Tembo vs Timescale, Vercel, Heroku, and Hygraph

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

There is no AI mentioned in this week's newsletter. Please clap.

And let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

Young serverless PostgreSQL startup Tembo made a bold move with their product launch last week. They released pg_timeseries, a Postgres plugin that enables developers to work with timeseries data. (Think: weather data, server metrics, sensor data, ect)

Why is this audacious?

There's already an entire startup that specializes in using Postgres for timeseries data called "Timescale". And Timescale allows developers to use their open source timescaledb plugin in databases, without using their SaaS product.

However, the timescaledb plugin is under a Cloud Protection License. This means you can use it for any purpose, except offering a SaaS database product. This prevents a company like AWS from Mongo-ing Timescale and competing with them.

Up until now this has prevented Postgres platforms like Supabase, Xata, and Neon from offering services using timescaledb. However, individual users were free to install it in their individual databases.

Tembo's permissively licensed, alternative timeseries plugin changes the landscape. Now they and anyone else can compete with Timescale's services.

For making a bossed up move like that, Tembo's pg_timescale is your Product Launch of the Week.

Other Launches

✨ Front-end cloud platform, Vercel had a launch event, and released several new features, including a web application firewall. Read about everything else Vercel shipped.

✨ Platform-as-a-service, Heroku now has a low tier database plan that starts at just $5.

In 2022 Heroku nixed its free tier plan which sparked a migration of small projects off of the platform, and to services like Render. See this chart where Render's growth skyrockets post-Heroku's sunset announcement.

Perhaps Heroku is trying to win hobbyists back with a cheap database plan.

✨ Headless CMS, Hygraph wrote up the 8 key use cases for their product. This isn't a product launch, but I want to highlight how simple and smart this is. Customers need to be told explicitly what a developer tool can be used for, or they'll likely slot it into the wrong categories.

The only tweak I would make to this content is to not format it as an article. This should be a series of pages on the Hypgraph site so it can easliy be discovered by prospects.

✨ CDN for APIs, Stellate launched an improvement to caching. This updated feature enables developers to "immediately return cached content to the client and use @defer to return uncacheable content when it’s resolved by the origin".

If your company is looking to grow users and revenue using SEO, PPC, and content marketing, consider booking me for a free go-to-market consultation. Hit reply on this email, and let's talk. - Hashim Warren, Hypeburner.