measuring their usage. But when they sold StacksWare to Avi Networks, they spent two years working remotely for the acquirer. The friction and loneliness quickly crept in.
They’d message someone, not hear back for a while, then go back and forth trying to discuss the problem before eventually scheduling a call. Jumping into synchronous communicating would have been much more efficient. “The loneliness was more subtle, but it built up after the first few weeks” Safreno recalls. “We simply didn’t socially bond while working remotely as well as in the office. Being lonely was de-motivating, and it negatively affected our productivity.”
The founders interviewed 100 remote engineers, and discovered that outside of scheduled meetings, they only had one audio or video call with co-workers per week. That convinced them to start Pragli a year ago to give work-from-home teams a visual, virtual facsimile of a real office. With no other full-time employees, the founders built and released a beta of Pragli last year. Usage grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1st.
Today Pragli officially launches, and it’s free until June 1st. Then it plans to become freemium with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month. Pragli is also announcing a small pre-seed round today led by K9 Ventures, inspired by the firm’s delight using the product itself.
To get started with Pragi, teammates download the Pragli desktop app and sign in with Google, Microsoft, or Github. User then customize their avatar with a wide range of face, hair, skin, and clothing options. It can use your mouse and keyboard interaction to show if you’re at your desk or not, or use your webcam to translate occasional snapshots of your facial expressions to your avatar. You can also connect your Spotify and calendar to show you’re listening to music (and might be concentrating), reveal or hide details of your meeting, and decide whether people can ask to interrupt your or that you’re totally unavailable.
From there, you can communicate by audio, video, or text with any of your available co-workers. Guests can join conversations via the web and mobile too, though the team is working on a full-fledged app for phones and tablets. Tap on someone and you can instantly talk to them, though their mic stays muted until they respond. Alternatively, you can jump into Slack-esque channels for discussing specific topics or holding recurring meetings. And if you need some downtime, you can hang out in the watercooler or trivia game channel, or set a manual away message.
Pragli has put a remarkable amount of consideration into how the little office social cues about when to interrupt someone translate online, like if someone’s wearing headphones, in a deep convo already, or if they’re chilling in the microkitchen. It’s leagues better than having no idea what someone’s doing on the other side of Slack or what’s going on in a Zoom call. It’s a true virtual office without the clunky VR headset.
“Nothing we’ve tried has delivered the natural, water-cooler-style conversations that we get from Pragli” says Storj Labs VP of engineering JT Olio. “The ability to switch between ‘rooms’ with screen sharing, video, and voice in one app is great. It has really helped us improve transparency across teams. Plus, the avatars are quite charming as well.”
With Microsoft’s lack of social experience, Zoom consumed with its scaling challenges, and Slack doubling down on text as it prioritizes Zoom integration over its own visual communication features, there’s plenty of room for Pragli to flourish. Meanwhile, COVID-19 quarantines are turning the whole world towards remote work, and it’s likely to stick afterwards as companies deemphasize office space and hire more abroad.
The biggest challenge will be making such a broad product encompassing every communication medium and tons of new behaviors comprehensible enough to onboard whole teams. “How do you build a product that doesn’t feel distracting like Slack but where people can still have the spontaneous conversations that are so important to companies innovating?” Safreno asks. The Pragli founders are also debating how to encompass mobile without making people feel like the office stalks them after hours.
“Long-term, [Pragli] should be better than being in the office because you don’t actually have to walk around looking for [co-workers], and you get to decide how you’re presented” Safreno concludes. “We won’t quit because we want to work remotely for the rest of our lives.”
Amazon fires two employees who criticized the company’s COVID-19 response, Google may be creating its own chips to use in Pixel phones and more details emerge about Apple and Google’s contact tracing plan. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 14, 2020.
Two additional employees who were publicly critical of Amazon’s warehouse conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been fired by the company. Those employees — UX designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa — were also members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an organization of employees “who believe it’s our responsibility to ensure our business models don’t contribute to the climate crisis.”
Amazon has pushed back against the notion that the employees were fired expressly due to their criticisms of its treatment of workers during the pandemic. But, at the very least, the optics are less than ideal.
Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too. The in-house chip is apparently code-named Whitechapel, and it’s being made in collaboration with Samsung.
On a media call, Apple said it will roll out the feature update to the broadest number of iOS devices as possible — more than three-quarters of iPhones and iPads are on the latest version of iOS 13 and will receive the update. Google said it will update Google Play Services with the feature so that the contact tracing system can run on the entire fleet of Android devices running Android 6.0 or newer.
