DevConnect is free. There is no advertising, no paid tier that unlocks the useful parts, and no algorithm deciding who deserves reach. People ask how that is supposed to work, which is fair.
The reasoning
Every developer platform I have watched go bad went bad the same way. It started useful, grew, needed revenue, and the cheapest revenue is attention. Once attention is the product, the feed stops showing you what is good and starts showing you what keeps you scrolling. Nobody decides to ruin it, it just follows from what is being sold.
The second failure is subtler. Once there is a paid tier, the free tier has to be worse on purpose. That is not a bug in the business model, it is the business model.
I did not want to build either of those, so I removed the option early, while it is still easy to remove.
What it costs
Money, obviously. It runs on a small budget and I pay for it.
But the real cost is slower. Without advertising there is no budget to buy attention, so growth has to come from the thing being useful enough that someone tells someone else. That is a much slower loop than paying for installs, and there is no shortcut in it.
It also means I cannot promise scale. The platform is small right now. Anyone who tells you their new community is thriving is either lucky or lying, and you will find out which within a minute of signing up.
What I am actually betting on
That a place with no ads, no gatekeeping and no rage-bait is worth being small for a while. And that people who build things would rather be somewhere honest than somewhere busy.
If that sounds like you: https://devconnectplatform.com?ref=devto. Posting is free, the job listings show salaries, and the tester exchange is there because everyone shipping to Google Play needs the same favour from someone.
If it does not, that is genuinely fine. I would rather be useful to a few hundred people than optimised for everyone.
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