Throughout my career, I’ve purchased market research from both Evans Data and SlashData. Both organizations offer excellent developer research because they focus only on developers. There are more well-known market research firms, like Forrester and Gartner that offer reports on developers too. If you’re looking for blunt, general trends, these are fine. But, if you need detailed comparative data of developer programs for example, I recommend you look to companies like Evans Data and SlashData. In this article, we’ll look at some recent market research about developer programs that I’ve found very valuable from each of these research firms.
Evans Data Corp.
Evans Data has been around since 1998 and offers a great perspective on how the worldwide developer ecosystem has changed over time across all industry segments. They have an impressive list of clients, pretty much everyone. They have online webinars targeting all facets of Developer Relations. I highly recommend these events to expand your knowledge of the developer ecosystem and to network with your DevRel peers. They have a huge panel of developers around the world from whom they conduct surveys that drive their research results.
To illustrate the value of this data, I’ve obtained permission to publish a single chart from Evans Data depicting how much developers spend on developer programs¹. On average, developers spend between $200 to $5,000 per year on all their developer programs with over 50% spending between $500 and $2000 per year. To get a sense of how things have changed, 5 years ago all pricing categories were approximately equal in percentage. Clearly, developers are spending less on programs now with the sweet spot landing around $1000 per year. Research like this (and the rest of the report not shown here) really helps guide pricing decisions.
SlashData
SlashData was originally founded in 2005, under the name VisionMobile where they initially focused exclusively on mobile developer research. They have since expanded to include developers in all industry segments. SlashData has a great online community of DevRel professionals called DevRelx. If you’re a DevRel practitioner, I highly recommend joining DevRelx. It’s free and a great networking resource.
As an example of SlashData’s research, I’ve obtained permission to use their Developer Program Benchmark which compares Developer Programs by looking at Developer Satisfaction vs. Developer Engagement. Shown below is their Q1 2023 Developer Program Benchmark²:
On both Developer Engagement and Developer Satisfaction, Google ranks at the top, with Microsoft holding strong, and Huawei and Alibaba making strides recently. Three years ago, when I originally wrote this document, Huawei was were Amazon/AWS is now, and Alibaba was was close to where Apple is now. These two have really moved up significantly in the last 3 years. Other notable movements include Meta & Qualcomm moving from the center to their current positions up and to the right. A notable non-mover is NVIDIA staying in roughly the same lower-left quadrant today as they were 3 years ago, and Amazon/AWS has stayed relatively the same, moving only slightly up and to the right over the past 3 years. My previous employer, VMware, has room to grow. As a client, SlashData added VMware to their survey which would both help us understand where we stood and argue for additional resources.
Summary
Obtaining market research about the developer ecosystem is critical for any platform company with developers. Sure, you can survey your own developers, but you can’t easily survey your competitor’s developers. For this, you can lean on these leading developer research firms like Evans Data Corp. and SlashData. What I’ve shown in this brief article scratches the surface of what’s available. To learn more, I encourage you to reach out to these firms I’ve trusted in my career and explore their research offerings.
References
[1] Evans Data Corp, Developer Relations Report, 2022. Published with permission from Evans Data.
[2] Slashdata, Developer Program Benchmarking Bubble Chart, Q1 2023. Published with permission from Slashdata.