DevOps platform provider Circle Internet Services Inc. today debuted a new free tier for software engineering teams that includes features and capabilities formerly only available in the company’s paid plans.

CircleCI’s platform provides continuous integration and delivery capabilities for developers and engineers using automated processes to allow for developing and shipping code faster with fewer errors before it goes into production.

“We’re making even more of CircleCI free,” Jim Rose, chief executive of CircleCI, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “There’s been this move over the past year where you’ve found more and more freemium services have gotten more constricted over time. Giving access to fewer resources and limiting what’s available to software developers. We’re going the opposite direction.”

As software has become more complex and testing gets more cumbersome, Rose explained that CircleCI has decided to “lean in from a free perspective” in order to provide better support for developers, especially now that software development cycle times are much shorter than before and CI/CD pipelines happen sooner than ever.

That means developers need to start implementing CI/CD practices earlier in their projects while getting access to a comprehensive, free toolset such as provided by CircleCI from the start would allow them to start off on the right track.

“We’ve tripled the number of build credits available for free from 10,000 to 30,000 per month,” Rose said. “And we’ve also really opened up the catalog of resource types that customers can use too. In the past, we’ve only allowed customers to use a very basic sort of Linux container, but we’ve realized that people really need access to many sorts of containers of all sorts of shapes and sizes.”

The new free plan includes unlimited users and maximizes flexibility for teams with up to 6,000 build minutes per month. Developers can now run their compute across larger number of different platforms including Docker, Linux and Windows. MacOS will also be available soon.

DevOps teams gain will also access to collaboration features including private orbs, which are configuration packages that can be shared between builds. Behind the scenes, CircleCI’s Insights dashboard will let teams maintain a real-time view of platform usage, build success rates, flaky test detection, pipeline duration and all number of other metrics that help determine code integration health.

To date, more than 200,000 DevOps teams rely on CircleCI’s platform to automate delivery workflows including companies such as Peloton, Samsung and the healthcare communications platform Klara.

“Testing, validation and confidence in our code are key,” said Valentin Ranshakov, quality assurance lead at Klara. “We need the power of the cloud to deliver at scale. CircleCI connects our processes and pipelines and brings visibility into our coding environment, offering efficiency and rapid, high performance.”

CircleCI’s paid plans begin at $15 per month that adds 6,000 more minutes per month and increases access to resources and support to experts. The enterprise-level plan starts at $2,000 per month and includes a customizable number of build minutes, the largest resource list and high flexibility for CI/CD performance.

Sign-ups for a free account are available on CircleCI’s website.

Image: CircleCI