Levelbrook Developer Tools

A permanent page. It will not quietly change.

The anti‑rug‑pull pledge

We will never paywall a feature that was previously free. Not in a major version, not in a rewrite, not in a “new plan structure”, not after an acquisition.

The five promises

  1. A free feature stays free

    Anything shipped in a free tier stays in the free tier, in that product, permanently. If a paid tier appears later it can only add. This is the promise the name is about, and it is the one most likely to be tested by our own future revenue pressure.

  2. No telemetry — not even “anonymous”

    No analytics, no usage statistics, no crash reporting, no install ping, no “help us improve” dialog. There is no setting to turn it off because there is nothing to turn off. The only network request any of these extensions makes on your behalf is activating a licence key you personally typed in.

  3. Your data is yours, and it is portable on the free tier

    Export of your own data is never a paid feature. If a tool records something about your work, the free tier can get all of it out, in a format you can read, and delete all of it in one action.

  4. A perpetual licence is actually perpetual

    Buy the lifetime option and the version you bought keeps working forever, offline, on every machine you own. Entitlements are Ed25519-signed tokens verified locally, so they do not stop working if a server goes away — including ours.

  5. No dark patterns

    No fake countdowns, no invented scarcity, no interstitial upsell in your editor, no review prompt on install, no bundled second extension, no feature that degrades until you pay. A trial ends by telling you it ended.

Why anyone should believe this

Because the promise is cheap for us to keep and impossible for the incumbents to copy — they already broke it, publicly, and the ratings record it.

  • A widely used HTTP client successor holds a 2.39★ rating — the worst in our entire survey of the category — earned by putting previously free features behind a subscription. Its users' own word for it was “rug pull.”
  • The most-used VS Code Git graph has 15.2M installs and a 4.94★ rating, and has not shipped since April 2021. Its licence blocks forking, so nobody could rescue it.
  • The most-used code runner has 41.7M installs, has been dead 2.5 years, and has telemetry on by default.
  • The most-used .http client has 7.5M installs at 4.91★ and has been unmaintained since 2022.

A pledge is only worth something if breaking it is visible. Every one of these products is an extension you install locally: you can diff a release, watch the network, and read the changelog. If we ever move a free feature behind a paywall, it will be as public as those ratings are.

How we talk about what we ship

The same instinct that makes the pledge worth having makes the marketing constraints below worth stating. These are rules on us, not claims about us.

  • We do not publish install counts, customer counts, revenue or testimonials — because we have none. Nothing on this site has shipped yet. When there are real numbers there will be real numbers; there will never be invented ones.
  • We do not say a product is available until it is. Every product page carries an explicit status, and it says “not yet on the Marketplace” while that is true.
  • We name what is cut, thin or untested on the page that asks you for money — not in a footnote, and not after you have paid.
  • No fake urgency. If there is ever a launch discount it will have a real deadline and a real reason, and it will not reappear the week after it expires.
  • No undisclosed promotion. When we post about our own products anywhere, we say it is ours in the post.

What this pledge does not promise

It is not a promise that every product ships forever, that prices never change for new customers, or that a free tier can never gain a paid sibling. It promises that what you already had, you keep — which is precisely the promise the tools this portfolio replaces failed to keep.

Hold us to it: team@levelbrook.com.