DEV Community: Laura Du Ry

The Best Tech News Forums in the US and EU

Laura Du Ry — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:12:04 +0000

Forums remain one of the most trusted spaces for keeping up with tech news and discovering valuable developer content. Unlike traditional media, these platforms give developers a real-time pulse on new frameworks, tools, and discussions shaping the industry. Both in the US and EU, forums have fostered communities that drive innovation and knowledge-sharing.

At the heart of this trend are new platforms that emphasize transparency and community ownership, most notably Refetch, a modern, open-source tech news forum designed as a Hacker News alternative.

The Role of Forums in Developer News

Forums are where developers gather to share, argue, and inspire. They play a vital role in surfacing cutting-edge tools, dissecting new research, and discussing trends before they hit mainstream outlets. Unlike blogs or newsletters, forums are peer-driven and thrive on organic participation.

For developer news, this matters. Developers need more than polished press releases—they need firsthand perspectives, shared problems, and candid opinions.

Top Tech News Forums in the US

1. Hacker News

A household name, Hacker News has long been a go-to source for tech news. While it provides visibility, its centralized control and sometimes narrow scope leave space for alternatives.

2. Reddit Communities

Subreddits like r/programming, r/technology, and r/webdev are major hubs for open discussions. However, the quality of content varies, and moderation can be inconsistent.

3. Refetch

This new forum is quickly gaining traction as a Hacker News alternative. Built as an open source tech news platform, Refetch emphasizes transparency in moderation and puts developer content at the forefront. Its community-driven approach attracts developers who want more open, modern spaces in which to share knowledge.

4. Lobsters

An invite-only community focusing on high-quality discussions, especially around software engineering.

Top Tech News Forums in the EU

1. Slashdot

An old but still active forum with global participation and significant traction in Europe.

2. Mastodon Tech Communities

Federated discussions on Mastodon are popular among EU developers who value decentralized platforms.

3. OSS & EU Tech Groups

Many EU communities are deeply engaged in developer news, from open-source mailing lists to regional forums.

4. Refetch

Though new, Refetch is bridging gaps between US and EU developer communities by offering a global, open-source-first approach.

What Makes a Great Forum for Developers?

Active, fair moderation.
Focus on developer content (not consumer gadgets).
Transparency and community-led ethos.
Open-source foundations that align with developer values.

Conclusion

From classics like Hacker News and Slashdot to modern experiments like Mastodon communities, the US and EU each have vibrant spaces for tech news. But with its transparent, open-source-first model, Refetch is setting itself apart as a truly modern Hacker News alternative.

If you’re looking for the next wave of developer news, it’s worth joining Refetch early and shaping its future.

Open Source Alternatives to Hacker News

Laura Du Ry — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 06:56:17 +0000

For years, Hacker News has been a cornerstone of tech news and developer content. But while it’s influential, it’s also centralized, with moderation and decisions controlled by a single entity. This creates bottlenecks and limits the diversity of discussions.

As developers embrace openness and transparency, many are turning to open source tech news platforms. Enter Refetch, a new, community-driven forum that positions itself as a fresh Hacker News alternative.

Why Look Beyond Hacker News?

Hacker News has undeniable strengths: a massive audience and the ability to make projects go viral overnight. But it also has drawbacks:

Centralized moderation can stifle diverse voices.
The scope often leans toward Silicon Valley-centric topics.
Lack of transparency in how content is prioritized.

Developers increasingly want platforms that reflect the ethos of open source—transparent, community-owned, and globally relevant.

The Open Source Ethos in Developer Content

Open source is more than just code, it’s a philosophy. Developers want the same openness in their tech news platforms:

Transparency in moderation.
Community-driven growth.
Accessibility across borders and time zones.

The Leading Open Source Hacker News Alternatives

1. Lobsters

A long-standing, invite-only forum with curated discussions. While niche, it remains a respected space for developer content.

2. Refetch

As a fully open source tech news forum, Refetch combines modern UX with transparent moderation. Its mission is to serve as the next-generation Hacker News alternative, focusing on high-quality developer news that’s global, not just US-centric.

3. Mastodon Tech & Lemmy Communities

Federated and decentralized platforms where developers build smaller, focused spaces for tech news. While diverse, they lack the single hub effect that Hacker News or Refetch offer.

