Neon expands version control, Strapi offers cheap plan

"Devtools Weekly" by Hypeburner tracks the business of developer tools. I'm your editor, Hashim Warren.

A lot of new features and pricing changes happened in our industry this week, leaving a good bit for us to explore.

Let's get into it!

Hot Product Launch

Serverless database, Neon announced an exciting feature that "restores a branch to an earlier state in its own or another branch's history."Officially Neon calls it "Branch restore with Time Travel Assist", which sounds like an offensive play the Lakers might run.

Seriously though, the Neon team is doing impressive work with bringing familiar version controls to database management. This new feature is easily the Hot Launch of the week.

Enterprise Watch

Unfortunately, out of everything I saw launched last week by developer tools startups, I wouldn't classify any of it as being aimed at winning large customers.

Hopefully some Product team will try to increase revenue next week!

Front-End Products

✨ Headless CMS, Strapi added a $29 plan, hoping to entice developers to use the service for their side projects.

✨ API gateway, Grafbase continues its drumbeat of new releases with the announcement of "batching", which "allows users to make multiple independent GraphQL requests in a single HTTP request."

Serverless database, Xata now has previews for audio and video attachments in the database. This makes Xata even more attractive and usable to the non-database managers on a team.

(Sidenote - Xata combines its product roadmap and changelog on the same page. It's a smart presentation that all developer tool SaaS companies should consider adopting.)

✨ New React framework Waku is now supported on Netlify.

✨ Heroku released a "What is Heroku?" demo video that walks through the basics of the app platform.

Let's learn from this one. Why would Heroku, which has been around 17 years and has high brand recognition amongst web developers spend time making a "Heroku 101" video?

It's because the team there understands what I also advise to devtool startups. The most urgent need for your SaaS is for prospects and free tier users to understand the basic value and differentiator of your tool.

Because of this I suggest a monthly, or even weekly live demo of your core features.

Looking for help with your SEO or next product launch? Hit reply and contact me for a free consultation. - Hashim Warren