“This is amazing. No major comments at all. It’s so helpful to have someone who sees the real issues immediately and actually cares about a realistic roadmap and timeline.”
Biz/Org
GatsbyJS
Year
2022
Developer Tools
Growth & Onboarding
The vision
Gatsby Cloud aimed to make it effortless for developers and agencies to build, deploy, and scale high-performance Jamstack sites. But the reality was more complicated: pricing didn’t match agency needs, growth flows were unclear, and critical onboarding paths were packed with hidden friction.
The reality
By the time I joined, developers were hitting walls everywhere:
Agencies couldn’t scale because pricing was tied to individual seats.
Teams resorted to awkward workarounds just to manage client billing.
Site transfers were painful, often requiring shared logins or support intervention.
Add-ons and usage limits were confusing, blocking expansion instead of encouraging it.
The create-site flow was technically powerful but functionally opaque for new devs.
The homepage and pricing pages were overwhelming, duplicative, and unclear.
The work
In three months, I partnered across product, design, engineering, support, and leadership to clarify customer needs, map developer expectations, and fix the high-friction surfaces that directly impacted activation and revenue.
Highlights included:
Agency plan strategy and pricing alignment
Site transfer and workspace ownership flows
Add-on UX simplification and billing clarity
Template-based onboarding and integration setup
Feature allowance and plan limit redesign
Developer interviews, field research, and usage modeling
What we needed to solve
Gatsby Cloud had strong technical foundations, but new developers weren’t getting to value quickly. Agencies were stuck. Pricing was confusing. And high-potential customers were bouncing.
So the core questions became:
How might we help developers and agencies go from interest → activation → success without hitting confusing limits or workarounds?
I focused the work around four major goals:
Remove onboarding friction
Clarify the create-site flow, integration setup, environment variable handling, and starter templates.
Clarify pricing and plan limits
Make site count, user count, and add-ons intuitive instead of intimidating.
Support agencies with real workflows
Agencies needed ways to transfer sites, manage billing, and give clients ownership without losing control of projects.
Build the foundation for PLG growth
Clean entry paths and clear surfaces help developers explore, adopt, and expand without sales bottlenecks.
My approach blended data, developer interviews, UX prototyping, and deep systems thinking across billing, usage, and organizational workflows.
Challenges
Pricing and plan limits were confusing
Bandwidth, builds, invocations, users, sites - it was all listed, but not understood. Add-ons were hidden behind a clunky modal that didn’t explain costs. Customers were losing trust because “What am I paying for?” wasn’t clear.Agencies were blocked at every turn
Seats didn’t map cleanly to agency work. One dev “owning” all client sites created permission and billing nightmares. Agencies needed scalable, flexible workflows, not rigid assumptions.Site transfer was difficult
Developers routinely transferred sites by sharing passwords or manually replicating environments. There was no secure, predictable flow for handoffs.The create-site flow was powerful but opaque
Developers could scaffold templates, configure Contentful integrations, and apply variables—but the sequence and logic weren’t intuitive.The homepage and pricing pages were overwhelming
Customer interviews revealed that people didn’t understand which plan was right for them, how usage worked, or how to predict their monthly bill.
Solutions
Clarifying pricing, limits, and add-ons
I redesigned the entire add-on flow:
Introduced a confirmation step explaining: current limit → new limit → price → next billing cycle.
Simplified the selection interface and anchored it to customer language instead of internal jargon.
Proposed a new feature allowance table that reduced 5+ vertical screens into one clear overview.
Several users told us it was the first time they might try explaining to their clients how billing worked.
Creating an agency plan that matched real workflows
After interviewing agencies, I mapped out the real scenarios:
Multiple developers working across dozens of client sites
One dev owning multiple workspaces
Agencies wanting clients to handle billing while they handled builds
Teams needing to transfer site ownership cleanly
I worked alongside design and engineering to draft an Agency Plan that solved for:
Multi-site management
Multi-workspace access and admin
Clear project ownership
Zero-downtime client handoff
This directly supported revenue expansion and reduced workarounds.
Designing an end-to-end site transfer experience
We mapped the full flow: logged-in users, users with multiple workspaces, users hitting plan limits, and users needing to upgrade to accept a transfer.
We introduced:
A secure “Transfer Site” handoff
Workspace selection
Intelligent plan checks
Upgrade paths only when necessary
A final confirmation step before the site moved
This unblocked agencies instantly.
Improving the create-site and template onboarding flow
Working with engineering, I helped redesign the template + integration path:
Clearer steps to authorize CMS integrations
Automatic detection of required environment variables
Inline documentation
Bulk variable copy/paste
“Read more” guidance for confusing fields
Cleaner CTAs for creating the first preview build
This helped new developers get from zero to first build without second-guessing what Gatsby Cloud was doing.
Restructuring the homepage and pricing pages
I condensed a massive, scrolling pricing page into a simple hierarchy:
Free
Professional
Agency
Enterprise
With visual feature allowances and clear upgrade moments.
This improved comprehension and let teams self-select faster.
A clearer, faster path for developers and agencies
In three months, I:
Clarified new Agency pricing and billing model
Redesigned add-ons and confirmation flows
Improved onboarding for templates and CMS integrations
Introduced a true site-transfer model
Reduced confusion in plan limits and upgrade paths
Brought customer interviews into every growth conversation
The real impact
Developers finally understood:
What they got with each plan
How billing worked
How to manage agencies and clients
How to transfer sites safely
How to get from “new project” to “first build” without blockers
Agencies were able to scale without messy workarounds.
New developers onboarded faster.
And the product team had a much clearer roadmap for growth and platform maturity.
This work created the backbone for Gatsby Cloud’s future PLG and agency expansion efforts - and demonstrated how much can be accomplished with clarity, research, and structured problem-solving, even in a short time window.