How Refetch Stands Out

Refetch isn’t just another forum, it’s purpose-built for developers:

Fully open source, with code and governance open to the community.
Transparent moderation policies.
Global accessibility (designed with both US and EU developers in mind).
A strong focus on surfacing developer content that matters most: tools, frameworks, and real-world problems.

The Future of Open Source Tech News Platforms

The demand for decentralized and open platforms will only grow. Developers increasingly want ownership in the spaces they inhabit. Platforms like Refetch may become the blueprint for the next generation of developer news communities.

Conclusion

While Hacker News remains a staple, the tide is shifting toward openness and transparency. Lobsters, Mastodon, and Refetch all represent meaningful steps forward—but Refetch, with its fresh take and open-source roots, has the potential to become the community-led Hacker News alternative developers have been waiting for.

If you’re passionate about developer content and open source tech news, then explore Refetch and help shape its growth.

What is Refetch?

Refetch is an open-source alternative to Hacker News, designed to bring transparency and community-driven values back into tech forums. It delivers the latest technology news, discussions, and insights while empowering developers and readers to shape the platform. Built for and by the open-source community, Refetch offers a fresh, transparent, and collaborative way to stay on top of what’s happening in tech.

We removed cookies, pixels, and tags from the website and console

Laura Du Ry — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 08:02:00 +0000

With our recent announcement of GDPR compliance, we took a big step in becoming a privacy-first organization. But we didn’t want to stop here. We wanted to take it further than just ticking the privacy boxes. We wanted to act as a party that values your personal data, so we needed to take action and move to privacy-friendly analytics. This led to removing most of the tags, pixels, and cookies on our website and the Appwrite Console. In this blog, we dive deeper into what we removed, how this affected our growth strategy, and, most of all, what we, as a community, gained from this decision.

But first, what are pixels, tags, and cookies?

Pixels, tags, and cookies are all pieces of technology used to track user activity online. They are often used for marketing and advertising purposes but can also be used to improve website functionality and user experience.

Tags are snippets of code added to a website to track your activity and collect data. For example, a tag can be used to track how many people visit a particular page on a website or to collect information about what products you are viewing. The most well-known tool for this is Google Tag Manager. It allows you to manage all of your website tags in one place.
Pixels are small, transparent images that are embedded in a website. When you visit a website with a pixel, your browser sends information about your visit to the company that owns the pixel. This information can include the user's IP address, browser type, and the URL of the page you’re visiting. It is a beneficial tool to retarget website visitors with banner or social ads.
Cookies have two different types: first-party, which are set by the website you’ve visited mainly to improve your experience on that website, and third-party, which are set by different websites, such as Google Analytics. Third-party cookies are often used to track you across platforms, mostly meant for advertising purposes.

So, what did we remove?

If you visit the Appwrite Console or website, you will see a cookie consent banner. However, you will see only two options for you to pick from, Strictly necessary cookies and Product analytics.We have removed all of our Marketing classified pixels, tags, and cookies such as:

HubSpot tag
Google Tag Manager
Twitter Pixel
Facebook Pixel
Google Ads Pixel
Google Analytics Pixel

Most were used to get website analytics, analyze website clicks, measure ad performance, and collect form submissions.

The consequences of removing marketing pixels, tags, and cookies

The above mentioned allowed us to analyze user behavior, measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, retarget ads, and, to some extent, personalize the user experience. There are hardly any growth or marketing teams that don’t rely on them, and as stated in an article from Osano, privacy regulations make it a lot harder for growth and marketing teams to do their work. Go to any privacy footer on any website, and you will read an essay on all the data that is being tracked. But this is precisely what we are challenging: does removing pixels, cookies, and tags make growth’s life harder? Let’s take a look.

Attribution: It can be challenging to attribute conversions to specific marketing campaigns without the ability to track users across different devices and websites. This can make it challenging to know which campaigns drive the most results and make informed decisions about future campaigns.
Segmentation: Without the ability to track user behavior, preferences, and interests, it is challenging to segment users into different groups based on their interests and preferences. This can make delivering targeted messaging and experiences difficult for different user segments.
Reporting: It can be difficult to generate comprehensive reports on marketing performance without the ability to track users across different devices and websites. This can make it challenging to track progress over time and identify areas for improvement.
Ad targeting and Retargeting: Pixels and cookies enable precise ad targeting, allowing you to show ads to users who have shown interest in your products or services. Retargeting, which involves showing ads to users who have previously interacted with your website, becomes impossible without these tracking mechanisms.
Competing: For some, competition might also drive them towards using the tracking to stay or get ahead. You could fall behind if your competition has more information and data to leverage. Without pixels, cookies, and tags, you'll be at a significant disadvantage compared to competitors who can leverage data-driven insights. So, fear could be a legitimate driver.

