{ "title": "The Beat Studio", "description": "Two hosts on what moved in developer marketing this week: launches, pricing pages, homepages and go-to-market at the companies that sell to developers. Every claim rests on a public source listed with the episode.", "disclosure": "Will and Brian are fictional hosts voiced with ElevenLabs, and the music is made with ElevenLabs. Each episode is researched and written by AI agents and fact-checked against its listed sources. ElevenLabs is a company this site covers; it is a tool the site pays for, not a sponsor.", "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/", "feed": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast.xml", "updated": "2026-10-03", "count": 4, "episodes": [ { "id": "2026-W40-stop-billing-in-tokens", "episode": 4, "title": "The Billing CEO Who Tried to Kill the Token and Kept It", "published": "2026-10-03", "duration": 768.6, "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-stop-billing-in-tokens/", "markdown": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-stop-billing-in-tokens.md", "audio": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-stop-billing-in-tokens.mp3", "type": "audio/mpeg", "bytes": 12297750 }, "art": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-stop-billing-in-tokens-art.png", "words": "Kill the token", "week": "2026-W40" }, "hosts": [ "Will", "Brian" ], "summary": "A billing CEO whose company Stripe now owns tried to kill token billing and kept it, and says why. Will reads the post and grades it; Brian asks whose argument it is, and answers with GitHub's credits. Then DigitalOcean puts a subscription on the same meter, and Google's new Gemini model launches at a price with no end date.", "sources": [ { "label": "Stripe blog, Scott Woody - Why I tried to kill token billing (and why we kept it)", "url": "https://stripe.com/blog/where-pricing-is-headed" }, { "label": "Stripe newsroom - Stripe completes Metronome acquisition", "url": "https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-completes-metronome-acquisition" }, { "label": "GitHub Docs - Usage-based billing for individuals", "url": "https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/usage-based-billing-for-individuals" }, { "label": "GitHub Docs - What changed with billing", "url": "https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing/request-based-billing-legacy/what-changed-with-billing" }, { "label": "PostHog docs - PostHog AI pricing", "url": "https://posthog.com/docs/posthog-ai/pricing" }, { "label": "DigitalOcean - Why we built Managed Agents", "url": "https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/why-we-built-managed-agents" }, { "label": "DigitalOcean - Harness Runtime pricing", "url": "https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/harness-runtime" }, { "label": "DigitalOcean - Introducing Agent Droplets", "url": "https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-agent-droplets" }, { "label": "Google - Gemini 4 Argon", "url": "https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-4-argon/" }, { "label": "Google - Gemini API pricing", "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing" }, { "label": "Latent Space - Notion's Token Town", "url": "https://www.latent.space/p/notion" }, { "label": "Code to Market - Did Laravel do a PERFECT developer marketing launch?", "url": "https://codetomarket.fm/episodes/did-laravel-do-a-perfect-developer-marketing-launch" }, { "label": "Scaling DevTools - Kyle Galbraith from Depot", "url": "https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/kyle-depot" }, { "label": "To Be Continuous - Ep. 11, Pricing for Developer Tools", "url": "https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/to-be-continuous/ep-11-pricing-for-developer-tools" } ], "transcript": [ { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 6, "text": "The man whose company bills the token sellers tried to kill token billing, and kept it. That's the story this week, and if there's a model under your product it's yours too, because the question is which unit goes on your pricing page: the one you pay for, or the one your customer gets. Scott Woody runs Metronome, the usage-billing company Stripe bought at the start of the year, and he's just published a post on Stripe's blog titled why I tried to kill token billing and why we kept it. A billing vendor, in writing, saying the thing he meters is a bad way to charge a customer. Then shorter ones. DigitalOcean launched agent infrastructure on a per-second price and, a week later, put a monthly subscription over the same price. And Google announced a model at an introductory price that doubles when the introductory period ends, without saying when. So, Woody. Why would a billing company want to kill the thing it bills?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 64.8, "text": "It's better than that sounds. He never wanted to stop metering tokens; he wanted them off the customer's invoice. The post says your invoice should be where you define your value to your customer, and that pricing on tokens means letting your costs determine your price. Here's the argument, with one picture I'll keep all episode. Imagine a restaurant that bills you for flour. Not the bread, the flour: so many grams, at the mill's price, plus the kitchen's markup, itemised. That's a token invoice. Woody's point is that once the customer can see the mill's price, they argue about the markup. And when flour gets cheaper, and models keep getting cheaper, they ask why their bill didn't, or they go and buy flour themselves. His sentence for it, the one I'd keep from the whole post: \"Token billing positions your product as a commodity markup on top of an actual commodity.\" He's fair about why everyone does it. Tokens are a safeguard against runaway compute, and if you sell models the token is the product, so it's the right unit. For everyone else he calls it useful infrastructure and a bad thing to show the customer, which is why the title says he kept it: Metronome still meters tokens underneath, it just wants them off the bill. Then he gives you three steps. Tokens, which is the flour. Unified credits: a prepaid card, and each dish takes its own number of points off it, so the card knows what the flour cost and you don't have to. Then outputs: a price per dish, an image generated, an email sent. And outcomes, paying for revenue or churn, he calls a myth for anyone without a monopoly or a very large contract, because nobody can attribute them. My grade: as writing, high. As advice, a notch lower, and I think you're about to tell me why." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 176.9, "text": "Not yet, hold the grade for a minute. So what does he want me to change on Monday?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 183.3, "text": "Put the unit the customer values on the invoice, and keep the unit you pay for in the cost model. That's the principle, and I'd sign it. Whether a devtool can actually do it is where my grade drops, and I'll get there. You first, because I can see you've got the acquisition page open." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 202.9, "text": "Mine's the listener's question too. Who is telling me this, and what does he sell? Stripe finished buying Metronome at the start of the year, and in the announcement Patrick Collison named the companies Metronome's metering runs for, OpenAI and Anthropic among them. The token sellers. The post ends by linking to Metronome's product page. So a billing vendor whose showcase customers bill in tokens is telling everyone else to buy a layer of billing on top of tokens. Doesn't make him wrong. So weigh it: it's vendor marketing. And here's what GitHub did in the summer. Copilot moved off a price per request, back toward tokens, wrapped in credits: every interaction priced by tokens and converted into credits, a credit a cent. Paid plans get a fixed batch of base credits plus what GitHub calls a flex allotment, and the docs say that flex batch is designed to adapt as the economics of AI evolve. The credit stays a cent; the docs say how many you get can move. That's the terms. My reading: a price that can change without the price changing. Woody's middle step, the prepaid card, is also a way to change how many points come on the card without ever touching the price of a point." