Stepsize helps Engineering teams track and prioritise technical debt. Now, all of our product’s core features are available for free to all teams. In this article, you’ll learn about our journey and why we chose to go freemium.
All of our product's core features are now available for free to all teams. In this article, you’ll learn about our journey and why we chose to go freemium.
Why freemium?
Our team has spent the last year building a powerful tool to help Engineering teams track and prioritise technical debt. We were getting a stable number of users each month and onboarded most of our customers by doing personalised demos and regular check-ins.
Along the way, we’ve learned a lot from the fast-growing companies we served, and gradually, the product was ready to be adopted by the teams without our in-person guidance.
When we asked ourselves: should every company in the world have a good way to track and prioritise tech debt—the answer was “100% yes!”
It became our mission to enable every company to manage technical debt effortlessly.
Having an inspiring mission in mind and a powerful product at hand, we decided to eliminate all the usage barriers and add a free plan.
New category of tools = new habit
Stepsize falls into a completely new category of tools—technical debt management.
Numerous pieces of research have shown that companies who manage technical debt ship up to 50% faster, have happier engineers, and higher product quality. This is significant enough to conclude that proper tech debt management could be the difference between winning and losing for any software company. But today, even despite their best efforts and processes, companies don't have the right tools to manage tech debt adequately.
A lot of companies we've spoken to try to manage their tech debt by creating a backlog in their project management tool or in a spreadsheet. It's a great way to start, but here's the problem: these issues will not contain the context necessary for you to prioritise them effectively.
Here's the vicious cycle that ensues:
the team tracks debt => can't prioritise it => can't fix it => the backlog grows => it gets harder to prioritise => tech debt is not managed effectively => the team stops tracking it
Stepsize solves this exact problem. With our product, engineers can track debt directly from their workflow (code editor, pull request, Slack, and more) so that you can have visibility into your debt. Stepsize automatically picks up important context like the code the debt relates to, and engineers get to quantify the impact the debt is having on the business and the risks it presents (e.g. time lost, customer risk, and more) so that you can prioritise it easily.
By going freemium, we give companies time to adopt new habits of tracking and prioritising technical debt and boosting their chances to succeed in managing it.
How does Stepsize freemium plan work?
We decided to go with three simple plans. The free plan includes an unlimited number of tech debt reports, unlimited users and teams as well as all workflow integrations (wow!)
What’s next?
We designed this freemium product thanks to insights from 300+ interviews with some of the best software engineering teams in the world. One thing is clear: dealing with tech debt is a continuous process, not a project.
"Stepsize is our source of truth for tech debt. The way it allows me to report debt, straight from my editor is just superb. The best thing is that my team is actually using it to report debt on an ongoing basis."
Danylo, Team Lead at Neocles
We continue having these conversations every day, so if you’d like to share your experience, reach out any time.
Our team is excited to share this journey with you, and we hope to see you all on board: stepsize.com
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