From our earliest days, New Relic has been all about helping developers do the things they need (and love) to do—better and faster. I get it: I’m a developer who found New Relic as a customer eight years ago when my team needed to see what was happening inside our app and infrastructure. We deployed the agent, and minutes later, we knew precisely what to do to make the project (and our lives) better. New Relic was easy to use, accessible, and just worked. I loved New Relic so much that I joined the company.

Delivering a great experience for developers is why we do what we do at New Relic. We love software and have built a platform that makes building better software possible. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce early access to the free New Relic Developer Edition, which provides two users up to $500 worth of total product usage per month. This is valid for use across the New Relic platform, for non-production workloads, including the same data-retention period as our Pro-level subscription.

At Futurestack New York last month, our CEO and Founder Lew Cirne announced Programmability on the New Relic One Platform (along with a ton of other great stuff, from logging to AI) as part of New Relic’s evolution into the industry’s first observability platform. As Lew said, it’s only a platform if developers can build software on top of it. And access is an important part of making sure developers have what they need to innovate and experiment with this new platform. So in addition to all of the great platform capabilities, training, and sample code we’ve made available, the New Relic Developer Edition now makes it easy to explore the full power of New Relic’s observability platform for free. Once you have access, download the New Relic One CLI, check out our open source apps and code examples, and plug into the community for ongoing support.

You might say that this kind of offering is us getting back to our roots, but we’ve never left. We’ve just built so much great stuff (from Mobile to Synthetics to Logs to programmability) that we need a bigger, better, more comprehensive plan for developers to explore and try out all the things that New Relic has to offer now—as always, to help you build more perfect software.

To learn more and sign up for the New Relic Developer Edition, head over to developer.newrelic.com.