If you want to use data for decision-making or personalizing the user experience, removing tags, pixels, and cookies might not be your first choice. But as mentioned, we are here to challenge this idea. Do you really need to track all this personal data to do your work in growth? We think not. Since there are many privacy-friendly options for getting the data and insights you need, and you can adjust your growth strategy to match a privacy-friendly approach. So yes, you can run a successful growth team despite the above challenges.

So, let’s look at what this looks like for Appwrite.

Privacy-friendly alternatives for your growth stack

Our growth philosophy and rules enable us to grow without relying on tracking you across the web. To give you some insight, here are three (of the six) growth statements we follow for success:

To center gaining access, knowledge, and information about Appwrite as the most crucial goal to lead to growth.
To let information flow freely for developers to find. (accessibility is key)
To use paid advertising and sponsorships only to amplify the reach of knowledge and information. (aka creating awareness)

The above can simply be conveyed as having a good content and social media strategy, and the success of this can be analyzed in a privacy-friendly way. We can measure success in metrics like traffic, impressions, social reach, new accounts, etc. Here are some ways we keep the team informed:

UTM data helps us track attributions from different campaigns, mediums, sources, and specific content. We can tell whether a visitor is coming from a specific link or not, for which we currently use dub.co, an open-source alternative to Bitly. This helps us determine whether sponsoring a newsletter was effective or if a piece of content brought us traffic. But that is about as far as we will go. As soon as you leave our website, we lose all your information and would like to keep it that way.
Open source analytics alternatives. We use privacy-friendly alternatives like Plausible to help us analyze our website and Console data. It is an open-source analytics platform with one of the highest privacy standards I have seen. It helps us get demographic and user behavior data in a privacy-friendly manner.
First-party data. We get a lot from users, like emails and names from authentication. We use it for login purposes, so you don’t have to enter your login details over and over again and add them to our CRM, HubSpot, for email communications. But with this data also comes great responsibility, and with our recent GDPR compliance announcement, we are not only upholding strict data privacy but also are certified with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards.
Content performance. As mentioned, you should be able to find information on Appwrite without any limitations. Many companies have gated content, where they set up forms to collect your data for you to get information or reports. We believe this restricts you from learning freely. Therefore, we focus on the performance of our content and see metrics such as page view and time on page as a measurement of success.
Online reach. Brand24 and Orbit are two tools we use to measure online reach. Both tools allow us to see and analyze community growth online. Brand24 focuses more on the standard online channels, such as X, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and the people influencing our reach there. Meanwhile, with Orbit, we focus on more (developer) community channels to understand performance on channels such as Discord, GitHub, and Dev.to.
Search. Many people search the internet daily, looking for solutions, and even after the introduction of ChatGPT, this is still the case. So, keeping track of our search results is another indicator of our tactics' success, as it’s a great indicator of interest shown in Appwrite and the industry. For now, we use Semrush and Google Search Console to give us this data, but we are interested in learning about open-source tools in this area.

To return to our growth philosophy, we believe the dev community will find the information they need on their terms. We know that the developer journey is not one straight line and that people will find information on their preferred platforms when needed. We just need to ensure that we have content ready for you to find wherever you are on your journey. This instinctively eliminates the idea of running ads across platforms to convince you to use Appwrite. We merely use paid media or sponsored newsletters to let you know we exist, making pixels, cookies, and tags redundant in most cases.

But there is more to gain than just privacy-friendly data.

Building experience and trust with the developer community

As we often repeat, we are heavily focused on the developer experience. It is at the core of everything we do. Considering this, there are several reasons why we decided to remove most of the tags, pixels, and cookies from our website:

Privacy: As many studies show, people want to control the information they share with other parties online. By removing most of the tags, pixels, and cookies, we reduce the amount of personal data we collect from the Appwrite website and Console. And as we focus on collecting first-party data, we grant you that control.
Performance: Tags, pixels, and cookies can slow down a website's loading time. By removing them, we improve the performance of our website and the Console for you. And a study from Akamai, shows that a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103 percent. So, improving performance is worth it.
Security: This tracking technology can also track you across the web and collect intrusive data about you. By removing them, we are making our website more secure for you and preventing potential data breaches.

