Pybites Platform 2.0 is here 🐍 🎉

Hey Pythonista,

We have some very exciting news for you today! Ready?

Pybites Platform 2.0 is here!

Our Codechalleng.es (inception Dec 2017, ~ 49K accounts) can now be considered legacy.

In this email we'll highlight 5 features / wins of this big release / migration.

Please make sure you check it out here: https://pybitesplatform.com/

To hear us talk about the launch and what some of the challenges + learnings were, tune into our dedicated podcast episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4d4yP0VChM

1. Better design

I hope you agree that v1 no longer cut it in 2024. Yes, it was functional, but it could no longer be considered a modern design. And people were expressing this quite often.

The reason we did not action it was that rewriting a platform is a tremendous effort, especially when there are many existing users and happy customers. But after the successful Rust platform prototype, we decided to JUST DO IT!

We switched to Tailwind CSS and embraced htmx everywhere we could, and the result was a much more responsive site!

Here is a comparison of the old vs the new when you log in. Our new platform feels way less cluttered:

3. Data migration + existing subscriptions

This was a real challenge, but important to us.

We made v2 as seamless as possible so when you login your account + data will be migrated (some things we've EOL'd though, for example the 100 days of code grids).

This is clearly announced on the login page (see the following screenshot).

Also, we switched from Gumroad to Stripe for subscription and payment management. Stripe has proven highly customizable (see pricing next). Still, with a change of this magnitude, existing subscribers will maintain access to the new platform with no interruption.

4. 2.0 is more affordable + adopts regional pricing

We recognized that 25 USD / month was relatively expensive, so we dropped the price by 40% to 15 USD / month. See more here: https://pybitesplatform.com/pricing

Sticking to our core value of "lifting people up", we wanted to take the opportunity to ensure we could support as many people around the world as we could.

Enter "parity pricing". The platform is now priced relative to the cost of living in ~150 different countries/ economies. This will make it accessible to more people than ever before!

Check it out for yourself: when you go to the pricing page you should see the prices in your local currency and at a price relative to your country's economy (Bob in Spain = EURO, Julian in Australia = AUD):

5. Roadmap of new features

We keep building and tuning every single day (200 issues open, 60% or so is closed, we iterate fast!)

Two big features in the works re-introduce platform support for schools + teams.

We have been making this effort as a real developer team would by working with GitHub issues organised with a GitHub project. It was nice to reaffirm that what we teach in our coaching programs stands true as effective in a real, production environment.

And as you can imagine, a big project like this brings many future features and ideas. We've realised the need to manage priorities, so we've developed a roadmap of all upcoming features for the next two quarters: https://pybitesplatform.com/roadmap

This will help us keep you informed on what's coming.

And now, without further ado, please login/sign up and start coding:

https://pybitesplatform.com

If you have any further questions, please check out our FAQs, and if that doesn't help, just reply to this email or message us in the Community.

If you like it and think your colleagues and peers can benefit from this, please share it out with them (we just added a free 7-day trial feature).

Thanks, and enjoy!

- Bob & Julian