Reddit announced an update to its policy for political advertising that will require campaigns to leave comments open on ads for the first 24 hours. The platform also launched a new subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds, that will include information about advertisers, targeting, impressions and spending by each campaign.
TechCrunch asked top investors in the space for their predictions on what’s ahead once life resumes to its new normal. One investor mentioned how in March, they spent a third of their time in edtech — now, they’re spending almost all their time vetting startups there. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Previously, Switch owners had few options if their console ran out of storage space. With the update, if storage is running low, a person can transfer a game directly to an SD card.
According to numbers shared exclusively with TechCrunch from job sites Adzuna (which also powers the U.K. government’s “Find a job” service and provides data to No. 10) and WorkinStartups, tech hiring activity amongst 100 of the U.K.’s top tech companies has fallen 31% in the last month.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Apple is providing a dataset derived from aggregated, anonymized information taken from users of its Maps navigational app, the company announced today. The data is collected as a set of “Mobility Trends Reports,” which are updated daily and which provide a look at the change in the number of routing requests made within the Maps app, which is the default routing app on iPhones, for three modes of transportation including driving, walking and transit.
Apple is quick to note that this information isn’t tied to any individuals, since Maps does not associate any mobility data with a user’s Apple ID, nor does it maintain any history of where people have been. In fact, Apple notes that all data collected by maps, including search terms and specific routing, is only ever tied to random rotating identifying numbers that are reset on a rolling basis. This anonymized, aggregated data is collected only to provide a city, country or region-level view, representing the change over time in the number of pedestrians, drivers and transit-takers in an area based on the number of times they open the app and ask for directions.
As far as signals go for measuring the decrease in outdoor activity in a given city, this is a pretty good one considering Apple’s install base and the fact that most users probably don’t bother installing or using a third-party app like Google Maps for their daily commuting or transportation needs.
The data is available to all directly from Apple’s website, and can be downloaded in a broadly compatible CSV format. You can also use the web-based version to search a particular location and see the overall trend for that area.
For an individual, this is more or less a curiosity, but the release f this info could be very useful for municipal, state and federal policy makers looking to study the impact of COVID-19, as well as the effect of strategies put in place to mitigate its spread, including social distancing, shelter-in-place and quarantining measures.
Apple has also announced that it’s working with Google on a new system-level, anonymized contact tracing system that both companies will first release as APIs for use by developers, before making them native built-in features that are supplemented by public health agency applications and guidance. Apple seems particularly eager to do what it can to assist with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, while still striving to ensure that these measures respect the privacy of their individual users. That’s a hard balance to strike in terms of taking effective action at a population level, but Apple’s reach is a powerful potential advantage to any tools it provides.
Newly launched mobile streaming service Quibi is killing one of its more highly-anticipated series — a show depicting Snapchat’s origin story, focused on founder Evan Spiegal. The news was exclusively reported by Variety on Tuesday, which did not detail the source of its news.
Plans for Snapchat show were first announced at SXSW in 2019, when Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman took the stage to talk about their plans for the new streaming service and its unique technology for mobile viewing.
The Snapchat series was to be based on the screenplay “Frat Boy Genius” by Elissa Karasik, which had depicted Spiegal as a hard-partying Stanford student, according to a review of the much-hyped script by Vulture.
“It is the story of how [Spiegal] built and created Snapchat, which is one of the great social platforms of our time,” touted Katzenberg, at the event. “And we want to tell a story that is as compelling and interesting about the creation of Snapchat and Evan’s story as ‘[The] Social Network’ was for Facebook,” he added.
The show was meant to appeal to Quibi’s target audience of young, on-the-go Millennials and Gen Z users who were looking to watch short-form videos while out and about — for example, while riding the subway, waiting for an appointment, standing in line, and more.
However, Quibi launched its service at a time when its users are no longer running around town. These days, everyone is sheltering in place amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And real-world activities are canceled, so there’s nothing much to do but go for walks or stream Netflix.
Quibi’s launch day downloads had indicated a lack of pent-up demand for the mobile service, topping only around 300,000 after the first day.
However, Quibi CEO Meg Whitman has since confirmed the app’s first-week downloads have now reached 1.7 million, in an interview with CNBC. But these installs were boosted by a high-profile partnership between Quibi and T-Mobile, which is offering the service for free for a year to its unlimited wireless customers on family plans.
Whitman also said Quibi was accelerating its plans to add support for casting features that would allow Quibi content to play on televisions.
The company had earlier confirmed at CES in January that AirPlay and Chromecast were on its roadmap, but the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Quibi’s plans. People today are watching movies and TV at home on their big TV screens, and may not be looking for “quick bites” of video they can binge in a few minutes’ time.
