Komodor Goes Freemium 🥳

I’m so excited to share with the world that today Komodor has officially transitioned to a freemium model, and made all of its great features available to small teams for FREE! 

Now, every developer can use Komodor to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Kubernetes with ease. By simplifying K8s operations and injecting our own expertise into the product we’ve created a better dev experience that reduces toil and sparks joy. 

The onboarding process is easy, fast, self-serve, and best of all – Free forever! Yep, Komodor is free forever, and ever, ever. You can call us your KFF 🙂

Create your free account now.

This is part of Komodor’s bigger vision of ‘K8s for all’ – making Kubernetes operations and troubleshooting easy and accessible to everyone, through education, open-source tools, and our core product. We came a long way and the road ahead is longer still, but this is a huge milestone and a further commitment to our mission.

Why Freemium?

While other products are limiting their free offerings or shutting them down entirely, we are certain that the only way to fulfill our vision of ‘K8s for all’ is by opening up our platform to every developer in the world for free. 

We know that devs like to get their hands dirty and play around with a product until they understand its value. We know that trial periods and paywalls suck. Trust me, we feel the same way.

We believe that a real revolution starts from the bottom up. If we truly want to disrupt the K8s space we need to enlist as many happy Komodor users as possible, and the first step is a humble invitation to experience Kubernetes differently.

Yes, there’s a business motivation in that as well. PLG is the path of successful B2D companies, and a freemium model is a sensible way to gain wide adoption and convert users to paying customers. However, when we close our eyes and imagine the future, we don’t see dollar signs, but rather the smiles of happy dev and platform teams working in tandem to build and run awesome applications on K8s. 

To quote our co-founders, Ben and Itiel: “We wanted to build the tool we wish we had as K8s developers”.    

Where we started

From the very beginning, Komodor’s founders felt that while Kubernetes is becoming more ubiquitous, it is also becoming exponentially more complex. At the same time, the shift-left movement has placed much of the operational responsibilities on devs, yet the industry hasn’t matured enough to foster expertise and consolidate best practices. 

And so, devs were expected to own their apps end-to-end without a proper understanding of the underlying infrastructure. Leaving many of us reliant on ops teams and feeling frustrated, incompetent, and generally unhappy. 

DevOps, SREs, and Platform Engineers also felt frustrated and unhappy because their time was spent on putting out fires, dealing with endless escalations, and making patchwork solutions on the go. At scale, even seasoned engineers with infra backgrounds find it difficult to keep track of changes and retain control of their systems.

It’s no wonder then that ‘burn-out’ and ‘on-call fatigue’ were trending topics in the dev space throughout the last two years. 

Thus Komodor was born. A single, straightforward, platform to simplify Kubernetes operations and enable developers to monitor, manage and troubleshoot their K8s apps independently –  Facilitating a real shift-left culture that empowers devs and allows us to focus on what we really care about.    

Komodor ♥️ Kommunity

Creating a vibrant community for both Komodor users and Kubernauts, in general, was a top priority for us. The future relies on collaboration, knowledge sharing, radical inclusion, and dare I say – empathy. So it’s only natural to hold a space for folks to come together, learn, grow and inspire each other. 

As I mentioned earlier, Komodor’s vision is to make K8s accessible to everyone, by bridging the knowledge gap between devs and DevOps. As above so below – the Kommunity mirrors the product and works towards the same end goal.  

Our Kommunity is already home to hundreds of engineers from different backgrounds, levels of experience, roles, etc. With the availability of the free tier, I imagine many more folks with the same vision joining the revolution. When I said ‘WE want to disrupt the K8s space’ I didn’t mean just the Komodor team. I meant all of us, together.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic just join our Slack Kommunity and geek out with all the cool people there. You’ll regain faith in the future in no time 🙂       

What’s in the free plan?

Another pillar of our belief is that products should charge for scale, not features. Therefore, we offer all of our great features completely for free, with a few limitations on the scale. 

The free tier is ideal for small teams, startups, home labs, and even large organizations who want to test Komodor on a smaller scale before committing. If you’re early in your K8s journey you might find it fun and educating to interact with K8s through Komodor. 

To unlock Komodor’s full potential take a deep dive into our documentation. Take a glance below at some of the key capabilities Komodor has to offer.

👁️ Observe: Cross-cluster Visibility

• Uncover your resources with a robust Kubernetes dashboard
• Easily explore and navigate through your K8s resources across clusters from a single pane of glass
• View metrics, logs, and K8s events and inspect resources in real-time

⚙️ Manage: Simplified Cluster Management

• Easily run day-to-day operations like restarting a service, rollbacks, comparing resources, setting requests/limits, etc.
• Control more complex configurations by editing resource manifests and config files
• Validate your K8s configurations with real-time feedback for best practices

🛠️ Troubleshoot: Automated and Guided

• View the entire history of changes and events to quickly correlate issues
• Instantly know if an issue is infra or app-related
• Run automatic playbooks for common K8s incidents
• Get simple remediation instructions and take action with just one click

The future

The transition to freemium marks the next phase in Komodor’s journey. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and I’m giddy with anticipation to meet all the new Komodor users and Kommunity members that will join us on this adventure. 

I’m talking about you! Yeah, you with the KubeCon hoodie and the Docker whale plush toy! What’s holding you back? We’re waiting for you right here.

Try out Komodor now (it’s free remember?)