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 278.1, "text": "Change the points, not the price? That's a good line and I hate it. Is there a version of credits that can't do that, or is that just what a credit is?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 289.5, "text": "PostHog's is the nearest. It runs its AI features on credits, and its docs print the markup: twenty percent over what the model provider charges them, written down on the page. The exact thing Woody says never to show, in public, on purpose. Then the one figure in the post. Woody says roughly one in six Stripe users past some revenue milestone are using or rolling out hybrid pricing. Hybrid, in his own paragraph, means seats plus usage. Not credits, not outputs. So the number counts a thing the post isn't arguing for, with no base given. Self-reported, single source, and it measures the wrong step, which tells you how thin the evidence for the middle one is: a billing company's own customers, counted in a way that leaves it out." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 336.1, "text": "That takes my advice grade down another notch, and here's where it stops, because the answer is on the record and isn't from a billing company. Sarah Sachs, Notion's head of AI, on Latent Space in the spring. Notion's first idea was to charge per agent run, a price per dish. Every version of it, she says, brought them back to complexity that mapped straight onto token throughput. So they built credits above tokens, because their costs arrive in different units, GPUs, web search, serving tiers, and they sell credit packs with enterprise discounts. Self-reported, one company, but one that tried the step above and came back down. So here's what should have been done, on Notion's evidence, and it's one position: credits, tied to your cost in public, the way PostHog prints its markup. Then the number of points on the card can't move unless the formula does, and the formula is on the page where your customer can read it. For a devtool's pricing page that means the dish is what the customer sees, the flour stays in the kitchen, and the recipe for the card is published. That's the version of Woody's post I'd hand a founder, and it's shorter than his." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 409.1, "text": "I had credits down as a way to hide a price. Notion tried the honest unit, per run, and it ran back to tokens on its own. That isn't a vendor hiding a price, it's a product that couldn't find a unit, and that is what moved me. But how do you know any of it works? Every position we've got is an opinion or a company describing itself. Has anyone measured whether tokens or credits move sign-ups, or bill shock, or anything a finance team would recognise? Not Woody, not Notion, not GitHub, nobody I could find. Which brings me to a company that had this whole argument with itself in one week." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 449.7, "text": "DigitalOcean. Go on." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 450.8, "text": "DigitalOcean, the cloud for small developer teams, launched Managed Agents into public preview with a post by its chief product and technology officer. The pitch was the meter: CPU billed per second of actual use, memory by the hour, and the post ends on being billed for the work and not the wait. The same post says infrastructure is roughly three to eight percent of what a typical run costs and the rest is tokens. Which tells you the per-second meter sits on the smallest slice of the bill. A week later, Agent Droplets. A monthly plan over the same meter: a Pro tier at fifty dollars a month with fifteen percent off agent usage, unlimited seats, no per-seat charge. The per-second rates did not change. Past the plan's allowance you pay list price from a prepaid balance. In your restaurant it's a membership card: pay monthly, get a discount on the menu, and the menu stays the menu. Their reason is predictability, not cost. They tell of one customer's stack, half a dozen vendors and as many invoices, in their own telling, and their picture of that month is labelled illustrative. Then: \"Nobody on the team could say what a single agent run had cost.\" Small teams, they say, want a price you can predict and a bill you can read." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 529.8, "text": "A monthly fee for a discount on something they already sell by the second. Hang on. Same rates underneath, a cheaper rate for paying up front. Why is that a story and not a coupon?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 542.3, "text": "Because of the footnote. The per-second meter, billed for the work and not the wait, isn't live. The runtime's pricing page says billing only for the seconds the CPU is actually working is coming soon, and until then you're billed at a quarter of the CPUs you allocated, working or waiting. So in one week: a meter that launched, a membership that discounts the meter, and a line in small print saying the meter is still being installed. The membership arrived before the meter did." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 572.6, "text": "Here's why I'm on DigitalOcean's side anyway, and my witness is a company going the exact opposite way. Depot, the build-acceleration tool. Kyle Galbraith, its co-founder, on Scaling DevTools last year: they were moving off their monthly tiers and back to pure per-minute usage, because a plan forces engineers to think about the price, with spend caps on top. Self-reported. He said they'd built a pricing model that worked for them as founders and didn't land with them as engineers. So the devtool took the membership card off, DigitalOcean put one on, and both say they're fixing the same complaint. Which tells me the unit isn't the argument. The argument is whether anyone can say in advance what the month costs. Hank Taylor, when he was at Laravel, on Code to Market: not knowing what it would cost was one of the main three reasons people hadn't made a first deployment, and his team was building a calculator. Self-reported, no figure. Predictability is the product. The unit is a detail you argue about afterwards." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 634.5, "text": "Depot is one founder on one podcast, and you've just made him the industry. How do you know it's predictability and not margin? A plan with a discount is also a prepayment: DigitalOcean gets the monthly fee whether you run an agent that month or not. Do I need a predictability story to explain why a cloud company likes that shape? What I'll give you: Depot and DigitalOcean disagree on the unit and agree on the complaint, from both sides of the counter, and that's the most useful thing anyone has said today." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 667.6, "text": "Last one, short, because you can't buy it. Google announced its new Gemini model, Argon, at an introductory price, and in small print the price doubles after the introductory period. No end date anywhere on the page. The model goes first to a cyber-defence programme, then to paid API customers, and it isn't on the public API price list yet. A sale price on flour, from a mill that isn't taking orders. Peter van Hardenberg, from Heroku, on To Be Continuous years ago, self-reported and old: \"People really understand your product through its price.