Hatchbox is now $15 per server per month
UpdateAs of October 1st, Hatchbox is $15 per server per month. This applies to all customers, new and existing.
We emailed everyone ahead of the change, but here's the reasoning in case you missed it.
Why we raised prices
For years, GoRails, the education side of our business, subsidized Hatchbox development. AI has been brutal to most education businesses and we're no exception. We'll have fewer new GoRails customers in 2026 than in our first year in business.
Knowing that was coming, Collin and I have focused on Hatchbox for the last 12 months. We shipped a lot:
- Cluster visualizations
- Caddy metrics
- Load balancer health checks & retries
- Colored logs
- Database metrics & backup downloads
- A revamped API and an MCP server
- Better static site support
- On-Demand TLS
We hoped Hatchbox would grow enough to be sustainable on its own. Growth has been slower than we were aiming for, which left us with two options: raise prices and keep working on Hatchbox full-time, or put it on the back burner and get jobs.
We chose to keep building.
Why $15, and why everyone
When we launched the current version of Hatchbox, we priced it low to make it more accessible and didn't think hard enough about long-term sustainability. Ironically, lower pricing makes Hatchbox less accessible in the long run, because we have fewer resources to reinvest in making it better.
Hatchbox Classic was $15 per server, so this is basically a return to our original pricing.
I thought hard about grandfathering existing customers. But that would lock in the exact problem we're trying to fix: most of our revenue would stay at the old rates.
I never wanted to raise prices on the people who backed us from the start. But I'd rather charge fairly and keep building Hatchbox than keep it too cheap and slowly let it go.
Questions?
We'd love to hear from you. Email us if you have questions, concerns, or just want to share how you're using Hatchbox.
Thank you for trusting us with your deploys.
— Chris & Collin