Overall, it made much sense to go down this route and focus on delivering a better experience and enhancing trust with the community. And I think it’s fair to say that with the removal of marketing pixels, cookies, and tags, we didn’t lose anything; we merely gained.

Building a privacy-friendly and open-source growth stack

We still have the necessary tools to improve our product, the developer experience, and analyze our website traffic. That said, we will continue to explore the possibilities of moving towards a fully open-source and privacy-friendly growth tech stack. Not only do we feel it is the right thing to do, but it is also rooted in our culture. We want to treat you as we want to be treated by any vendors we use. For now, this has been the most sensible decision we could have made for Appwrite and the community. We are excited to take privacy further and further, so who knows where we will stand a year from now.

If you are looking to build your privacy-friendly growth stack, go check out this blog from Posthog.

The evolution of team Appwrite

Laura Du Ry — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 10:06:06 +0000

2024 has begun, and as it goes with a new year, many people search for a new job. Statistically speaking, January is the most popular month of the year for new job seekers. Reasons vary from New Year's resolutions and increased hiring activity to bonus payouts. At Appwrite, we notice this, too. That said, throughout the year, the team gets numerous hiring requests in their DMs, so many we cannot respond to most, let alone do we have vacancies for all these people. So, in response, we decided to write this blog. We will give you insights into how many current team members joined Appwrite after helping out in the community and contributing. But please note they never did this with the intention of getting hired. This was just the outcome of their actions.

The very first Appwrite employees

To kick off, the very first Appwrite employee, Eldad Fux, started his own open-source project and worked relentlessly to get Appwrite where it is today. Aka, the Founder & CEO of Appwrite, aka contributor zero.

After the first funding round, there was financial power to hire the first engineers of Appwrite. Here is an overview of the very first engineers who joined the team and how they stood out.

Christy Jacob is currently the Lead Engineer building out Appwrite Cloud. But before that, he was one of the very first active contributors to Appwrite, and at only 23 years old, he joined the team as a Founding Engineer. After being hired, he went above and beyond to help Appwrite grow. Besides coding, he handled social channels and took care of most of the copywriting work, as well as other marketing and growth-related work.

Damodar Lohani is a Flutter enthusiast, and in his search for a proper Backend-as-a-Service, he discovered Appwrite. Not much later, he dedicated an entire YouTube channel to videos on Appwrite and Flutter and contributed to Appwrite’s Flutter SDK. If you want to know what to do to get hired by Appwrite, or any other OSS company, he is a leading example. Making contributions in both code and content definitely gets you noticed.

Jake Barnby was a rather tricky one logistically. Being the only one in the southeast Pacific time zone, working together with him was an unforeseen challenge. When most of us log on, Jake logs off. However his contributions to the Android SDK and his wide knowledge of languages and platforms helped him land a job at Appwrite. He contributed to every single SDK and API, and even frontend work. He got promoted to Lead within a few months. It is a classic story of dedication and hard work that pays off.

Bradley Schofield dropped out of college because he wasn’t learning enough. We have heard that story quite a few times in the developer community, but did you know he was only 16 when we hired him? That’s a first for us. Now, he has been around for three years, and as a full-stack engineer with a love for data, he is the go-to engineer for anything growth-related.

Like many products in a staring phase, Appwrite had some bugs. Our current front-end lead Torsten Dittmann decided not to sit around and wait for a fix and started contributing by fixing bugs for Appwrite. Today, whenever you open your Appwrite Console, you can see Torsten and his team at work.