\" Heroku treated a price change as something the whole company had to roll out with care, and this one arrives as a line under a launch post. So what does a developer understand from a price that's half of something, for an unknown time? That the token price is a launch promotion. And this is my view, not Woody's: even the people who sell tokens use the token price as marketing, which is one more reason not to copy it onto your own invoice." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 731, "text": "The flour's on sale and the mill isn't open." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 734.2, "text": "So. Dish on the bill, flour in the kitchen." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 737.4, "text": "And the recipe on the page, or someone quietly changes the portions." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 741.7, "text": "Print it, and predictability is the product." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 744.2, "text": "Then show me the measurement. From anyone." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 746.7, "text": "Coming soon." } ] }, { "id": "2026-W40-homepage-rewrites", "episode": 3, "title": "Postman Rewrote Its Homepage for Agents. Sourcegraph's Didn't Last.", "published": "2026-10-03", "duration": 618.8, "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-homepage-rewrites/", "markdown": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-homepage-rewrites.md", "audio": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-homepage-rewrites.mp3", "type": "audio/mpeg", "bytes": 9902020 }, "art": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-homepage-rewrites-art.png", "words": "Homepage for agents", "week": "2026-W40" }, "hosts": [ "Will", "Brian" ], "summary": "Postman rewrote its homepage this week to speak to AI agents first: the first button now installs Postman for your agent. Sourcegraph had already gone agents-first, then put up an even harder line for about a day and took it back. Brian reads the pages like letters and asks who they are addressed to now; Will says what the growth team in that room was thinking.", "sources": [ { "label": "Postman - homepage", "url": "https://www.postman.com/" }, { "label": "Postman - homepage, markdown edition", "url": "https://www.postman.com/home.md" }, { "label": "Postman - pricing", "url": "https://www.postman.com/pricing/" }, { "label": "Postman docs - About plans", "url": "https://learning.postman.com/latest-v-12/docs/billing/about-plans.md" }, { "label": "SD Times - Postman Introduces the Control Plane for the Agentic World", "url": "https://sdtimes.com/control-plane/postman-introduces-the-control-plane-for-the-agentic-world-with-general-availability-of-fabric-gateway/" }, { "label": "DEVOPSdigest - Postman Releases Passport", "url": "https://devopsdigest.com/postman-releases-passport" }, { "label": "Postman Blog - Introducing the Context Graph API", "url": "https://blog.postman.com/introducing-the-context-graph-api-one-map-of-your-api-ecosystem/" }, { "label": "Sourcegraph - homepage", "url": "https://sourcegraph.com/" }, { "label": "Sourcegraph - pricing", "url": "https://sourcegraph.com/pricing" }, { "label": "Sourcegraph blog - A new era for Sourcegraph", "url": "https://sourcegraph.com/blog/a-new-era-for-sourcegraph-the-intelligence-layer-for-ai-coding-agents-and-developers" }, { "label": "Coder - pricing", "url": "https://coder.com/pricing" }, { "label": "Coder docs v2.36.3 - AI Governance", "url": "https://coder.com/docs/@v2.36.3/ai-coder/ai-governance.md" }, { "label": "Coder docs - AI Governance", "url": "https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/ai-governance.md" }, { "label": "GitHub - coder/coder release v2.37.0", "url": "https://github.com/coder/coder/releases/tag/v2.37.0" }, { "label": "Coder blog - Coder Agents is GA", "url": "https://coder.com/blog/coder-agents-ga" }, { "label": "LogRocket - April Dunford's killer question to expose weak AI product positioning", "url": "https://stories.logrocket.com/p/april-dunford-killer-question-expose-weak-ai-product-positioning" } ], "transcript": [ { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 6, "text": "Postman rewrote its homepage in the last couple of days, and the first sentence on it is now addressed to AI agents. Postman is the API tool, the one for testing an endpoint before you ship it. Sourcegraph, which indexes whole codebases so you can search them, went the same way about two weeks ago and kept it. Then yesterday morning it had a harder version of that page up, and by this morning the harder one was gone. So that is one decision, made twice in a fortnight, and one of the two is still working out how loudly to say it. What I want to argue about, once you've heard the pages, is who they stopped talking to." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 48.6, "text": "You read homepages the way other people read novels, so read me Postman. Before and after, and tell me what moved." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 56.1, "text": "Here is how I read one. A homepage is a letter, and the hero is the salutation, the Dear-whoever line at the top: who it is to, and what you want from them. Before, the page's title, the words in your browser tab, said world's leading API platform, sign up for free. That was still there yesterday. That's from our page monitor, by the way, The Beat's own tool: it checks a set of company pages every day and records what changed, and everything I say about a before comes from it. This morning the title and the hero are the same five words: \"API engineering for your agents\". Under it, go faster from development to production with higher accuracy and fewer tokens. Fewer tokens. That is a cost line, written for whoever pays an agent's bill. And the first button is not sign up. It is install for your agents, with an npm install command beside it. So the tab went from sign up free to Dear agent, install me." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 116.9, "text": "Hang on. The sign-up button isn't the first button? On Postman? What else moved?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 121.8, "text": "Most of the letter. The monitor flagged the page yesterday because its stored text grew by about two thirds in a day, so this was not one headline, it was a lot of new text underneath it. High up on the page sits the Context Graph, Postman's map of your whole API estate, with one line of evidence: an agent working from one checkout finds about a hundred and thirty of your services, and with the graph nearly four times as many. Their number, their product doing the counting, but notice the shape. The demo is an agent failing without them. And then, near the bottom, trusted by over forty million developers, their own count. It is the P.S. One more thing. The footer tells machine readers that a clean markdown version of the page exists. The letter comes in an edition meant for the agent." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 173.7, "text": "The forty million are in the P.S. Right, let me be the growth team, and I am inventing this room: Postman has said nothing we can find about why the page changed. Picture the growth team's room. The forty million do not read the homepage, they open the app. The Dear line is for whoever you have not got, and in the last couple of weeks the company shipped three products for exactly that reader, all of them about agents and APIs, the last one a day or two before the page moved. The CEO's line on that launch was that a business whose agents cannot see or securely reach its APIs becomes irrelevant. Vendor words, but that is the pitch. So the room says: we own the map of the whole estate, and a new reader needs a map more than any person ever did. Lead with the asset, rent it to the new reader, and the old address still works on the pricing page, where the free plan for individuals still is. I think I would have won that room." