Improving Developer Onboarding and Growth for Gatsby Cloud

The impact

In three months: agency pricing model defined, add-on UX redesigned, site transfer flow built end-to-end, onboarding friction removed. Developers and agencies went from hitting walls to shipping.

Gatsby Cloud had strong technical foundations. The growth surfaces were broken. Agencies could not scale because pricing was tied to individual seats. Site transfers required shared logins or support tickets. Billing confused people. New developers could not get from signup to first build without getting lost. I came in to fix the high-friction surfaces that were directly costing activation and revenue.

The product was good; the growth surfaces were not the product

The trap with a technically strong product is assuming growth problems are quality problems. They were not. The product experience simply did not match how developers and agencies actually worked. Agencies ran multiple client sites under a single seat with workarounds that made billing a nightmare and handoffs a mess. Pricing pages overwhelmed. Plan limits were listed but not understood. The create-site flow was powerful and opaque at the same time. None of that is fixed by better code; it is fixed by treating activation and billing as product surfaces in their own right.

I ran developer interviews, mapped agency workflows, analyzed support-ticket patterns, and partnered across product, design, engineering, and leadership to find what to fix first. Then I moved fast. I redesigned the add-on flow with a confirmation step showing current limit, new limit, price, and next billing cycle, and users told us it was the first time they could explain their bill to a client. That is not cosmetic. Billing a customer cannot explain is billing they churn out of, so making the charge legible was a retention lever wearing a UX costume. I defined an Agency Plan for multi-site management, multi-workspace access, and zero-downtime client handoffs, built the end-to-end site-transfer flow from scratch with plan checks and upgrade paths, and collapsed the pricing page from a multi-screen wall into a clear, self-selectable hierarchy.

The create-site and onboarding work went deep too: cleaner CMS integration steps, automatic detection of required environment variables, bulk variable copy/paste, and inline documentation that helped new developers get to their first build without second-guessing the platform.

What this built

• An agency-ready platform. The Agency Plan and site transfer flow unblocked a segment that had been stuck on workarounds, and created a real path to revenue expansion.
• Billing clarity that earned user trust. Developers finally understood what they were paying for and could explain it to clients. That's not a UX detail - that's a retention lever.
• The backbone for PLG and growth. Clean entry paths, self-selectable plans, and friction-free onboarding created the foundation for Gatsby Cloud's longer-term product-led growth strategy.