Quibi and Snapchat have been asked for comment. We’ll update if any are provided.
With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own.
In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we’ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often in conflict with each other, if my Facebook community board is anything to go by — to get the most out of being allowed outdoors. And in cases where people are remaining indoors, figuring out exercise regimes within our four walls has become a way to stave off boredom, to offset the cessation of our normal gym or sports routines, or just to stay in shape in our newly extra-sedentary lives.
In that context, a startup called Aaptiv — a Netflix-style app-based business that connects people to a range of trainer-led indoor and outdoor fitness and wellness sessions that they can do on their own, usually without any special equipment — is today announcing that it has raised some funding from one of its big investors, Insight Partners, on the back of a recent surge in business.
Founder and CEO Ethan Agarwal says the the number of people using the service during the novel coronavirus outbreak has spiked, with organic traffic in the last month up 100% and engagement with content up 200%. Aaptiv has now passed 30 million classes consumed on its platform (up from 22 million in May last year). The company, like many startups, is not yet profitable but is coming close to breaking even.
The new infusion of funding will be used to continue expanding a new Enterprise channel that Aaptiv recently launched to provide classes via API, on other platforms. Aaptiv’s partners include FitReserve, Weight Watchers and Audible (Amazon, owner of Audible, is one of Aaptiv’s investors), and the list is growing.
We asked, but Agarwal said that Aaptiv is not disclosing the amount of the investment, nor its valuation.
“I don’t want my company’s performance or success measured by those numbers,” he noted earlier today in an interview. “It’s not how we are thinking about the company.”
That could mean the round or valuation are not huge; or it could mean that they are so large that they would distract from the company’s product news, so not much to read into that. Insight Partners’ Thilo Semmelbauer, who sits on the board of the company, was equally quiet on the numbers.
“Crossing 30 million classes is a big milestone, and we’ve been excited to see the interest from corporates increase substantially in recent months,” he told TechCrunch. “The round is specifically for launching Aaptiv’s corporate offering to capitalize on such strong global interest. As the company is nearing break-even we aren’t disclosing the figure at this time.”
Insight earlier this month disclosed that it had raised a whopping $9.5 billion for a new fund, with a mission to support existing portfolio companies through these complicated COVID-19 times.
For some more context, Aaptiv has raised over $60 million to date, and in its last round — the $22 million Series C in 2018 that included Amazon — Aaptiv was valued at $200 million. Last year, we noted that the startup was talking to potential acquirers to be sold for what we understand from a close source to be a “nine-figure” (hundreds of millions of dollars) price.
It was, in fact, those M&A conversations that led the company to deciding to build the enterprise tier and walking away from a possible exit for now.
“What was the point of selling if we could build a bigger business by making Aaptive available to multiple companies,” said Agarwal.
Agarwal said that now Aaptiv is getting inbound interest from “multiple verticals” for its B2B2C offering, including businesses that want to integrate Aaptiv into their employee wellness programs, companies whose core business model — for example, FitReserve providing carnets of passes for in-person fitness or related classes — has been completely stalled by the coronavirus, and others that might benefit from providing more fitness and wellness services to their users.
The company started out life by connecting a network of trainers to users through a series of on-demand classes. Last year, however, it made a small pivot of sorts when it launched an AI-based service called Coach that aimed to provide workouts and other suggestions more tailored to your specific abilities and interests and goals: not replacing the human trainers, but augmenting them.
Along with that shift, Aaptiv laid off an unspecified number of trainers. Today, it has 20 on staff, Agarwal said, and has no plans to change that model with a move into, for example, an all-AI platform, or building a fitness marketplace where any trainer could sign up to offer classes.
“Part of the reason we are so successful is because it’s not that easy to create these classes,” he said. “We, and the trainers, put a lot of time, effort and energy into building them.”
A court in Nanterre, France, has ruled that Amazon should greatly restrict orders in France in the coming weeks. According to the decision that AFP and a union have obtained, Amazon can only accept orders of groceries, hygiene and health-related products.
The company has 24 hours to comply or it’ll have to pay a fine of €1 million per day.
Since the lockdown started in France, Amazon has already been “prioritizing” essential items over non-essential ones. It means that if you order a video game on Amazon, it might take a week or more to show up at your home.
But all six fulfillment centers in France are still operating as usual as of today. Last month, Mediapart shared audio recordings of Amazon executives saying that they haven’t been doing enough to protect warehouse workers — it has been particularly hard to respect social distancing for instance.
