The work

The decision

Self service or not at all

The obvious version has a sales call, a demo and an annual seat licence. We built the opposite: five free proposals, then credits that refresh monthly, no onboarding at any tier. That closed the door on enterprise revenue, which was the trade I wanted. Freelancers do not book calls. They try a thing at eleven at night and either keep it or forget it.

What happened

Past two and a half thousand active freelancers and a hundred and twenty thousand proposals, with an eighty five percent higher reply rate than the pitches they wrote by hand. Growth came from freelancers telling other freelancers.

The decision

Give away the thing we could have charged for

It indexes a company's source code, and the teams who need it most will not send a repository to a startup. No security page fixes that. So it is open source, self hostable, bring your own key, and code never leaves the customer. That cost us the recurring revenue and bought permission to be installed at all.

What happened

Standups went async and most of that meeting time left the sprint. New engineers stopped digging through Slack for architecture context, because every answer cites the file it came from. It has spread inside engineering teams with no sales conversation.

The decision

Contract terms are configuration, not code

Finance was reconciling invoices against a homegrown meter in spreadsheets, and every new pricing tier meant an engineering ticket. We could have built a faster version of that. Instead contract terms became configuration finance edits directly, with an audit trail under every calculation. That moved a whole class of work off the engineering queue permanently.

What happened

Reconciliation time dropped about ninety percent and disputes fell by three quarters inside two quarters. Finance launches a new contract structure without an engineer. A regulated fintech, so there is no public link, and it is still the hardest thing we have shipped.

The decision

Refuse to export a theme that fails contrast

Every other generator hands you a palette and leaves accessibility to you, which means it gets checked once, near the end, by whoever remembers. Here contrast is solved as the scale is built, so the tool cannot return a theme that fails AA. It rules out colours people ask for. That is the feature.

What happened

Twenty four presets, six export formats, a full themed scale in under thirty seconds. Free and open source, and the piece of Devyst software most likely to be sitting in a project that has never heard of us.