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 238.4, "text": "Good case, and I will come back to that free plan. Yours is the company that could not decide how hard to say it." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 246.9, "text": "Sourcegraph. It indexes a whole codebase so a person, or now an agent, can find anything in it. The decision to write to agents was made months ago, in public: earlier this year its big release post called the platform the shared intelligence layer for developers and AI agents. The homepage caught up about two weeks ago, by our monitor. The hero became the context layer for your entire codebase, with agents named first in the line under it, and that hero is still live. Then yesterday morning the monitor caught a harder version of the same page. Same hero, but the problem section rewritten, and its new line was, \"Codebases have outgrown the people who built them.\" Followed by a promise that your senior engineers would stop being the human search index. By this morning it was gone." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 296.3, "text": "Gone how? Back to the old page, or on to a third one?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 300.9, "text": "Back, word for word, this morning, and still back tonight. So it lived about a day, as far as our monitor can tell. Was it a test, a staged launch somebody pulled, a deploy that went out early? Nobody outside Sourcegraph can know, they have published nothing about it, and I am not going to pretend. What I can say is what was on each page. The one they kept says context layer, agents and developers. The one that lasted a day said the codebase has outgrown the people who built it." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 333.6, "text": "Say that sentence again slowly, because I think it is the whole story. Codebases have outgrown the people who built them. The developer is not the reader of that line. The developer is the thing that got outgrown." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 347.1, "text": "And the one they kept still has the developer in it. Second, but in. Here is why Sourcegraph can write to the agent without flinching. The pricing page has one plan. Enterprise, starting at sixteen thousand dollars a year, with an annual contract as the minimum. There is no individual on that page to lose. Nobody at Sourcegraph is missing a sign-up button: the button on that hero is get a demo." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 372.7, "text": "Which brings me to Coder, the third one, briefly, through its pricing page. Coder sells enterprises self-hosted development environments and, since last month, a coding agent of its own to run on the same infrastructure. As of yesterday morning its Premium tier carries a badge reading includes AI governance. Until last month, AI governance, the controls on what an agent may do and what it costs, was an add-on, a separate per-user licence bought on top of Premium, in Coder's own docs. A release a month ago said to present it as included, the pricing page caught up as of yesterday, and there is no public price on the plan or on what the add-on used to cost. So governance is the floor at Coder now, not the upsell, and Coder's own beta number is the case for that: nearly seventy percent of its agent workloads came in through the API, not from someone chatting with an agent. Their number, from a beta. But if seven in ten of the jobs come in through the API, the policy about what they may do is not an extra." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 439.1, "text": "So that is three. One wrote the agent in and kept it, one wrote it in, tried it harder, and the harder page came down, one made the agent's rules part of the base price. Argue with me. Is writing your front page to the agent the right trade?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 456.5, "text": "Two problems, and the second is the one I care about. First, sameness. Both companies now use the same two words about themselves. Sourcegraph's hero says context layer. Postman's CEO, introducing the Context Graph API, called it a shared context layer for the systems that already do the work. Same fortnight, same noun. April Dunford, the positioning writer, has a line about AI features sold as positioning. \"Who cares? Nobody cares. Everybody's got one of those.\" Second-hand, from a write-up of a podcast. If every devtool's Dear line says for your agents, none of them is positioned. Second, and this is mine: who stopped being addressed. At Postman it is the individual who opens the app to test one endpoint, the forty million. That person got the old title's promise, sign up for free, and now gets a desktop install button and a line near the footer. And since the spring the free plan is one user. One. No team, where before a few people could work together for free. Postman's own docs say so. So the letter did not just change who it is to. The free plan got smaller in the same year the salutation changed. Not a connection I can prove. Not one I will ignore." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 530.8, "text": "Every devtool that sells to teams should write the agent in by the end of... no. Strike that. Postman can write Dear agent because it owns the map, and Sourcegraph can because it owns the index, and an agent needs a map or an index more than any person ever did. If you own nothing the agent needs, for your agents on your homepage is Dunford's sentence with your logo on it. On the free plan I have no answer. One user is one user. But the Coder page is the strongest thing on the table and it's on my side. If seven in ten jobs come through the API, the person who signs is a platform or security lead, and for your agents is how you tell that person you have thought about what theirs will do. That reader is addressed more, not less." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 582.3, "text": "Then say that. Write to the platform lead. Whatever happened in Sourcegraph's room, and I do not know, the letter still up this morning is the softer one. The page that gets kept is the one that knows whose name goes after Dear." } ] }, { "id": "2026-W40-free-is-the-pitch", "episode": 2, "title": "PostHog Says Nobody Pays. Raycast Moved the Meter.", "published": "2026-10-03", "duration": 716.7, "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-free-is-the-pitch/", "markdown": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-free-is-the-pitch.md", "audio": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-free-is-the-pitch.mp3", "type": "audio/mpeg", "bytes": 11468514 }, "art": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-free-is-the-pitch-art.png", "words": "Nobody pays", "week": "2026-W40" }, "hosts": [ "Will", "Brian" ], "summary": "PostHog, the product analytics company, now tells you on its homepage that almost nobody pays it, and its own site gives three different numbers for how few. Raycast kept every price and moved the meter underneath its AI instead. Will thinks free on the front page is the strongest positioning in devtools; Brian thinks it is a bill that arrives later.", "sources": [ { "label": "PostHog - homepage", "url": "https://posthog.com/" }, { "label": "PostHog docs - Product Analytics