As the team grew

If you know Appwrite, you know Steven Nguyen. Not all heroes wear capes, but we should get Steven a cape. Not only does he work on code at Appwrite, but he also answers everyone’s questions on our Discord server. He started doing this a year-long before he joined Appwrite. As you can imagine, he is a welcome addition to the team.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1742789725684203737-407'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1742789725684203737&theme=dark" }

Khushboo Verma is someone you’d love to have on the team. She creates content, does public speaking, is an engineer, and is a valuable addition to the Appwrite team. She discovered Appwrite through another Appwriter, Aditya, when she invited him to join a liveshow for GitHub’s Education channel. Appwrite’s community-driven culture drew her curiosity, and she started contributing to Utopia-PHP. She immediately joined the Discord server, where she connected with the rest of the team, which helped her expand her skillset and she contributed yet again by adding the PostgreSQL database adapter. She felt that this was a rewarding experience, and soon after, she joined Appwrite as she knew that Appwrite would be the right place for her.

Wess Cope is more than an engineer, a father, content creator, mentor, aspiring dev advocate, and Batman. He is probably the most experienced engineer we have on the team. Name a framework, and he will know how to code it. He joined the community and started asking many IoT questions, and while waiting for answers, he just started helping others. Again, like the others, he got noticed, especially with all of the knowledge he possessed.

Matej Bačo started tinkering with Appwrite as a freelancer and ran into some obstacles. Thanks to Appwrite's Discord server, he could learn from others and understand all the concepts rapidly. To show appreciation for all the support maintainers gave, he decided to help with all the community questions he possibly could. This led to him being a valuable member of the Appwrite team.

Contributing in general

Now, we don’t only hire people from our own community. We, and other tech companies, appreciate contributing in general. Thomas G Lopez, a front-end dev, is one of the people who has made notable contributions within the Svelte community. He even built Melt UI, an open-source collection of accessible and customizable component builders for creating user interfaces with Svelte. His contributions earned him the notable title of an official Svelte Ambassador.

If you have been around the Appwrite community, you must know Aditya Oberai by now. He actively participates in the larger tech and hackathon community and stumbled across Appwrite by chance on X. Now, one thing you need to know about Aditya is his unfair advantage: he is a networker. So when he discovered Appwrite, he noticed that he already knew many other contributors, which drew him in further and helped him land a job at Appwrite.

Dennis Ivy is not just a class teammate but also an amazing tutor to so many devs, as he has produced hundreds of videos that have helped others in the community learn how to code, including tutorials on Appwrite. Need we say more? Contributing is more than just code!

Sara Kaandorp joined as the first non-technical hire. Now, She leads our Design team and, with it, brings our brand and visual identity to new heights every day. She might not have contributed to the community, but as a designer, she put the work in with her portfolio. Also, she understands development as she has a background in it. Therefore, there is no better designer we could wish for to lead all of our efforts.

How to stand out from the crowd

Finding the right team members is crucial for tech start-ups. When you are still building your company, there is little room for error, especially when building your team. Hiring the right people determines future success. So it’s about finding the needle in the haystack for employers like Appwrite, and for you to be that needle, you need to shine brighter than the rest.

Now, this is not an unhealthy testimony to working day and night, every day, no fun, or any of that. On the contrary, we stand for healthy life balance and will force you to take leave if you like it or not. To stand out is to deliver quality work consistently, not quantity, to be eager to learn, receptive to feedback, and supportive of others. And if you missed this point, one thing is for sure: contributing to open source increases the chances of getting hired into a tech job.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1744470232603799730-691'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1744470232603799730&theme=dark" }

Doing more with your skills

So, how do you stand out? Be active in the community you want to work in. Contribute to open-source projects with code, content, support, or whatever works best for you. To learn more and get inspired, follow people like Eddie Jaoude, Danny Thompson, Ruth Ikegah, Santosh Yadav, and our very own Eldad Fux. However, if you decide to contribute, keep in mind: keep it healthy.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1744753548238213437-957'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1744753548238213437&theme=dark" }

Supporting the future of open source

Laura Du Ry — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:48:59 +0000

With the release of Appwrite Pro, we reached another milestone. A new development in our product offering that allows you to build with more confidence.

But for those of you thinking:

This is a paid plan, so what about us open-source maintainers?

Well, we haven’t forgotten you. Appwrite is open-source, and we have come so far due to the love the open-source community has shown us. Therefore, we want to continue to give back to the community by allowing OSS maintainers to build with Appwrite Pro free of charge. With this OSS plan, we hope to ensure the future for many open-source maintainers, just like many of you have ensured ours.

Let’s take a short walk down memory lane to learn about Appwrite’s open-source journey so far and why we owe the community our support.

