BuddyBuild Announces Freemium + New Pricing Plans

Feature Image Credit: Buddybuild

I'll never forget the first time looking into what it took to get a beta version of one of my apps onto a friend's phone before it was live in the App Store. The app was a game that I was building with an iOS framework called Cocos2D, which meant that it would only run on an iOS device. The most well-known iOS beta testing platform at that time was called TestFlight, which was acquired by Burstly in 2011; that full story can be read here.

Right before acquiring TestFlight, "Burstly raised $7.3 million from Upfront Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, Softbank Capital and others in seed and Series A funding". At the time, TestFlight's user-base included about 70,000 developers and 280,000 testers. Burstly went on to be acquired by Apple during the winter of 2014.

When Apple or any other corporation for that matter acquires a service, does that mean that the competition is over? Not at all! In the beta testing and distribution space, Fabric was a widely used alternative to TestFlight ever since Twitter released it around the Fall of 2014. In fact, Twitter seemingly acquired Crashlytics in 2013 so that it could be a contender as a beta testing platform service.

These days, Buddybuild is the new shiny object of today's beta testing platform services, eclipsing Apple's TestFlight and Twitter's Fabric in terms of ease of use. Buddybuild:

• Integrates with just about everything
• Provides a very powerful SDK with state of the art instant reply technology for catching obscure bugs easily
• Observes repositories for changes to the codebase to automatically build versions of an app

As well as much, much more. They literally make the development world a better place. We have been using them since they launched in October 2015, and unsurprisingly, they have been acquiring users like crazy with a very high retention rate to boot. Did I mention that they are were free?

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the case of Buddybuild was too good to be true for too long – Buddybuild has finally released a freemium pricing model that goes into effect on September 1st, and it's not cheap, either. Like most services that solve big pains across an industry, the beta distribution space has been hot for acquisitions (even Microsoft snapped one up on 2014); perhaps I'll be writing about a Buddybuild acquisition before long by Google or Facebook.

The Bottom Line: Buddybuild, one of the independent, leaders in beta build distribution services rolls out its first pricing model to cash in on its success.

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