Stack Overflow for Teams is offering an unlimited free plan to woo more developers onto its platform

• Stack Overflow for Teams will now have an unlimited free version available to groups of up to 50 developers.
• According to CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar, the aim is to allow companies to create a community internally.
• That is the reason why free usage has not been timeboxed.

Stack Overflow for Teams now has a free version. The knowledge and collaboration platform’s free tier will allow up to 50 people to sign on.

Moreover, the company promises that it will remain free forever. Users don’t need to offer credit or debit card details in order to sign up for the free plan.

Unlike the Stack Overflow question and answer website, Stack Overflow for Teams is a knowledge management software. Using the public platform is free, but Teams was thus far a paid product.

Aside from the limitation on users, the free version of Stack Overflow for Teams has most of the features that are offered in the paid tiers as well. This includes integration with team collaboration apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

The move shows how CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar is using the foundation that has already been built on the company’s public platform to power the next phase of product-led growth.

“We realised through experience, that it was actually not enough time to allow companies to create a community internally and that’s basically what we’re trying to do,” Chandrasekar told TechCrunch while explaining having a timeboxed free trial didn’t make sense for the company.

Community, brand and product approach
According to Chandrasekar, companies usually think about their product first and then their brand. Communities are the last run on the ladder, which most tend to ignore.

But, for Stack Overflow, that was the starting point. “Communities will be absolutely essential for companies to really accelerate their development in the new digital world,” Chandrasekar said at the Business Insider Global Trends Festival, last year.

He pegs that around 60% of software developers worldwide sample Stack Overflow — that’s around 26 million to 27 million developers. And, this strategy has worked just fine for the 12-year old American startup created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.

“All of this is fueled by the remote world environment,” Chandrasekar told Business Insider. The company started as a community — a messaging forum, really — then built itself into a brand and now has a product to offer — Teams.

The explosion of work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have helped the startup. In fact, Stack Overflow’s $85 million from its Series E funding was mostly aimed at developing Stack Overflow for Teams.

Disclaimer: Both Stack Overflow and Business Insider are partners of Times Bridge

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