Since then, at least one Amazon employee has been diagnosed with coronavirus in France. A union (Sud Solidaires) referred to a court, asking Amazon to shut down its warehouses altogether in order to protect employees.
The court has ruled that Amazon can’t keep operating as usual under these circumstances. But the company can still accept orders of essential items. It has to overhaul its operations if it wants to accept more orders going forward.
According to Le Parisien, the decision will remain valid up to one month, pending a review of COVID-19-related risks. The court could decide to extend the restrictions.
As recently as a year or two ago, the idea of a $900 starting price for a OnePlus device would have seemed, at best, fanciful. The company built a name for itself with a series of flagship quality devices at a mid-tier price point. It was a smart approach that served the company well, carving a solid niche for itself even amid a saturated and stagnant market.
But as the market has changed, so too has OnePlus. One of the more pronounced signs of the company’s growth over the past half-dozen years is an increasing interest in the higher end of the market. It has been a slow evolution. First the company rethought its longstanding approach of holding off on cutting-edge technologies, and then last year it introduced a Pro tier to its device line.
The latter, in particular, opened the line to a real premium category, and today it delivered on the promise with the introduction of the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro, starting at $699 and $899, respectively. The Pro comes in two configurations, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or 12GB/256GB (the same as you’ll find on the standard 8), with the higher end running an extra $100.
That’s chump change compared to premium devices from the likes of Samsung and Apple, but it’s still a new paradigm from the traditionally budget-minded OnePlus. Of course, you’re going to get a lot for that price — this is OnePlus, after all.
First, there’s 5G. That was one of the trends OnePlus was more than happy to be among the first to jump on. It also was something we spent a lot more time talking about when we were still allowed outside. Which, honestly, makes this as good a time as any to point out that I’ve had the phone in my possession for a while, but am unable to do a proper review due to both my inability to leave the house and some of my own ongoing health issues.
What I will say, however, is that it’s one of the more striking devices I’ve seen in a while, due in no small part to a lovely — if largely unphotographable — blue finish. Up front is a massive 6.78-inch curved QHD+ display coupled with a 120 Hz refresh rate (that can be toggled down to 60Hz to save on battery — which is perfectly fine for most tasks).
In spite of the large screen, it’s still held easily in one hand, courtesy of the elongated 19.8:9 aspect ratio. HDR Boost provides stronger color contrasts, along with 10-bit color for better accuracy. It’s a combination that pops, making for a solid and well-rounded display at a price point that’s plenty competitive with high-end devices.
Around back is an interesting take on the quad-camera design. There’s a 48-megapixel main, 48MP ultra wide, a 3x optical zoom (for a total of an admittedly degraded 30x with help from digital) and a color filter camera. That last one’s a bit of an odd addition with some fairly niche uses, like the ability to add “artistic lighting effects and filters.” Not exactly the most useful application of a fourth rear-facing camera.
The handset is powered by the flagship-ready Snapdragon 865, along with a solid 4510 mAh battery that charges to 50% in less than half an hour. There are a handful of OnePlus’s customary software add-ons as well, via the latest version of OxygenOS, including a new Dark Theme and various other visual touches.
It adds up to a handset that still feels like a bit of a bargain, in spite of being OnePlus’s most expensive to date. It goes on sale April 29 through OnePlus, carrier sites and Amazon. The $699 OnePlus 8 will be available the same day.
The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and postgrads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances.
Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, with literally hundreds of variations on loan terms, repayment methods, and public interest forgiveness options. For borrowers, what are the best ways to minimize their total burden while staying within the rules?
Washington DC-based Savi wants to make student loan borrowers “savvy” to the best options available to them, and now it has even more capital to take on this pressing challenge. The company announced today that it has raised a $6 million Series A led by Nyca Partners, one of the most influential investing firms in the fintech space.
Finance startups often have misaligned incentives between users and their own revenue models — a financial health app may make quiet referral revenue by peddling new credit cards and loans, exactly what a user doesn’t need.
What makes Savi interesting is that the company was designed from the beginning to make sure that it always placed the interests of its users first. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation and founded by two idealistic founders who came together over improving the outcomes of the nation’s youth.
After graduating from Georgetown Law, Aaron Smith founded and spent four years running Young Invincibles, a youth-focused think tank and advocacy organization that was originally created to bring attention to youth issues during the health care reform discussions in the early years of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Savi’s other co-founder Tobin Van Ostern worked on youth voter engagement for Obama’s first presidential campaign as the head of Students for Barack Obama before heading to the liberal Center for American Progress.
Savi co-founders Tobin Van Ostern and Aaron Smith. Photos courtesy of Savi.
