Developers detest marketing. If you want to sell them a tool, make it easy for them to find the information they need and leave them alone to try out your tool.

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Developers resist traditional marketing approaches and prefer straightforward, hands-on evaluation of tools. They value peer recommendations over advertising, want clear pricing without sales calls, and need easy access to documentation, free tiers, and sandbox environments. Successful developer tool marketing focuses on letting developers try products independently rather than using typical marketing tactics like webinars or sales pitches.

Software developers aren’t buying it

That, and advanced use cases would be nice. Most tools are great for simple stuff. It’s the advanced things that they fail at.

“People trust people they know more than people they don’t know” and “If you let people try it, they will know if they like it” These things really should come as a shock to no one.

I wish more companies selling development tools could understand these principles. The number one thing that will stop me from using your product is if you do not have transparent pricing from the get-go.

didn’t read the whole article but as a developer i will say this TLDR could not be more true

Pretty spot on, in my experience. This though, is the conundrum:
‘Finally, make your pricing clear and prominent. Developers will definitely follow the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” principle and move on to a competitor if your site has a “call and set up an appointment with our sales team” schtick on the pricing page.’
I think everyone hates this, and yet it is very, very common. Since they’ve already identified that the developer doesn’t make the actual purchase decision, then this technique targets the purchaser.