Channel Hosting on prefix.dev!

Today we are launching our first commercial product. It's a big step in our journey as a company: paid channels on prefix.dev, with usage-based pricing. We have ambitious plans on how to transform the package management experience on our platform, and this is the first one.

How did we get here?

Our goal is to offer developers an unparalleled, productive package management experience on Windows, macOS and Linux. We believe in the potential of the Conda ecosystem, and have transformed it "from the inside" by rewriting all parts of it in Rust and submitting Conda Enhancement Proposals to improve the ecosystem for everyone.

From day 1 we had an incredibly passionate community that has helped us shape Pixi and bring it to production. Today, Pixi is used at the largest companies you can imagine. From AI startups to physics labs, from Finance to Pharma - Pixi is an essential tool to get work done and improve our world.

Our platform - prefix.dev - is the result of the building blocks we've been crafting. With each one, we believe that we have tackled an actual problem:

1. rattler: We have rewritten the Conda ecosystem's core in Rust. What began as a port of Version and MatchSpec Parsing, Package Resolution, and Installation Logic has matured into a comprehensive library built for developing full-featured package managers within the Conda ecosystem,

2. rattler-build: Our re-implementation of conda-build with extreme speedups and an improved user experience making package building much more fun and a lot faster,

3. pixi: Our modern package manager that has been bringing Conda package management into the hands of many more users also outside of the Python ecosystem,

4. pixi-build: Making package building not just easier but something you don't have to think about anymore when using Pixi,

5. prefix.dev: Our platform is now a full-blown Conda package registry hosting mirrors of large channels (conda-forge, bioconda) and handles >1 Million package downloads, daily (more than a 10x growth over last year). We launched additional capabilities such as pioneering sharded repodata, support for trusted publishing, and sigstore attestations.

By taking the time to invest into these tools, we've been able to close the loop on a complete package management pipeline. A pipeline that is now generally available to every company.

Where we are today

Today, we have over 600 Conda channels that host packages - private and public - on our platform. We haven’t launched a pricing model yet, and it has taken us a considerable amount of time to come up with an initial pricing strategy.

Our conda-forge mirror has shown that we are capable of running the largest channels in the "Condaverse" (19.6 TB and counting). Our own Tobias Hunger has created the biggest non-mirror channel (github-releases) with 1.8 TB of packages coming straight from Github releases (each with a Sigstore attestation by the way). Our infrastructure works!

Every user on prefix now has access to a personal usage dashboard to track your channels, and channel sizes. We are running a significant service for the community for free: a full blown conda-forge mirror that we host on globally distributed storage infrastructure for fast access.

To keep this infrastructure running and growing, we're introducing paid plans.

Pricing tiers

As a business, we want to offer a serious, dependable service to our paying customers. As such we are launching our pricing today with usage quotas. All of our plans include unlimited bandwidth meaning that your CI can pull packages as often as it wants to.

• Free accounts get 3 GB of public package storage for free / 500 MB of private storage, and can only use a single user.

• Pro accounts are meant for teams: for 50 Euro / month you will get 10 GB of storage and 5 team members. Our pricing beyond that is 10 Euro / month for 10 GB of storage and 1 additional user.

• Enterprise: we want to work with you on custom enterprise integrations of our platform hosting into your infrastructure. Feel free to schedule a call here if you are interested.

  • Single-sign-on for your team, with your preferred provider

  • Organizations on the prefix platform (coming soon)

  • Deployment options - from bring-your-own-bucket (we store the metadata, you store the data), a tenant deployment on our cloud to bespoke on-prem, we’re open to explore options with you.

See the pricing page for more details.

The open source plan

We also recognize that our ecosystem lives and breathes on open source! If you are running a channel that primarily publishes open source packages to a public channel, we are happy to sponsor your community with the open source plan, giving you ample package storage. Just reach out to us on Discord or Email and we’ll set you up with the special open source plan.

Strong foundations for your software, from development to deployment

Over the past months we talked to many companies, large and small, to learn about pain points - and we are eager to hear from even more (schedule a call here).

We want Pixi to be the best tool to ship at AI speed - securely. We are smoothing out the package development and publishing workflow with Pixi Build. And commercially, we want to build secure foundations for our users to depend upon.

You should be able to iterate at AI speed, and have prefix.dev as trusted partner to keep your software supply chain clean. We see upcoming regulations like the CRA in Europe as big chance: we are well positioned to help our customers comply with regulations. Contact us if you want early access to our CVE dashboard for conda-forge.

Closing thoughts

We are immensely proud of how far our tools have come, and we live to serve the open source community. Seeing state of the art robots run with Pixi, or the impact we have on reproducible science in Physics and Pharmaceutical research makes us proud. At our core, we are committed to support and help the Conda community grow, by making it better.

We've thought carefully about pricing that sustains our open-source work while delivering a dependable service. Our channel hosting platform gives you an easy way to set up channels. If you want to increase storage or use it more privately, we now have paid plans that scale with you.

Tim de Jager and Nichita Morcotilo have led this effort for the past three months. It's well-established that turning open source software into a business is hard, and we're grateful for their work in getting us here.

Check out our pricing page to learn more, join our discord for a chat, or contact us directly! We'd love to hear from you! You can also use this link to schedule a meeting with our CEO Wolf.