--- title: DevPass: growing an AI coding subscription with a passport date: 2026-08-01T10:00:00.000Z edited: 2026-08-01T10:00:00.000Z author: Ismail Ghallou (Smakosh) canonical: https://smakosh.com/blog/devpass-growth-branding reading_time: 8 min (1742 words) Tags: ai, growth, branding --- # DevPass: growing an AI coding subscription with a passport ![DevPass landing page — One key. Every model. Three flat prices.](/assets/blog/devpass-hero.png) In [my last post about LLM Gateway](/building-llm-gateway) I mentioned DevPass in passing as "the single biggest inflection" in the company's growth. This post is the zoomed-in version: how a flat-rate subscription for AI coding tools went from 11 subscription starts in April to 909 in July — hitting the thousand-subscriber mark as I write this — and how an intentionally weird brand — a literal passport, with visa stamps — did a surprising amount of the work. ## What DevPass is [DevPass](https://devpass.llmgateway.io) is a flat-rate plan for developers who live in AI coding tools. Instead of juggling per-token API billing, you pay $29, $79, or $179 a month and get one key that works in Claude Code, OpenCode, Cline, our own DevPass Code agent, and any OpenAI-compatible tool — with access to every model on LLM Gateway, metered transparently at provider rates. The core pitch is a value multiplier: every dollar you pay turns into $3 of model usage. No token math, no anxiety-watching a usage meter, switch or cancel anytime. Those three prices and that 3× multiplier have been constant since day one — every "pricing change" in the product's history was packaging and framing, never the number. ![DevPass pricing — Lite $29, Pro $79, Max $179](/assets/blog/devpass-pricing.png) ## From "LLM Gateway Code" to DevPass The product launched quietly in January 2026 as **"LLM Gateway Code"** — a generic dev-plans page with a Lucide code icon and a hero that said "Dev Plans for AI-Powered Coding." It sold a handful of subscriptions a month. The turning point wasn't a feature. At the end of March we renamed it **DevPass**, and in May it moved to its own domain. The name came first, and the entire visual identity was reverse-engineered from it over the following three months: if it's a _pass_, then agents are travelers, tools get stamped in like visas, and your subscription is a travel document. In May we launched on Product Hunt — "One subscription. Every coding model. Three flat prices." — and tore the launch banners down 24 hours later, recycling the hero slot into an evergreen cost calculator. ## The brand: a passport for your agents Most AI dev tools ship the same visual language: dark mode, terminal green, a bento grid. DevPass got its own system — Bricolage Grotesque display type, an always-dark interactive terminal, and ink. Lots of ink. The passport metaphor became the organizing principle for the entire product: ![The DevPass passport book with agent visa stamps](/assets/blog/devpass-passport.png) - **The PassportBook** on the landing page is an interactive passport you can flip open. DevPass Code — our first-party terminal agent — is the _bearer_; Claude Code, OpenCode, Empryo, Cline, SoulForge, and Autohand appear as hand-placed ink stamps with rotation and blend modes, each with its own border shape and sub-label: "ADMITTED · 2 ENV VARS", "BUILT-IN · /CONNECT". Any OpenAI-compatible tool gets "VISA ON ARRIVAL." There's a proper machine-readable zone at the bottom. - **Reset Passes** — consumable add-ons that reset your weekly premium-model allowance — render as visa-extension stamps you collect, with unused slots drawn as faint dashed outlines like the empty squares of a passport page. - **Public profiles** carry a full **3D passport in three.js**: a navy booklet with guilloche paper you flip page by page, where your plan is the visa sticker, model families are airports with IATA-style codes, coding harnesses are the airlines you fly, and each model you've used gets entry/exit stamps with first-used and last-used dates. Plus a barcode and MRZ strip, because if you're going to do the bit, do the bit. - **The Model Census** survey scores models with 1–5 stamp ratings and APPROVED/DENIED recommendation stamps. - The stamp-in animation eventually became the standard success motion across all our apps, and when our chat product rebranded as "Lounge," it extended the same travel grammar — boarding-pass plan cards, tier codes, a bar-receipt top-up dialog. At one point someone tried to "clean up" the Reset Pass card into our plain design system, and the revert commit message became the brand's mission statement: _"The stamp animation and visa-extension styling are deliberate DevPass brand identity, not decoration."_ The lesson I keep re-learning: a distinctive metaphor, executed consistently, compounds. Every new feature had an obvious visual home ("what does this look like as a passport artifact?"), the brand became instantly recognizable in screenshots on X, and none of it required a design team — just commitment to the bit. ## The growth machine Branding made DevPass memorable; a sequence of deliberate growth features made it grow. **Positioning against the meter.** The landing page runs a "price check" ledger: $29 of pay-as-you-go API credit buys $29 of usage; Cursor Pro's $20 buys about $20; DevPass Lite's $29 buys $87 at provider rates. We shipped programmatic comparison pages against every rival coding plan — OpenCode Zen, Fireworks' FirePass, z.ai's GLM Coding Plan, Qwen — each with structured data and a "Switch in 60 seconds" migration section. **A first-party agent as the front door.