pricing", "url": "https://posthog.com/docs/product-analytics/pricing.md" }, { "label": "PostHog handbook - Pricing principles", "url": "https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/feature-pricing.md" }, { "label": "PostHog handbook - Enduringly low prices", "url": "https://posthog.com/handbook/low-prices.md" }, { "label": "Ian Vanagas, PostHog - Non-obvious advice about pricing your product", "url": "https://posthog.com/newsletter/pricing-advice.md" }, { "label": "PostHog docs - Self-driving pricing", "url": "https://posthog.com/docs/self-driving/pricing.md" }, { "label": "PostHog - pricing (Markdown)", "url": "https://posthog.com/pricing.md" }, { "label": "Thomas Paul Mann, Raycast - Why We're Changing How Raycast AI Is Priced", "url": "https://www.raycast.com/blog/changing-how-raycast-ai-is-priced" }, { "label": "Raycast manual - Changes to Bring Your Own AI in v2", "url": "https://manual.raycast.com/ai/byoai.md" }, { "label": "Raycast manual - AI Credits", "url": "https://manual.raycast.com/ai/ai-credits.md" }, { "label": "Raycast - pricing", "url": "https://www.raycast.com/pricing" }, { "label": "Raycast - A Technical Deep Dive Into the New Raycast", "url": "https://www.raycast.com/blog/a-technical-deep-dive-into-the-new-raycast" }, { "label": "Sindre Sorhus on X - leaving Raycast for Tinycast", "url": "https://x.com/sindresorhus/status/2099619102453067917" }, { "label": "Tinycast - README", "url": "https://github.com/abue-ammar/tinycast" }, { "label": "Resend - pricing", "url": "https://resend.com/pricing" }, { "label": "Resend - pricing (Markdown)", "url": "https://resend.com/pricing.md" }, { "label": "Resend docs - What is Resend pricing", "url": "https://resend.com/docs/knowledge-base/what-is-resend-pricing.md" }, { "label": "Elena Verna - How to give away free product and make money doing it", "url": "https://www.elenaverna.com/p/how-to-give-away-free-product-and" }, { "label": "Mac Power Users forum - Sindre Sorhus switched from Raycast to Tinycast", "url": "https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/sindre-sorhus-switched-from-raycast-to-tinycast/46944" } ], "transcript": [ { "speaker": "Will", "start": 6, "text": "PostHog, the product analytics company, put one line under its sign-up button about three weeks ago: ninety-seven percent of users pay us nothing. No credit card required. Whoever runs marketing at a devtool with a free tier should read that line twice, because I think it's the strongest positioning a developer tool can run right now. It answers the only question a developer has before clicking, which is whether trying this starts a conversation about money." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 32.7, "text": "And I read the same line as ninety-seven people in a hundred being paid for by three, who find out what that costs after they've built on it. So that's the argument: free on the homepage, strongest positioning in devtools or a bill that arrives later. And the same month, another tool a lot of developers live in, Raycast, put a meter on its AI without touching a single price. You first. PostHog, properly. I want to hear you say it's a sales strategy out loud." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 63, "text": "It is a sales strategy, and the handbook reads that way. The words are on the page today; the date is our own page monitor's, and I couldn't check it against an archive. Now the handbook, which is public. Their pricing principles put the free tier first: hobbyists, and teams without product-market fit yet, get generous free allowances. Anything that grows word of mouth should be free, which is why they don't charge per seat: more people inside your company using PostHog is, on their logic, more word of mouth. And then the number that makes it a strategy rather than a kindness. They say nearly all their sales are self-serve, and seventy percent of customers find them through word of mouth. PostHog's own figure." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 107, "text": "Seventy percent through word of mouth. So the free tier is the sales team." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 111.9, "text": "The free tier is, in effect, the sales team and the ad budget, and the homepage line is the sign on the door for it. The history is one sentence: they started as a subscription with a small free tier, within a year they made the free tier enormous and paired it with usage pricing, and they say that pairing has been the core of their pricing ever since. And the handbook says something about direction. They treat the free tier as a one-way door: easy to raise for existing customers, very painful to lower. If the sign says free, and the company has written down in public that lowering it is very painful, then the sign is credible. That's the positioning. Not cheap. Safe to start." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 156.6, "text": "Safe to start. Let me put my exhibit on the table, and it's from the same company, so you don't get to say I'm comparing apples to... whatever. Two things. First, the ninety-seven. Scroll down the same homepage and it says ninety-eight percent of our customers use PostHog for free. Open the pricing docs and it's more than ninety percent of companies. Users, customers, companies. Three words, three numbers, and none of them says how it's counted or over what period. So it's not a number, it's an adjective. Second thing. PostHog's own newsletter on pricing, by one of their own writers, has a section heading that reads \"Charging anything is better than giving it away.\" Under it, an AI coding startup called Kite that shut down with half a million people using it every month and not paying. So the company whose sign says almost nobody pays has written, in its own voice, that giving the product away is a trap for an early-stage startup. Both are true at once, and I'd like to know which one the homepage is." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 220.3, "text": "They'd say both. The free tier is the door, and the meter is behind it." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 225.6, "text": "Then look where the meter went. Ten days after the homepage changed, our page monitor logged the pricing page changing too, and among the lines that got added are AI lines. Single source again. PostHog AI, a bundle of free credits a month, then a price per credit. And the new Inbox, which is in beta, the self-driving thing that opens pull requests for problems it finds: the first three a month are free, after that fifteen dollars a pull request. Fifteen dollars, on a tool whose sign says ninety-seven percent of you pay nothing. That's not hypocrisy, it's the design. Free where it grows word of mouth, metered where it costs them money. I just think the listener should hear both pages in the same breath, because the homepage is doing a lot of work to make sure you only read one." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 276, "text": "Fine. Then tell me Raycast, because the post I read said prices didn't change, so what's the story." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 282.3, "text": "They didn't change, and that's the story. Raycast is a Mac launcher with AI built in, a free plan at the bottom and paid plans above. Around the time PostHog's sign went up, Raycast's CEO published a post, under his own name, on why they're changing how the AI is priced. Every subscription price stays the same, his words, and I checked the pricing page today: Pro is still ten dollars a month. The sign on the door didn't move. What moved is underneath, so follow me for a second. Say you pay Raycast ten dollars a month. Before this, that bought you AI with a rate limit: so many requests an hour, with no allowance to run down. Now the same ten dollars buys an allowance, and a long agent task eats into it. The price tag is identical. What it buys went from a flat fee to a meter." