Dear Dune community,

Over the next few weeks we’re going to roll out several new paid plans to make Dune even more powerful for those that need it. There is, and will continue to be, a powerful free tier. We’ll have several tiers so that you can find a plan that fits your needs and wallet. Before it all goes live I wanted to share with you some of the principles we use when it comes to these changes. 

First, for the avoidance of doubt: the core Dune product experience will remain free as it always has been. Not only that, it will rapidly become better and better over time. Our mission is to make crypto data accessible and that means we want to keep having a very powerful free user experience. To achieve this for the long-term, we of course need a sustainable business model. 

Why?

Our focus at Dune is to turn crypto data access from a theoretical possibility to a practical reality. In our effort to do that we take on some serious infrastructure bills for the whole community. We are employing some of the world's very best engineers and investing deeply in creating the most powerful crypto data experience on the planet. Not to mention all of the educational resources and support we put out so anyone can become a wizard. All of this costs a lot of money and naturally means we also need to make some money in the long term.

Why now?

We have always had a paid component of Dune, but for the vast majority of our time so far we have not focused on it. We have instead focused on scaling through crazy growth and building out several important pieces of infrastructure to create a better experience for the community. It’s always been the plan to build out a new paid offering to meet our power users needs when we had the right technical foundation in place.

So when we are now launching new paid products it’s not because of the market, our investors pushing us or because we are running out of cash. In fact, we have always stayed very lean and still have the vast majority of funds raised in the bank. Dune is not going anywhere. 

We are launching new paid plans now because our community continues to need more from the data, and we now have the right technical foundation to meet these needs. You want more from your Dune experience, and we are excited to be able to offer this.

The principles we use for monetizing 

Free

When you build in public, Dune is free to use. That’s because by building in public you’re helping to make crypto data accessible. Others can build on your queries and learn from them. You’re helping to educate the world. You can query and visualize a ton of blockchain data as much as you want. You can work with the cleanest datasets in the game. You can collaborate with the community, easily share your work, get clout and awesome opportunities.

Paid

If you don’t want to contribute to the community knowledge you can keep your work to yourself and then we charge you. Also if you want to do something that is more costly from an infrastructure standpoint, we will charge you. In practice that means we’re charging for:

• Take your content private which doesn't benefit the community
• Export data and create value for yourself outside of the community. For instance if you use data export for trading, proprietary research or to build a business.
• Run on heavier infrastructure to have queries execute faster

These are the main ways in which we monetize and we think it’s a fair approach: you can use powerful tools for free if you also contribute to the public collective understanding of blockchain data,, or you will pay a bit for the service you use.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be launching new paid plans according to the above principles. Power users that want more from Dune can look forward to more performance, better team collaboration in private or public, the highly anticipated API access and more! This is the first time in years that we’ve made changes to the Dune paid products and we’re excited for you to check it out. Over the next few months, we will also be adding a lot more functionality to both free and paid tiers.

We’re excited about the new paid plans but are also aware that one rarely gets everything right out of the gate so if you have any questions or feedback please reach out in our discord or email sales@dune.com. We’ll keep doing our very best to make something useful and valuable for you. 

Thank you for being part of the Dune community.

The data must flow!

/Fredrik

Dune CEO & Co-Founder