Falling in love with open-source

The first ever pull request for Appwrite was submitted in August 2019 by Eldad, Founder and CEO of Appwrite, and not much later, the first community PR followed. Contributors kept on coming and helped with code, copy, accessibility, fixing bugs, and more. For Eldad at the time, it was remarkable to witness how devs would help out and expect nothing in return. They wanted to use Appwrite as their backend, so they helped improve Appwrite for themselves and also ensured others would not have to face the challenges of building a complex backend. During this period, Eldad fell in love with open-source and the community around it.

Not much later, Appwrite's open-source version was launched. The launch went viral, our Hacker News post was trending, and our GitHub Stars charts went up with over 1,500 new stargazers in the first month after release. The love was evident from both sides and together with many contributors, Eldad worked tirelessly as a solo maintainer to build out the product envisioned, ensuring many other developers would not face the same struggles when building complex software.

Today, Appwrite has over 38K stars, 800 contributors, 3.5K forks, and thousands of contributions made, all with the help, support, and love of the open-source community.

Pre-monetization as a solo maintainer

After three months of getting serious traction, Eldad decided to become a full-time open-source maintainer, leaving a full-time job. After 12 months, with no monetization of Appwrite yet possible, the real struggle started. The financial burden as a solo maintainer was immense. Not only do you have to cover the costs of building your project, such as infrastructure, development tools, and hosting, but you also feel the financial burden of day-to-day life.

After many considerations to fight the financial pressure, Appwrite got an amazing investment offer from the outstanding individuals at Ibex and Seedcamp, who offered to support the vision. Six months later, they were followed by an investment from Bessemer (Auth0, Cloudinary) and Flybridge (Firebase, MongoDB) that led our 8.5m seed round. The timing could not have been better, and Appwrite was able to thrive with new financial stability.

Giving back to the community

This financial power meant many things, such as Appwrite could build a team, invest in a better product offering, community swag, and start an OSS fund. And all of it with one thing in mind, giving back to the community. Helping those who have helped us.

Hiring from the OSS community

The first thing Eldad did with the funding was build out the team. And what better place to find the right people than in the open-source community? We hired some of the first and top Appwrite contributors. Christy, Torsten, Damodar, and Brandon. They formed Appwrite’s founding engineering team. Damodar even had a YouTube channel that focussed on Appwrite and Flutter, just to show off the support we got from an early stage.

As we grew, so did our team, and we added many more engineers to the team. Many of them came from the community. Some contributed to code, some started helping others in the community, and some created content. To this day, we still hire from the community, as we stand by open source and its contributors. It is embedded in our DNA.

Appwrite Swag Store

Another way we ensure funds from the community go back to the community is by giving back the money we earn on swags. For every shirt, hoodie, bag, or sock we sell from the Appwrite store, we give back the profit made. In general, we believe swag should be there for the community, not to line our pockets.

OSS Fund

We always knew that if we're ever fortunate enough to be in a position to give back funds to the community, we'd never think twice about it. And with our Series A, we were in that position. In 2022 we announced the Appwrite OSS Fund, a $50,000 fund to support open-source projects.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1640917165711712256-143'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1640917165711712256&theme=dark" }

At the time, Eldad put the purpose of the fund into words, and we couldn’t phrase it any better:

In the journey of turning your dream project into a reality, all that you need to have is the vision to build an awesome open-source project. The idea behind the fund is to support developers like you and the open-source project you are building.

This fund has now come to an end, but we successfully supported twenty OSS maintainers, such as LinkFree (now BioDrop), Vale, Rally, and Strawberry.

Pro Plan for free

Now that we have released Appwrite Pro, we can also release our new initiative to give back to the OSS community, the Appwrite OSS Program. OSS maintainers can apply for the OSS Program and use Appwrite Pro resources free of charge. This plan is important to us as we strongly believe in helping OSS maintainers, and we are humbled to have the opportunity and privilege to contribute to the growth of developers. We know very well where we came from, and Appwrite has been built with and by the open-source community. We’re excited to continue our support and to see OSS maintainers reach out to build with Appwrite Pro. In case you are such a maintainer, read our announcement blog to learn more.