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 335.4, "text": "So same price, but now it runs out." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 338.3, "text": "Now it runs out, and on the old version, from the middle of December, it simply stops when the credits hit zero. Their reason is cost. AI went from one question and one answer to agents running long tasks, their cost went up, their prices didn't, and they'd been eating the difference. Self-reported, and unflattering, so I believe it. Then the second beat. In the new version, bringing your own API key, your own ChatGPT or Claude subscription, a local model on your own machine, every one of those needs a paid plan." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 371, "text": "Hold on. I pay them so I can use the key I'm already paying someone else for?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 377, "text": "That's the sentence, and the CEO wrote it himself, in the manual: \"I can see why 'pay us so I can use my own key' feels strange.\" His argument is that Raycast should be the interface layer and not the inference layer, so you pay for the interface. Reasonable. So here's the shape, and it isn't the opposite of PostHog's. Same move, both of them. Keep the number on the front reassuring, meter the AI underneath. PostHog's front number is free. Raycast's is ten dollars, and ten dollars is the one people notice when it starts buying something different. Nobody hid anything; Raycast said it in a signed post. The difference is which number is on the front, and that's the thing worth arguing about." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 421, "text": "And that's when the famous Mac developer walked out. I saw that thread." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 425.5, "text": "Everyone saw it, and it's the one thing I'd want said carefully. Sindre Sorhus, a well-known open-source developer, posted a few days later that he'd left Raycast for Tinycast, which is free, open source, and runs Raycast extensions. Some of the people in the thread that spread it turned it into a pricing story. He didn't. His own words are that Raycast had become non-native and bad, which points at the new version, a ground-up rewrite around web views so it runs on Windows too, where the old one was native Mac code. That's a product complaint. It landed days after the credits, so it got filed under the credits, and the correct filing is that I can't find a number for how many people left, and Raycast hasn't said." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 471.3, "text": "Which is the honest answer and also the boring one, so here's where I actually stand. A pricing page is the most honest positioning document a company publishes, because it has to say who the product is for in numbers. PostHog just moved one line from the honest page to the loud one. Ninety-seven percent of you pay nothing says: this is for the person who isn't sure yet, come in. And your Raycast story is my evidence, not yours. Raycast is the company that didn't say it. It kept the sign still and moved the meter, and what it got was a thread full of people who felt..." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 509.7, "text": "That's the thread I just told you was filed under the wrong thing." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 514.2, "text": "It is. Fine. Then my evidence is the CEO. On the manual page that explains the change, under his own name, he writes that he can see why paying them to use your own key feels strange. That's a company admitting, in its own documentation, that it hadn't explained the change well. Nobody at PostHog is in the manual explaining a feeling, because the front number does the explaining. And Elena Verna, writing from inside Lovable a few weeks ago, where every use costs real money, says \"One of the biggest growth levers at Lovable is giving our product away for free.\" If the people paying the inference bills still say free is the lever, the sign is right. I'd put the free number on every devtool homepage I could get my hands on." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 561.4, "text": "Every homepage, from one company. How do you know it works? As far as I can find, PostHog has said nothing about whether the line moved sign-ups, nothing about what share of its revenue the paying few supply, nothing about how many free ever convert. You're looking at a company that writes a lot about pricing and taking its loudest sentence as the result. And Verna is defending the free tier of the company she works at; of course she is. Although. The bill arriving later isn't the problem. A bill that arrives for the thing that costs the company money, written down in advance, is just pricing. Fifteen dollars a pull request is fine. Credits are fine. What Raycast got wrong isn't charging, and it isn't hiding, because they wrote it all up under the CEO's name. It's that the number on the front was a price, one people had already learned, so when the meter went in underneath, ten dollars started meaning something else and the sign couldn't say so. Free can't do that to you. Free with a meter on the next page is still free. So the sign isn't the bill. The sign is what makes the bill survivable." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 632.9, "text": "You'll wait for PostHog to publish a conversion rate, and they never will, so let me ship something. The version I'd ship is yours and mine on one screen, and it's not the one PostHog shipped. Under the sign-up button, ninety-seven percent of users pay us nothing. Directly under that, what the three percent pay for: the fifteen-dollar pull request, the credit price, the usage line. Resend, the email API, does the plain version on its pricing page: a free tier as the door, then a published table, and a FAQ that says no special pricing for nonprofits or schools, every plan priced the same for every customer, enterprise aside. The number you're worried about, the one with three versions and no denominator, stops mattering the moment the meter is on the same screen. The weak version of the sign is the one that hopes you don't scroll." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 684.9, "text": "And I'd keep the ninety-seven and add how it's counted, which tells you I've come further than you have." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 691.6, "text": "You'd put a footnote on a billboard." