Empowering Teams: The Shift in Okteto's Development Focus
In the early stages of innovation, Okteto introduced a free SaaS tier, Okteto Cloud, to provide individual developers with a platform for remote development environments. From day one, our primary goal has been to simplify the developer experience, allowing devs to experience a fully automated Kubernetes development environment with just a single click.
While the core developer features and experience continue to shape our platform, it's clear from our customers and community that Okteto's strength lies in serving cloud native teams and that Okteto is not a viable fit for individual developer use cases.
Over the past year, Okteto has transformed into a comprehensive platform tailored for platform teams automating modern development on Kubernetes. We've learned that our commercial road to success is switching targets and serving these platform and development experience engineering teams who then design and deliver high value to their internal customers, the developers.
Along with the product evolution, our product and engineering teams have invested an exceptional amount of effort in maintaining a free, multi-tenant tool. Challenges such as managing fraud and abuse by unauthorized users and crypto mining, security concerns in multi-tenant environments, and the misalignment in Okteto usage as a free hosting provider, have led to diverting our attention and time away from delivering critical value to our customers and users.
What's next?
Because of these factors, we have decided to deprecate the free SaaS tier for individual accounts. On December 5, 2023 we stopped allowing new signups for the individual tier. Starting January 15, 2024 we will begin shutting down Okteto Cloud, the free tier of the SaaS product. We will be sending out a series of emails to affected users.
We remain focused and excited about delivering a great development experience to teams building cloud native applications and continue to work closely with platform engineering teams on increasing productivity and velocity and bringing joy to modern development. If you are interested in using Okteto’s platform, please reach out and we’ll help your team get started with our commercial SaaS platform, or you can check out a free 30-day trial of our Self-Hosted offering of Okteto.
If you are ready to migrate your team to the commercial SaaS or Self-hosted platform, we will provide a license with 5 free users for the first year if you reach out before Jan 15.
A big thanks
Once again, we extend our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and commitment to Okteto. Your early adoption and enthusiasm have been instrumental in shaping the evolution of our platform. Together, we've pushed forward what modern development experience should be. Thank you for being an integral part of our community. We're grateful for your understanding, and we hope you'll continue building with Okteto in the future.