** DevPass Code, our OpenCode fork, ships with LLM Gateway as its only provider and a one-click browser login — CLI loopback auth, Claude Code style, no key ever shown. It's listed first on every DevPass surface. Owning the default tool means onboarding friction is ours to fix, not a third party's. **A guarantee instead of a free tier.** DevPass has no free plan — a real constraint when your product is literally API credits. Instead: a 7-day first-month guarantee (cancel within 7 days, we refund the month minus metered usage), repeated under every CTA. The same release replaced every inflated marketing claim sitewide with a single source of truth — numbers went _down_ to defensible floors, "SOC 2 in progress" became SOC 2 Type II only once it was true, and fair-use limits moved onto the plan cards as "no hidden throttling." **Viral loops on profiles.** Public developer profiles (tokens routed, streaks, a GitHub-style heatmap) grew a public leaderboard, a screenshot-ready "Coding Wrapped" card, share actions with stats-prefilled copy, and a copy-paste README badge — four distribution loops, each riding developer status games and backlinks. **Reset Passes: monetizing the cap honestly.** When subscribers hit their weekly premium-model cap, the exhaustion screen offers a Reset Pass ($9/$29/$79, tier-bound, higher tiers include 1–2 per cycle) instead of a dead end. The gates run in both directions: we refuse to sell a pass late in a usage cycle when it can't pay for itself, and show an upgrade prompt instead. A fair-use constraint became a second revenue line _and_ an upsell surface. **The Model Census: community data as marketing.** Quarterly, subscribers rate the coding models they actually pay for. Ratings are usage-verified (you need 50+ requests on a model in 30 days to file), models only publish at five or more responses, and filing an entry earns a free Reset Pass "stamped into your passport." The results are public at [devpass.llmgateway.io/data/2026](https://devpass.llmgateway.io/data/2026): a value-ranked registry backed by 458 verified entries from 377 developers in the first wave. It's honest data competitors can't fake, it gives AI search engines something citable, and the reward loop feeds retention. ![The 2026 DevPass Model Census](/assets/blog/devpass-census.png) **Paid acquisition, tested skeptically.** We ran a small Google Ads search test with proper conversion tracking wired through Stripe before deciding whether to scale. The feedback loop did its job twice: keyword quality scores flagged that ads for "claude code alternative" were landing on a homepage that never said those words — so that query got its own honest comparison page ("The Claude Code alternative that keeps Claude Code," complete with a counterpoint section). Then the traffic report showed 191 paid visitors and zero signups, so paid traffic got a dedicated single-scroll, noindexed landing page. Instrument first, spend second. **Lifecycle work.** Cancellation-feedback surveys, subscriber email campaigns, a win-back campaign to churned subscribers, rollover credits on upgrades (killing the "I'll lose my remaining balance" objection), and duplicate-card abuse blocking. None of it is glamorous; all of it shows up in the numbers. ## The numbers Subscription starts by month, from our PostHog events (unique Stripe subscriptions): | Month | Subscriptions started | | ---------- | --------------------- | | April 2026 | 11 | | May 2026 | 83 | | June 2026 | 230 | | July 2026 | 909 | - **1,007 active DevPass subscriptions** as of August 1, verified directly against Stripe — Lite 602, Pro 335, Max 70 (997 fully paid up, 10 in dunning) - **1,250 subscriptions started** since launch - **5,270 unique visitors** to the DevPass site in July alone — top sources: direct, Google, the main LLM Gateway site, and X - **458 census entries** from 377 developers in the first Model Census wave - **44 Reset Passes purchased** and 215 redeemed (including census rewards) in their first month - LLM Gateway overall passed **$700K all-time revenue with $55.9K MRR**, independently verified via Stripe on [TrustMRR](https://trustmrr.com/startup/llm-gateway) — with DevPass as the fastest-growing line ## What I took away **A name can be a roadmap.** "DevPass" was chosen months before anyone drew a passport. Once the name existed, the whole visual system — stamps, visas, the 3D booklet, the census, even the sibling product's lounge motif — was sitting inside it waiting to be unpacked. Pick names with room in them. **Sell certainty, not tokens.** Developers didn't want cheaper tokens; they wanted to stop thinking about tokens. The 3× multiplier, flat tiers, and the guarantee all sell the same thing: predictability. **Honesty is a growth tactic, not a constraint.** Walking back an over-claimed partner-boost message, revising marketing stats downward, publishing fair-use limits, refusing to sell a Reset Pass that won't pay for itself — every one of these made the next claim more believable. Trust compounds faster than hype. **Make your users generate your proof.** The Model Census turned subscribers into a dataset nobody else has, and paying for it with Reset Passes cost us almost nothing. The best marketing assets get more valuable as you grow. **Instrument before you spend.** The difference between "ads don't work" and "broad match plus the wrong landing page was eating the budget" is a conversion event and an afternoon of auditing. DevPass went from a renamed side-page to the fastest-growing part of [LLM Gateway](https://llmgateway.io) in about four months of focused work. If you're building something similar — or want to argue about whether visa stamps belong in dev tools — [reach out](https://smakosh.com/contact). --- _Originally published at https://smakosh.com/blog/devpass-growth-branding_