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 694.1, "text": "Somebody reads the footnote." } ] }, { "id": "2026-W40-proof-is-the-new-ad", "episode": 1, "title": "GitHub's Best Ad Is a Bug List", "published": "2026-10-03", "duration": 786.4, "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-proof-is-the-new-ad/", "markdown": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-proof-is-the-new-ad.md", "audio": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-proof-is-the-new-ad.mp3", "type": "audio/mpeg", "bytes": 12583609 }, "art": { "url": "https://thebeat.dev/podcast/2026-W40-proof-is-the-new-ad-art.png", "words": "The bug list", "week": "2026-W40" }, "hosts": [ "Will", "Brian" ], "summary": "GitHub's best ad this month is a list of bugs it found with its own open-source agent. Postman turned one laptop's agent traffic into a data report. And a Rust rewrite's price tag became the headline. Will thinks showing the work is the best devtools marketing there is; Brian wants to know whether anyone who signs a purchase order reads it.", "sources": [ { "label": "GitHub Blog - How we found 24 Android vulnerabilities using our open source AI security agent", "url": "https://github.blog/security/how-we-found-24-android-vulnerabilities-using-our-open-source-ai-security-agent" }, { "label": "GitHub Security Lab - seclab-taskflows README", "url": "https://github.com/GitHubSecurityLab/seclab-taskflows" }, { "label": "GitHub Security Lab - All advisories discovered with AI agents", "url": "https://securitylab.github.com/ai-agents/" }, { "label": "Hacker News - GitHub's Android vulnerabilities post", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49886609" }, { "label": "Postman Blog - What Passport Found in 3 Weeks of AI Agent Traffic", "url": "https://blog.postman.com/what-passport-found-in-3-weeks-of-ai-agent-traffic" }, { "label": "npm downloads API - @postman/postman-passport, August to September 2026", "url": "https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/2026-08-01:2026-09-30/@postman%2fpostman-passport" }, { "label": "GitHub Blog - Migrating the GitHub Copilot runtime to Rust, using Copilot", "url": "https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/migrating-the-github-copilot-runtime-to-rust-using-copilot" }, { "label": "The Register - Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K", "url": "https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/18/microsoft-agentically-ports-copilot-runtime-to-rust-for-120k/5297549" }, { "label": "Hacker News - The Register's Rust port article", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773998" }, { "label": "Hacker News - GitHub's Rust port post", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735238" }, { "label": "Scaling DevTools - Dave Fletcher from LeadDev, what engineering leaders are buying in the AI era", "url": "https://scalingdevtools.com/podcast/episodes/dave-fletcher-from-leaddev-what-engineering-leaders-are-buying-in-the-ai-era" }, { "label": "Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 - Work", "url": "https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work" }, { "label": "Endor Labs - Everyone Wins Their Own Benchmark", "url": "https://www.endorlabs.com/learn/everyone-wins-their-own-benchmark" }, { "label": "Buttondown - Developer marketing is show and tell", "url": "https://buttondown.com/blog/developer-marketing-is-show-and-tell" } ], "transcript": [ { "speaker": "Will", "start": 6, "text": "The best developer ad of the fortnight has no adjectives in it. It's a list of bugs. GitHub wants you to run its AI security agent, and the way it chose to do that on Monday was to publish the vulnerabilities it found in other people's Android apps, with the script to run it on yours. Postman did the same the week before with a data report from one laptop. And GitHub did it again with a rewrite that printed its own bill. Three posts in a fortnight, and each one shows you the work and prints what went wrong with it." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 42.4, "text": "Lovely. Who signs a purchase order after reading a bug list? I'm not being clever, I read all three this week and I enjoyed all three, and I can't name the person at any company who buys something because of them. So which one's the bug list?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 59.2, "text": "GitHub's. The agent first, one sentence. GitHub's Security Lab has an open-source AI agent that reads a codebase looking for security holes, and you aim it with what they call taskflows, packaged prompts. A researcher there wrote a set for Android apps. Now here's the thing to notice. The post is titled how we found twenty-four Android vulnerabilities. And the first section, before a single vulnerability is described, is how to run this on your own project. Open a codespace, run one script, give it an hour or two on a medium-sized repo. The findings come after the instructions. It's a manual with a brag attached, not a brag with a manual attached. The twenty-four is their own count, and I'll come back to that. But twenty-four reported bugs in real apps in a real store is not a demo. That's a receipt. They did the work, and they're showing you the receipt." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 113.8, "text": "So the how-to comes before the what-we-found. And what did they find? Give me one." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 119.1, "text": "OsmAnd. A navigation app, not a toy. The agent found that any other app on your phone, even one with no permissions at all, could silently import settings into OsmAnd, and one of those settings is which server the map tiles come from. Swap that for the attacker's server and every tile you load goes through them, which means where you are, and the start and end of every route you plan. An app with over ten million downloads, and the attacker needs zero permissions. And then, and this is the part a normal ad would cut, the post prints its own limits. The model kept reporting low-severity stuff even when told not to. It misjudged severity. It produced false positives. Every finding, they say, should be reviewed by a human researcher who knows mobile. And then the last line is, quote, \"Start securing your project today. Run these taskflows against your own app and take the first step toward AI-assisted security.\" A call to action at the bottom of a security report. The report is the ad." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 182.7, "text": "Hang on, what does it cost me to run it? And can I check the twenty-four, or do I take their word?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 190.5, "text": "Cost: the code is MIT, free. But the post says you need a Copilot licence and it'll burn premium model requests. The readme is softer, you can point it at another AI API, and it warns a run can cost a non-trivial amount of money, their words. So the free tool has a meter on it, and the meter is GitHub's. Checking: as of this morning the Security Lab's advisories page lists five credited to that researcher, each with a CVE. The other nineteen you take on their word for now. And the post never says how many apps they ran it on, or how many findings got thrown out." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 229.8, "text": "So the receipt has a total and five line items. Mine's the opposite: every line item, from one laptop. Postman, last week. Postman, the API tool company, launched a thing this summer called Passport, a way to keep real API keys out of agents' hands, and its local community edition sits on your machine and watches what leaves it: which programs send which credentials to which hosts. Someone at Postman, Talia Kohan, left it running for about a month while she built an AI harness for a different Postman product. Then she read the log. Twenty-two distinct secrets had left her laptop. And the number that makes the report: her project's dot-env file, the place a developer thinks their secrets live, had four entries in it. Twenty-two leaving, four on the list. Where were the other eighteen? The keychain, git's credential helper, npm's config, variables inherited from the shell. None of it stolen, she's careful to say, just in use and on no list. And here's her line, the one the post stands on: \"My static scanner stayed green the entire time, and it was right to: not one of those 22 secrets was in the repository.\" That's the pitch in one sentence. The scanner you already run is watching the repo while the secrets walk out the side door." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 308.3, "text": "That's a good line. So what do I do, revoke all twenty-two?