Dachary Carey
The Tugboat team has been hard at work adding features to our deploy preview platform, and trying to make it easier for you to select the pricing plan that works best for your needs. Today, we’re announcing an update to our pricing tiers and features to make that process easier.
Until recently, Tugboat offered nine pricing plans; five shared cloud hosting plans, three dedicated hardware hosting plans, and an on-premise plan. While this was our attempt to offer “something for everyone,” in reality, this pricing was a little confusing. It wasn’t necessarily easy to determine which plan your project might need, or what you got if you upgraded to a higher pricing tier.
Starting December 1, Tugboat will offer a total of five pricing plans; three shared hosting plans, a Premium plan featuring our Google Lighthouse integration, implementation and onboarding support, and dedicated hardware for security and performance gains (formerly the Enterprise plan), and an on-premise option.
We’re continuing our free offering for folks who want to try Tugboat, or for people with small projects who don’t need a lot of storage and fancy bells and whistles. We’ve pared down our remaining shared cloud plans by eliminating two plans that caused performance bottlenecks or didn’t have a clear place in the lineup.
We’ve also consolidated what was formerly our “Enterprise” plans into one “Premium” offering. These plans all have the same features; the only difference is storage and performance. Now, you can consult directly with a member of the Tugboat team to find the Premium plan that’s right for your business needs.
As part of the pricing plan consolidation, we’ve paired Tugboat’s advanced features with appropriate plans to provide the right value at each pricing tier. Our Free and Intro tiers will keep the developer-focused tools that make us so popular with development teams, such as shell access, a command-line interface, access to our API, email capture, and detailed build logs.
Tugboat’s Visual Diffs, our visual regression testing feature, will now be available to Plus, Premium, and On-Premise projects. And Tugboat’s new accessibility, performance, and SEO audits, provided by our Google Lighthouse integration, are available to Premium and On-Premise projects.
While we believe the new pricing simplifies the process of selecting the right Tugboat plan for you, we want to give folks a window during which they can sign up for our legacy pricing plans. If you sign up for a Tugboat plan between now and the end of November, you’ll still have access to Tugboat’s Nano plan at $9 per month, and Visual Diffs at all pricing tiers. The Nano plan will no longer be offered as of December 1, and that’s also when Visual Diffs will become available to new sign-ups only on the Plus, Premium, and On-Premise tiers.
If you do have a legacy Tugboat plan, you don’t have to worry about these changes. You can keep using your legacy plan at your current pricing, with no changes to your existing features, such as Visual Diffs. However, if you do change your plan to take advantage of new features such as accessibility & SEO audits, it won’t be possible to revert to your legacy plan.
While we believe these changes are positive, we know that pricing changes can sometimes cause uncertainty and confusion. If you have questions or comments about these changes, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to chat with you in the Tugboat Support Slack, or feel free to contact us - we’re always happy to hear from you!
Tell us about your project, schedule a demo, or consult with a Tugboat Technical Account Executive.