The Road to Appwrite's Pricing Plans

Laura Du Ry — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 12:17:21 +0000

For those who missed it, last Tuesday we revealed Appwrite’s pricing plans. Many of you had let us know that you had been anticipating this moment, so it’s exciting to have reached this new milestone. Now these plans didn’t come to us overnight and have been a long time in the making, many months of research and consideration have gone into understanding the best price for our community. We are happy with the outcome and that we took the time to understand our community.

So what did we do over the past months? What made us come to these choices? Who was part of the process? In this blog, we will give some insight into our process and how we validated, what we believe, is the best pricing for the Appwrite Community.

Value Framework

We created a set of principles to guide us through the pricing process. We like to call this the “Value Framework,” as it focuses on delivering the maximum value to developers using Appwrite without compromising on the affordability and accessibility of our products and services. And this is what it looks like:

Equally plan for being accessible to all and our continued growth.
Make adoption easy and ensure the developer's growth and success matches pricing.
The developer's success helps Appwrite grow and deliver better products.
Features should be consistent across tiers unless they are clearly focused on enterprise.
Focus on value-based profit. Limits should only be applied to usage. Not functionality.
Be fair.

Now with this framework in place, we could take the next step: start with our research. We needed to know what the above framework meant to Appwrite users and the community.

Let’s dive into our research methodology.

Knowing, not guessing

One thing we wanted to really stay away from is assumptions. We need to know, and not guess. So for each part of the framework, we needed to come up with a set of questions that would lead us down the right path. We formalized these questions over three different surveys and one on one interviews:

Understanding your project needs and how costs would affect this.
What pricing models would be accessible to different developer needs.
Getting real responses on the actual pricing plans.
In-depth interviews to understand how you incorporate Appwrite into your daily work.

Overall we had a total of 410 respondents who helped us shape the pricing models. We interviewed over 30 developers online to get direct feedback and to understand how they used Appwrite. This gave us insight into how pricing could affect their work and really helped us understand where limitations should be placed and really should not be placed.

Business model

Another important point we wanted to challenge is the business model used in the backend service industry. The standard is a ‘pay-per-project’ pricing model, where you pay for each new project. We had our doubts about this as we felt it gets in the way of your ability to act on your imagination or ideation. We believe in creativity, value exploration, and learning, so not limiting the number of projects was an important factor for us to consider. So we challenged:

Pay per project vs pay per developer (those who use Appwrite)

Honestly, the results were tight. We asked straightforward questions about what you would prefer, which didn’t tip the scale. But once we focussed on actual usage, it became clear that having multiple free projects was needed for developers to explore possibilities. This does mean that if you collaborate with other developers on the same project, you will need to upgrade. It was the trade-off we made based on our framework:

The developer's success helps Appwrite grow and deliver better products.

We felt that, based on research, limiting projects would be a bigger blocker than limiting team size. Most of the organizations with multiple team members were commercial production projects that could afford an upgrade, whereas some of the individual developers with multiple projects were not in production yet. So for us, this business model is fair and better aligns with our values and mission.

And the reactions said enough.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1688926775802478592-918'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1688926775802478592&theme=dark" }

Price

Choosing the right price is never an easy task, but with our values in mind, we knew that whatever we would pick, it would have to be fair. And with that in mind, we wanted to:

Make adoption easy and ensure the developer's growth and success match pricing.

So what did we do? We asked what price would work best for you. We had lower and higher prices, but the price of $15, per month was the one that nearly everyone favored and considered to be fair on both sides. We really appreciated the honest answers we received. It was amazing to see so many developers looking out for Appwrite’s future, and not just the best price for them. This really showed how the community turned up.

Listening to feedback

Overall, we got a lot of feedback for us to work with, but the most heard was: be transparent and keep Appwrite accessible and affordable, but also become a sustainable company for the future. We believe that with this pricing, we will be able to make this feedback come true. To add to this, we wanted to be sure to add a pricing plan that would support open-source maintainers, like Appwrite, once started, as they build out their product for the community to benefit from.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1688906645060161537-75'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1688906645060161537&theme=dark" }

Conclusion: The beginning of a new dawn

A new and exciting era has begun before us as a community in which we reach new heights. We look forward to building out Appwrite and ensuring our mission to make software development accessible, developer-centric, and flexible by building with and for the open-source community.

And I think James Q Quick said it best. We are truly focused on the developer and we want to keep doing so for the future to come.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1688929866106699776-314'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1688929866106699776&theme=dark" }