lately they've just raised the airbrake prices to more than 600% WITHOUT ANY NOTICE! I see that exceptional cost 9 usd/month (per project or account? it's not clear)
I'll see what they'll do, and eventually migrate to an open alternative. 5 usd/month for 4 projects is great, 35 usd/month it isn't (speaking for a bootstrapping startup where every cent can make the difference)
Hi this is Ben. I run all things product. I take full responsibility for outages and our pricing change and I'd like to share what we're thinking--and I'm happy to have constructive feedback.
We have regular usage of 3000+ requests per second between our products. We have 12+ languages/frameworks that feed us exceptions. We also have integrations with PaaS providers like Heroku, EngineYard, AppFog and others. We also get hundreds of support requests each week. Part of our mission for embracing both of these products is to complete a vision that includes many powerful additions. But to get there we knew we needed to both retool the architecture for scale. We also wanted to keep under 24 hour turnaround time for our support.
When you look at our historical pricing there is no way we could meet our expectations of providing high reliability to our customers, a high quality of support and maintain all the bits that feed into the product--not to mention our vision for the future.
We tested our pricing changes with over a hundred of our users and they adamantly agreed--charge us more--make it rock solid--and let's see some of those features (e.g. search!).
And in general--our philosophy with pricing is this: we are developers. All of our customers are developers. But within this group there is a distinction--the side-project developer and the corporate developer. You are probably a corporate developer when you've advanced to having a company credit card. To you, our pricing is trivial for a production infrastructure service (see AWS or even Salesforce and friends). For the side-project developer--we are never going to be inexpensive enough. And we don't want to break your back to get great service from us! In fact, if anyone has been adversely affected by our plans, you should tell me! I take responsibility and want to hear from you.
I'm ben@airbrake.io or just give me a call at 415 500 5207. Although I'm in Berlin right now with some of our awesome users http://instagr.am/p/GtrfVDlnsy/, so if my speech is slurred or I'm slow to respond this evening, you know why. :-)
The main problem IMHO is that they did this price increase without any notification to current customers. I saw it just because I needed to upgrade my cc number, otherwise I won't have discovered it.
