You’ve seen this before. Free software is never actually free. So if Codeium for Individuals is free, what gives?
TL;DR we make money via our Teams and Enterprise offerings. There are a lot of functionalities that only make sense at the team or organization level, such as non-SaaS deployments, team analytics, remote indexing for personalization, audit logging, access controls, code review assistance, and more.
So, this begs the obvious next pair of questions:
- Why bother with individuals if serving them costs money (via compute)?
- Or is there something else *cough data/code cough* that we are “taking from” individuals in exchange for the service?
To answer the first question, the Codeium team’s core expertise is actually in machine learning infrastructure. Before Codeium, the team built Exafunction, which optimized complex GPU workloads at scale for some of the biggest robotics and machine learning companies. We have taken that same infrastructure and machine learning systems knowledge to serve our own models for Codeium at orders of magnitude less cost than others can (and definitely significantly cheaper than third party API calls).
And for the second question, the answer is simpler - no. We take security & privacy very seriously - we never sell/share user data/code or train our generative models on user code (and even make it super easy to opt out from any code snippet telemetry altogether on the individual's Profile page). What we actually use are aggregate signals and statistics that capture the performance of the system, and correlate those to model, extension, or product changes, allowing us to iterate on the product in a data driven manner (e.g. A/B testing).
There are also strategic reasons. While it doesn’t count as truly “product led growth,” if we have a unique opportunity to enable all developers with these AI tools at no-cost and isn’t a financial burden on us, then it actually makes sense to give Codeium out for free, no strings attached. If more individuals use and trust Codeium and find it helpful, there is a greater chance they will tell their companies about the enterprise offering, and then we will actually make money! So no, we are not giving it away for free so that we can monetize your data; we are giving it away so that you can quickly see the tool in action for yourself and have the conviction to ask your company to invest in Codeium’s paid team and enterprise tiers.
This might sound good for now, but free forever? That sounds too good to be true, especially if the product keeps getting more powerful, with more capabilities.
In short, we are committed to having a leading free tier forever. This includes things like unlimited Autocomplete, Chat, and Command (like today). We will not nerf this tier just to get individuals to pay. That being said, there may be new capabilities that actually are useful at the individual level that are expensive for us to serve with no limits, and we will wrap that into a Pro tier. But if you don’t want to pay, you have nothing to worry about - we will continue to keep improving your experience as well.
EDIT (09/18/24): Today, we have launched the paid individual tier called Pro. The additional capabilities include those that actually are actually expensive for us to serve with no limits. With Pro, you get unlimited access to our biggest and best models under the hood, more advanced context awareness, and other systems that meaningfully increase both the value to the user and our cost to serve. On our Individual plan, you will still get bigger and better models and systems than what is provided by the market, but if you are looking to get the absolute most juice out of your AI code assistant tool of choice, Pro is the right option. Both Individual and Pro will continue to improve.
Hopefully this makes sense! We would love to have every developer equipped with the most advanced AI powered code acceleration toolkit possible. If making Codeium free gets us to that reality quicker without burning through our pockets, then that just makes sense to us.
Get the modern coding superpower now: