Pricing was one of the most challenging decisions when launching Convex GA two years ago. At the time, we had a general idea about who we were serving, what value we'd provide them, and what a fair price was to charge for that value. But we didn't have many actual customers to talk to and validate our assumptions.
Fast forward nearly two years, and thousands of teams are paying for Convex. Over that time, we've learned that (modulo one or two tweaks) the Convex Professional plan is just about perfect... for some people.
But we've also learned there is a really enthusiastic group of developers for whom $25 a month is a lot of money. It's either more than they want to or can afford to pay. And it sucks that when they run out of resources on Convex's free plan, they either need to step all the way up to Pro, or just stop using the cloud service they love.
The need to fix this has gotten even more urgent since we launched Chef. When you're just trying out Chef and building confidence in its value, it sucks to prepay for a bunch of tokens you don't know if you're going to use!
Well, as of today, we've fixed this.
Introducing the new Convex Starter Plan
Convex Starter–available right now–is a pure pay-as-you-go, scale-to-zero plan. Starting today, you can register a credit card, and simply pay for any extra resources you need beyond the free plan, and nothing more:
We're also making Convex Starter the default upgrade flow in Chef. In general, new Chef users don't need all the features and high built-in infra resources in Convex Pro. They often don't know those features exist and don't care! So they shouldn't pay for them.
As projects mature, when it makes sense, an upgrade to Convex Pro will get:
- Cheaper unit pricing on resources for scaling
- Beefier hardware and more "burst" capacity for load
- Production features like preview deployments, log streaming, Sentry integration, and custom domains
- Compliance stuff like detailed team permissions per project and audit logs
- Official support
But if you don't need any of that stuff, you're welcome to stay on Convex Starter (or Convex Free) forever.
Up Next: The Scale Plan
The other major pricing lesson we've learned over the last two years is: you can outgrow the Convex Pro plan.
Some of our customers now have significant traffic and so are paying more than $10k per month for Convex. Around that scale, priorities change. Teams need dedicated hardware, SSO, service SLAs, urgent support and escalation, APIs for automating provisioning, pricing that passes through optimization benefits, and more.
We'll be rolling out that plan in the next few months. If you have a larger service, and you're considering Convex, please join our Discord community and let us know what you'd like from that plan!
