Free as in Honey

Starting today, you can use more of Honeycomb than ever before for free. That means more teams can start building up production excellence with features that were previously only available for paid subscribers.

Formerly known as our Community Edition, the new Free Plan now lets you take advantage of features like searching through your team’s historical activity to see how they solved past problems, or creating triggers that notify you when your data in Honeycomb crosses thresholds you care about. We want you to experience how some of our most powerful features help you build more resilient applications and more humane teams.

The value of being free

I’m pretty new to Honeycomb — I had the excellent fortune to join as the company’s first Head of Product back in December 2019. While I am up to my eyeballs in learning more about how our customers use Honeycomb, I’ll admit that as a product manager I’m sometimes driven by my gut. With 20+ years in this topsy turvy world of tech startups, there are things I know to be right about building products that people love. One that is near and dear to my heart is supporting a valuable free version that can be used in a meaningful way for smaller projects.

This comes from the same impulse that drives so many of us to contribute our energy to open source projects. We’re not obligated to give away our work for free, but we have seen the force multiplier effect when we make that work open and invite others to collaborate. Similarly, at Honeycomb, we believe that the practice of observability can change lives for the better -- so we want to help as many people as possible get started on that path. Our commitment to offering a free product finds its roots in our company mission:

To give all software engineering teams the observability they need to eliminate toil and delight their users.

We want you to get real value from the free version of Honeycomb. Unlocking the power and delight of observability shouldn’t only be for those with more to spend. There are plenty of features we can make available to you, while still being able to build and operate a successful business. Although we reserve some features for paid plans, we strive to make deliberate and judicious choices around how to build new capabilities that continuously drive value, while still serving the needs of all users according to our mission.

To that end, the product team is happy to announce that you can sign up directly for a Free plan. If you would like to play around with our paid features, we also have our popular 14-day trial that lets you dip your toes. Both of these options are 100% free and require no credit card.

We’ve got even more good news about our Free plan coming soon, but you’ll have to wait a few short weeks for that. In the meantime, we’d love to start learning more from folks using the free version of Honeycomb. What are you doing with it? How could you get more out of it? You can find me over in our Pollinators Slack or on Twitter (I’m @fishmegs — it’s a long story).