From Dune by Fredrik Haga

Every company has to think about its long term sustainability, especially in this market. This is not only in the interest of investors, but customers too. Being the customer of a service that suddenly goes bust is not a great experience. When something is free you have to ask, but how do they make money? So here are some thoughts on Dune’ business model and what it means for our users and customers.

We’ve enabled free access to our powerful platform, compute and features for half a decade. With that, we’ve built a strong community of the most driven, curious and high-integrity data analysts in the industry. It’s amazing to see the insights our community of users contribute to the whole space. Thousands of wizards have learned SQL with Dune, and built careers and profiles for themselves in the space. I remain very proud and humbled by our community and we will continue to support and grow all aspiring and established Wizards.

Fortunately, we raised a fair amount of money in the bull market and have made some intentional choices like keeping our team lean at just over 40 people. But like any business, we need to make money. It’s clear to us that individual analysts shouldn’t have to pay high prices to use Dune. Last year we had a plan for individuals, but we soon realized it was annoying for them to pay and didn’t yield much income for us, so we sunset it.

Companies have the resources to hire and compensate analysts who would use Dune for their business needs –  tracking on chain KPIs, accounting, risk management, engaging their community, building alerts and data infrastructure powering their various systems. Therefore our paid plans are built for teams and organizations.

When we launched our new plans this summer we removed seat-based pricing. That’s because Dune has always been about collaboration and charging per seat created friction in collaboration. Now individual analysts can easily pick up bounties and freelance gigs, and join the team spaces which they are contributing to.

We want to support wizards not only with education and tools, but give them a stage that expands their reach and potential. Therefore you can expect both team and user profiles to become richer, with more signals and ways for individuals and organizations to connect on our platform.

Dune’s free plan is and will remain powerful. Anyone curious and driven can make huge contributions to the community. When Dune is used for business use cases, teams can upgrade to paid plans. We believe that matching individual analysts with teams that have financial resources is a big win-win, while it makes for a sustainable future for the Dune platform. 

The data must flow

Fredrik, Dune Co-Founder & CEO