Today we are making the biggest change in our pricing, since the beginning. We are replacing SourceLair Free with SourceLair Basic, which offers access to 1 project for $5. Initially replacing our Free plan was a very tough decision for us, but eventually we are totally excited about it and we want to share everything with you.

What are the new pricing plans?

Starting today SourceLair offers the following two pricing plans:

• SourceLair Basic - 1 project for $5
• SourceLair Pro - 5 projects for $8

New users will get a no-questions-asked 30-day trial of SourceLair Pro, along with the ability to have up to one active add-on within the trial period. Existing users will get the same SourceLair Pro trial, along with the add-on one, if they have not consumed the latter already.

Within the trial period users can destroy and provision as many add-ons as they like without any charge, as far as they keep up to 1 add-on active. After the trial period expires you will be able to choose the plan that suits you best.

To get a complete overview on our new pricing, take a look at our pricing page.

Why are we dropping the Free plan?

Long story short is that we can't provide the experience that we want to our users and set high expectations on all of them for our service, while keeping a free plan and running a sustainable business.

In more details, at SourceLair we believe that developing software should be frictionless and pleasant. To achieve that, last year we shipped features like intelligent as-you-type auto-completion for Python and JavaScript and sophisticated and customizeable real-time error reporting for Python and JavaScript respectively. To provide our users with this experience we run resource-consuming background processes in each project, without having them claim a single byte of each project's 512 MB quota. Truth is that this does not come without cost for our infrastructure.

The most important reason behind this choice though is that we wanted to set higher expectations on more people for our service. We are so excited about how helpful the feedback of our paying customers is and how responsive they are when we attempt to communicate with them, that we wanted more of this.

When will the new pricing take place?

The new pricing takes into effect starting today Thursday January 21 2016, but since we offer a 30-day trial no one that migrates to a new plan will be charged within the next 30 days.

We are also letting our users know about the new pricing, by sending an email update to all existing users with a link to this article.

Who is eligible for free projects?

We are working on finding ways to provide our service for free to eligible groups of people like open-source contributors, students etc. Until we standardize this process, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected], if you believe that you should get free projects from us. All we need to know is why you would like us to provide you with these projects. We would love to sponsor you if you are working or would like to work on a particular open source project or you are a university, college or high school student, teacher or professor that would like to use SourceLair for educational reasons.

So lose no more time and go to www.sourcelair.com, claim your free month of SourceLair Pro and develop up to 5 projects of your choice, frictionlessly, in your browser.