Together, they decided to found Savi to bring their progressive mission orientation to helping young people around student debt. The student loan world, “it’s fairly complicated, and while obviously I think there needs to be continued improvement on the policy side, we needed solutions for student loan borrowers right now,” Smith explained. “And so that was sort of the impetus behind Savi — to use technology to create those kind of solutions.”
Savi ingests student loan data from users and then begins crunching the numbers to calculate the best options for repayment or forgiveness while taking into account the goals of its users.
While student lending is a trillion dollar plus market, Savi — owing to its progressive roots — has been particularly focused on offering its platform to users like social workers, teachers, and service workers. One of their largest partners is NEA, the largest teachers union in the United States with around 3 million members, and Savi is offered as a benefit to its members.
Organizations offer Savi’s student loan assessment tool to their employees and members to help them understand their financial picture. That tool is free for users, but from there, Savi charges a subscription to actively manage a user’s student loans, such as automating the process for filling out paperwork. Users can calculate their savings using Savi before committing to paying a subscription, ensuring that no user pays if Savi can’t help them save money. The company says that the average borrower sees $140 in savings per month and pays a $5-a-month subscription fee.
Given the typical employment of its users, Savi has a particular specialty on loan forgiveness, an option that many student loans offer for people in public-interest careers. Such options often have byzantine rules for eligibility though, and so Savi works to ensure that borrowers seeking forgiveness stay within the rules of their loan programs. Currently, the company handles more than 150 forgiveness and repayment options.
Similar to its assessment tools for organizations, Savi launched a new tool around COVID-19 to help people in health professions or who have been laid off as a result of the pandemic to figure out their student loan situations and find new programs for help. “We actually happen to have a pretty disproportionately high number of users that actually work on the COVID crisis,” Van Ostern explained.
Startups around managing student loans have been a popular area of investment for VCs. Yesterday, my colleague Alex Wilhelm noted that student loan platform Frank received a $5 million interim strategic round of funding, with edtech giant Chegg taking a board seat. I also covered Summer’s $10 million raise late last year, which, like Savi, is a public benefit corporation focused on minimizing the burden of student loan payments.
In addition to Nyca, Savi received funding from AlleyCorp, Temerity Capital, and 9Yards Capital along with Michelle Kang, Catherine Reynolds, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo.
GitHub today announced that all of its core features are now available for free to all users, including those that are on free accounts. That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub Actions, the company’s automation and CI/CD platform.
Teams that want more advanced features like code owners or enterprise features like SAML support will still have to upgrade to a paid plan, but those now start at $4 per month and user for the Teams plans instead of the previous $9, with the Enterprise plan starting at $21 per month and user.
When I talked to him earlier this week, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stressed that this move had long been on the roadmap and isn’t a limited promotion motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. “This is something we planned to do and have wanted to do for a long time — since essentially we did the acquisition — and getting to this point to do it took until now, when it became a high priority,” Friedman said. “But it’s definitely something that we wanted to do and, I mean, this is a big flippin’ deal.”
The company has obviously always taken a freemium approach to its pricing model, but since its acquisition by Microsoft, it started to expand the number of features in its free accounts. Not that long ago, one of the main reasons to pay for the lowest-tier personal GitHub account would’ve been to get access to private repositories, for example, but last January, the company decided to give access to unlimited private projects to all free users, though those were limited to three collaborators at a time.
“We’re switching GitHub from a pay-for-privacy model to pay-for-features, what’s typically called freemium — you may have heard of it,” Friedman said. “The way I think about it is we want every developer and team on earth to be able to use GitHub for their development, whether it’s private or public development.”
Right now, there are over 40 million developers on GitHub and Friedman says the team is projecting that it will get to 100 million by 2025.
“It’s a fundamental change to the business architecture of GitHub. That’s the thing we can think about internally,” said Friedman. “The thing that everyone else can think about is: they can just use GitHub now, for whatever reason. If you’re starting a startup or if you’re a team inside of a big company and you just want to use GitHub — no credit card required, no budget required — you can just set your team up.”
Friedman argues that the team didn’t make these changes because of competitive pressure from other players, though it’s worth mentioning that GitLab, for example, offers a competitive free plan with built-in CI/CD features, whereas Atlassian’s BitBucket now has a free offering now looks a bit limited in light of GitHub’s changes.
“This change makes us by far the best-priced and most accessible place for developers to create software,” he argues. More so than pretty much all our competitors, I think. So it wasn’t really competitively driven, it was much more informed by just going into more markets and seeing what folks were saying there.”