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 312.6, "text": "You can't, and that's the finding the pitch rests on. One Anthropic API key was being sent by two unrelated programs, a Bun script and Claude Code. Revoke it for the suspicious one and you break the healthy one. She turns that into a metric, consumers per credential, and says it's the number Passport is designed to keep at one. That's the product entering the report through the finding. Near the end is a section called set up Passport and read your own traffic: install the community edition, go do your actual work for a week, and she says outright not to take her numbers, because she can tell you what to look for but not what you'll find. Now the flags. One developer. One laptop. Measured by Postman's own detector, by a Postman employee, while building a harness for another Postman product, which gets its own section near the end. And the published page still has a placeholder in it, in square brackets, that reads screenshot of the Passport dashboard. Nobody filled it in." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 375.1, "text": "A placeholder. In the ad. Did anyone install it?" }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 378.3, "text": "As far as a bad proxy can tell, barely. The npm registry shows forty-eight downloads of the Passport package in the four days after the post. Forty-eight. You could count them by hand. Downloads aren't users and bots count both ways, so I won't call that a verdict. I'll call it the only number anyone outside Postman can read, and it's small. The opposite of your story: GitHub has a total you can't check. Postman has a number you can check, and it's forty-eight." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 408.3, "text": "And the third one is both at once. Two weeks ago GitHub published a post about rewriting the Copilot agent runtime, the thing underneath Copilot, from TypeScript into Rust. More than eight hundred thousand lines of it. Most of the code was written by AI agents, using Copilot itself, driven primarily by one developer, a Microsoft engineer called Stephen Toub. One person, plus a team around him, the post says. And he printed the bill. About a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in tokens, plus, by his own rough estimate, three weeks of his own time, plus dozens of known regressions from the port, all fixed, and he adds he's completely sure there are more they don't know about. So picture that as a marketer. Your dogfooding post has the price of the dog food in it, and a list of what broke." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 459.3, "text": "Hang on. A hundred and twenty grand. Is that a lot?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 463.2, "text": "Depends who's reading the receipt, and that's the story. Toub's reading is: cheap, next to the alternative. Eight hundred thousand lines of production code, one developer, a few weeks of his time and a token bill, and his line is, quote, \"Agents moved the price to where the project became tenable.\" Meaning a rewrite that size wasn't affordable before agents, the post's subtitle says exactly that. Now it's an invoice. That's the brag. The Register's reading, two days later, leans the other way. Their headline was Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for a hundred and twenty K, with the regressions right behind it, framed as AI still struggling with Rust, though they do add that by hand it would have cost millions. Same number, read as six figures and a list of what broke. And on Hacker News the Register's version got the bigger thread, by a distance, over GitHub's own post. So the number GitHub would never have put in an ad is the number that got read. Which, I'd argue, is the point." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 526.4, "text": "Or it's the cost. You lose the headline the moment you print the bill. That's where I want to argue, so go. Does proof sell, or does it impress the people who'd never sign the cheque?" }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 539.3, "text": "Sells, and the audience says so themselves. Last year's Stack Overflow survey: nearly half of developers endorsed or influenced a tool purchase in the past year, so they're in the room when the cheque gets written, whoever's holding the pen. And asked why they'd endorse a tool, good brand and public image ranked eighth out of ten reasons. Eighth. Reputation for quality was third. So the brand ad is talking to people who put brand near the bottom, and the bug list is talking to what they put near the top. The one voice we found from the buyers' side says the same thing. Dave Fletcher, the LeadDev cofounder, whose audience is engineering leaders, said over the summer that sweeping AI-first claims make his audience put barriers up, and that marketers should show real examples and explain the mechanism. One interview, from a survey he hasn't published, so single source. But it's the only one we found, and what he's asking for is the receipt." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 598.2, "text": "Fletcher, in the same interview, says a CIO may accept the high-level benefits language that would alienate an engineering team. So the proof post is pitched at the people who can endorse the purchase, not always at the one who signs it, and your own survey says endorse, not buy. And every one of these is the vendor marking its own homework, we flagged it each time. Sarah Johnson at Endor Labs, a vendor with its own AI security benchmark, wrote in July that \"the vendor who publishes the benchmark wins the benchmark,\" and then audited her own company's benchmark in the same post: they built the ground truth themselves and published the average, not the spread. That's on her employer's site, so weigh it, but she's describing the genre from inside. Then there's reach. GitHub's security post barely registered on Hacker News. Postman's one public number is forty-eight downloads. And nobody we can find has published a licence, a sign-up or a sale attributed to any of the three. Enjoyed by engineers, signed off by nobody, is still where I am." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 663.1, "text": "Reach I'll give you, with a caveat you'll like: the Register thread was GitHub's reach. Losing control of the story was the distribution. And brand spend is famously hard to attribute too, so that cuts both ways. But here's what your case leaves out. Every one of these posts admits something. Severity misjudged. One laptop. Sure there are more regressions. And Johnson, in your own source, says a vendor willing to say what its tool can't do is a good sign. The self-audit isn't a weakness of the genre, it's the mechanism. An adjective can't admit anything. Justin Duke at Buttondown put the payoff honestly, about a Stripe engineering post: unlikely to have turned into sign-ups directly, very likely to have been one of many reasons a developer picked Stripe. Slow and indirect isn't nothing." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 711.3, "text": "The Rust post got me. Specifically that the number got read, and I suspect because it was unflattering. You can't buy that with a claim, and the self-audit is the one part of the genre I can check myself, where the sales pipeline is the one part I can't. What didn't get me: nobody has shown a sale, three posts are three, and the denominator is missing from all of them. So I'll believe proof builds what Duke describes, a reason among many. And I'll keep asking whether any of it moved a signature." }, { "speaker": "Will", "start": 744.9, "text": "Here's the exercise, for anyone running marketing at a devtool. Say your launch post is drafted and it has the word powerful in it. Find the thing you'd have to run to replace that word with a number." }, { "speaker": "Brian", "start": 758.4, "text": "And then ask whether you'd still publish it if the number came out the way the Rust bill did." } ] } ] }