Whoa! Has it been over a decade already? Well, Codebender is still around and is into its next decade.
A lot has changed since the original Codebender team had to move on from the platform. The site has exchanged hands a few times, but is finally in the hands of Brett and Erik Hagman of Rogue Robotics. When we acquired it, Codebender wasn't left in a great state and is in dire need of improvements. Luckily, a lot of advancements have been made in server technology over the last few years should help make the improvements easier to manage.
Our intention is to return Codebender to its roots where it will provide tools for everyone to work with their hardware. We are improving the builder and uploader, and adding new tools to help manage data and help educators manage classrooms.
Codebender is a passion project for everyone involved, and will continue to be. If you are interested in joining the team, let us know ([email protected]).
If you have improvements you'd like to see, let us know in the comments below.
Finally, join our Discord to hear about the latest changes and engage with everyone involved.
Codebender was founded in 2012 by Vasilis Georgitzikis and Panos Sakkos, both passionate makers and Arduino enthusiasts from Greece. In November 2022, Codebender was acquired by Brett and Erik Hagman of Rogue Robotics. Brett has been involved with Wiring and Arduino since 2009.
We want to make Codebender free again because we believe that everyone should have access to tools no matter where or who you are. Everyone has great ideas, and we want everyone to be able to express those ideas with Codebender and their hardware.
While this sounds simple and easy, it still costs a significant amount of money to keep the systems running. By sponsoring Codebender, you can help us in our mission to keep these tools available to everyone, and help people bring their ideas to life.
Currently, there is only a 30 day trial on Codebender.cc. We are going to change that as soon as we can. If you want to support the site directly, you can sign-up for a standard subscription there. Eventually, when the site is updated, we will make sure your account is marked as "legendary" status, and you will have a reduced rate and receive all the perks of the paid tier we will offer (or you can just cancel your subscription altogether, and continue to use the free tier).
The educational site has a limited set of subscriptions available. We don't recommend supporting us through there, as that is designed for educational institutions only. If you are interested in the educational site, please direct any questions to [email protected].
We have a sponsor page on GitHub as well: https://github.com/sponsors/codebendercc -- Please have a look and you can consider supporting us at whatever level you see fit.
We may add some other ways to support us as well (like merch or Patreon). Let us know what you'd prefer, or if you have any ideas ([email protected]).
Thank you to all our supporters! Let's make Codebender amazing for another decade!
- Brett
When we started codebender on February 2012, more than 4 years ago, we never expected it to become this popular and go all this way. It was just a part-time open source project by some of the people at the local hackerspace.
Fast forward to now, and we are an investor-backed startup with:
We’re extremely proud of what we’ve built. Five guys from a hackerspace in Greece have managed to compete & surpass tools by multi-billion companies like ARM, and Arduino’s tools as well (themselves a multi-million company). We started with a vision to help the Maker movement grow, and touch people’s lives by making it easier to work on their projects and create stuff.
Not only did we achieve that, but we also pushed others to see the need, as in the case of Arduino’s own Arduino Create.
But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. And this is the end for codebender.cc and the beginning of our new chapter.
As all of you know, we provide codebender.cc for free. Of course, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch”, so that means we’ve been taking care of the bill all this time.
In our early days, this meant our personal time & money out of our own pocket. After getting funded, we used the money our investors put in to provide this service for free, which covered salaries, contractors, outside services, server hosting, utilities, rent etc.
Fun fact: At this moment, running codebender costs roughly $25,000/month.
We’ve tried to generate revenue for codebender.cc a couple of ways, i.e. Paid Private Projects, the codebender:esp Kickstarter, licensing our Compilation Infrastructure, etc. But none of these worked, and it seems we can’t escape an inevitable truth: Makers aren’t interested in paying for Software.
For a while now, we’ve been working on B2B deals to generate revenues. With more and more people moving to Cloud-based products, there is a clear need for companies who develop IDEs (such Chip Manufacturers, SDK providers, etc) to build Cloud IDEs for their customers. Given our many years of experience, we were the obvious choice to help companies make that transition.
Fun fact: codebender:esp originally started as an idea for building a Cloud IDE for Espressif - the makers of ESP8266 & ESP32. We built a demo, but since it didn’t go anywhere, we decided to see if the Maker market was interested in paying a subscription for such an IDE.
This means we are spread thin trying to serve both our B2B business, as well as the Makers who use codebender.cc and the development, maintenance, and customer support associated with that.
This, coupled with the announcement of Arduino Create and the knowledge that there are now others taking care of the same issues that we identified when we started, lead us to the decision to close down the Arduino-focused codebender.cc website and focus on our B2B efforts.
Of course, we understand that we are responsible for everyone who’s been using codebender so far. So we’ve set up a plan to make the transition as simple as possible.
Here are the most important phases:
From November 31st and onward, we plan to keep all hosted Projects, Libraries, and Embeds on read-only mode, so that people can still access code found as links or embedded in websites.
We’ll keep the site on read-only mode until December 31st, 2016 at the very least, but our goal is to keep it up indefinitely so long as there is still usage (enough visits to warrant that) and we can spare the resources to maintain & upgrade the servers.
We also understand that there’s a small number of people who can’t make the transition to the Arduino IDE or Arduino Create. This is people who are using Chromebooks -mainly educators- for whom codebender was the only compatible solution.
For that reason, we’ve set up a couple of very basic services for people who want to make a quick transition. They are simple, paid-only, low-maintenance services, which we can maintain as long as there is demand.
These are:
It’s been an amazing ride. I’m incredibly proud of our little part in shaping the Maker movement, and I’ll definitely continue being a part of it.
But we have to shift gears, and we hope you’ll support us in our endeavors.
See you on the other side!
— Vasilis Georgitzikis
