Langchain's killer app, Cloudflare Pages, and Vercel's pricing revolt

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

I keep the coverage of AI at Hypeburner tastefully constrained, but you'll start seeing more items from LLM orchestration tools and vector databases.

Let's get into it!

Hot Product Launch

AI app framework Langchain released an example project, Langfriend, an AI journaling app with long term memory.

Nailing long term memory in AI apps is a complicated problem that Langchain wants to help developers solve. So instead of dropping more agnostic docs, or yet another complex tutorial, they're using this example app to merchandise the features of Langchain and help developers adopt best practices.

This is a fantastic go-to-market strategy that other developer tools should adopt. Take the use case you want to guide users to, and build a polished application around it.

Langfriend announcement blog post

Langfriend video demo

Langfriend hosted app

Enterprise Watch

Vercel changed their pricing to a scheme that reduced the cost for most users, but raised the bill for about 8% of users. For that small cohort, sometimes the bill was dramatically higher.

One user tweeted a screenshot that his bill went from $20 to$201. That tweet went viral with over 131 retweets, and prompted a response from Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rauch.

A key unforced error was that the email that went to users who saw a price increase and decrease used the same template and excited language.

Usually, Enterprise Watch is where I catalog go-to-market moves in the marketplace that you can adapt for your company. Unfortunately, this week Vercel gives us an anti-pattern we should avoid.

(Can you blame Planetscale and Heroku for recently cancelling their free tiers? Who wants to cultivate a mob of price sensitive customers?)

Front-End Products

✨ Cloudflare's Pages product finally gets a little love, with new monorepo support. This enables developers to "exclude specific paths to watch for in each of your projects to avoid unnecessary builds from commits to your repo". This feature is so table stakes that I assumed Pages had it when it launched in 2021.

✨ ORM tool Prisma launched Prisma Pulse, a way to capture database events so they can be are "processed, evaluated, and distributed to relevant client subscriptions ensuring your applications stay synchronized with the latest database state."

✨ WordPress released version 6.5, which comes with a new "Interactivity API" that allows developers to make calls to the database without causing a page reload. This unlocks app-like user experience, such as "like counters or pop-ups to more complex features like instant page navigation, instant search, carts, or checkouts".

✨ Vector database Weaviate now has a Typescript client. This is a trend in the AI Engineering space. Companies like Weaviate and Langchain first cater to Python developers, but then release support for Javascript developers.

Special Report

No webinar this week, but I am working a special report about an exciting category, serverless Postgresql databases. By surveying how these startups are acquiring users in a rapidly evolving market you'll be able to apply these learning to your own products.

See you next week! - Hashim Warren