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The Business Case for DevRel

Why DevRel is worth funding - the network-effects mechanism behind developer-first growth, what neglect actually costs, and how to defend the budget internally.

The question this page answers

What DevRel is has its own page. This page answers the harder question practitioners actually face: how do you justify DevRel investment to leadership, and how do you defend it when budgets tighten?

The uncomfortable context first. In the 2024 State of Developer Relations survey, 61% of respondents said they find it difficult to prove their influence. The same report found 62% of DevRel teams reporting to founders or C-level executives, and 20% directly to the CEO. Read those two numbers together: DevRel sits unusually close to power, and too often shows up there without a business case. That is a dangerous combination, because a function that is visible to executives and vague about its value is first in line when costs get cut.

The business case for DevRel is not "developers like us". It is: developers decide which platforms win, their adoption compounds through network effects, and neglecting them creates real costs that land in other departments' budgets.

Developers decide, then someone signs

The structural argument was made by RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady in The New Kingmakers back in 2013: developers, not their employers, have become the real technology decision makers. Democratized access to software and infrastructure - open source, free tiers, cloud - means the people who build now choose the tools, and procurement formalizes choices already made.

The mechanics have only strengthened since. SlashData estimated the global developer population at 47.2 million at the start of 2025. A developer in that population can adopt your platform on a Tuesday afternoon: free trial, self-serve docs, working prototype before dinner, no salesperson involved. By the time a contract reaches procurement, the technical evaluation is over and switching costs already exist. If your product is something developers touch, you are in a developer-first go-to-market whether you fund it or not. DevRel is the function that runs that motion deliberately, through the roles the team page describes and the activities that make it visible.

The network effect, worked through

A network effect exists when a product gains value as more people use it. For developer platforms the mechanism is concrete, not metaphorical:

  • Every developer who succeeds leaves public exhaust: a Stack Overflow answer, a blog post, an open-source wrapper, example code in a public repo, a forum thread with the fix.
  • That exhaust is onboarding material for the next developer, produced at no cost to you, and it never expires the way a paid campaign does.
  • More adoption means a larger hiring pool that already knows your product, which lowers the cost for the next company to standardize on it.
  • More integrations and community libraries make your platform the path of least resistance for adjacent use cases.
  • And in the AI era, that same public corpus trains the models that now recommend tools and write integration code, so the flywheel extends to developers who are agents.

Each turn lowers the acquisition cost of the next developer while raising the value of joining. That is the flywheel: more people building in an ecosystem makes the ecosystem more attractive to build in. DevRel exists to start that flywheel and remove its friction - which is why the work looks like docs, community, and content rather than ad campaigns.

A worked example: Twilio, in its own SEC filing

The cleanest evidence is a company that built its business this way and then had to describe the machine to investors under securities law. Twilio's Form S-1 states the model in one line: "we acquire developers like consumers and enable them to spend like enterprises." It names the motion explicitly: "Our go-to-market model is primarily focused on reaching and serving the needs of developers. We are a pioneer of developer evangelism and education and have cultivated a large global developer community."

Now look at the funnel shape the filing discloses, as of June 30, 2016:

  • Over 1,000,000 registered developer accounts.
  • Over 100,000 paying customer accounts.
  • Over 30,000 Active Customer Accounts, defined as generating at least $5 of revenue in the last month of a quarter.

Read that ratio correctly: roughly 97% of registered developer accounts were not meaningful revenue, and that was the design, not a failure. The filing is explicit that "big ideas often start small", so developers were given free trials, self-service documentation, and free support to tinker years before a business problem arrived.

The payoff shows up one line down, in the expansion metric. Twilio reported a Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate of 155% for 2015 and 167% for the first half of 2016. At 155%, an existing customer cohort doubles its revenue in roughly 19 months with zero new logos closed. That is what "developers land small and grow" looks like when it finally reaches a financial statement.

When leadership asks why you would fund a million free accounts to get thirty thousand paying ones, this is the answer: developer-first businesses buy compounding expansion revenue with patience at the top of the funnel.

One honesty note, because this page argues against invented evidence in decks: Twilio proves the motion can work, not that it works everywhere. Your version of these numbers depends on product quality, market timing, and execution - which is exactly why the case must be paired with a strategy that names goals and metrics.

What neglect actually costs

The costs of not doing DevRel do not disappear. They move into other budgets, where nobody labels them.

Support load

Every recurring developer question without a good doc or community answer becomes a support ticket, answered one-to-one, at cost, forever. A canonical docs page or a well-run community thread answers it once and then keeps answering it. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a question that arrives ten times a week and takes 30 support-minutes each burns about 65 hours a quarter - the ongoing price of never writing the one canonical answer. Multiply by the dozen recurring questions every platform has, and "we can't afford DevRel" quietly becomes a support headcount line.

Silent churn

Developers rarely complain before leaving. They hit friction during integration, abandon quietly, and choose the competitor whose quickstart worked on the first try. This churn never appears in a CRM, because the "customer" never became one - the deal that dies in a failed integration is invisible to sales reporting. Without someone watching time-to-first-successful-call and onboarding drop-off, you learn about integration friction from win-loss analysis, a year late and one competitor behind.

Docs decay

Documentation rots at the speed of your release cadence, and unowned documentation rots fastest. Every stale page raises support load, extends onboarding time, and teaches developers that your platform cannot be trusted at exactly the moment they are deciding whether to trust it. The AI era raises the stakes: stale and wrong pages are now retrieved and repeated by coding assistants, so a docs bug becomes misinformation with a distribution channel, per writing docs LLMs can use.

Compounding in reverse

Network effects do not pause while you deliberate. The public answer base, the integrations, the community expertise, and the model training data accumulate for whoever invests. If that is your competitor, every quarter of your hesitation is a quarter of their flywheel - and catching up costs far more than keeping up, because you are then competing against compounded output.

None of these costs ever appear as a line item called "no DevRel". They surface as support headcount, lost evaluations, and a developer brand people quietly route around - which is why the case has to be made before the damage is measurable.

Arguing the case internally

Proving influence is the top struggle in the survey data above, so treat the internal argument as part of the job, not an interruption to it. Opinionated guidance on what belongs in the deck and what you should refuse to put there.

Put in the deck

  • Two or three goals with numbers and deadlines, tied to outcomes the business already tracks: adoption, retention, support cost, product quality. The strategy page shows what passes that test.
  • The funnel-shape education. Show the Twilio ratio and set the expectation up front that most developer engagement will never map to a closed deal, by design.
  • A cost-of-neglect estimate in your own numbers: current recurring ticket themes in support hours, onboarding drop-off, stale-docs incidents. Avoided cost is the budget argument finance actually respects.
  • Leading indicators paired with lagging ones: time-to-first-successful-call and peer-answered questions now, retained active projects and expansion revenue later. Say out loud that the lagging ones move quarters after the work does, and wrap both in accountable OKRs.
  • A reporting cadence you will actually keep. The same handful of honest metrics every quarter builds the credibility that a scramble at budget time cannot.

Refuse to promise

  • Per-activity revenue attribution. Developers need multiple touchpoints before they engage, and promising clean attribution sets a trap that springs at renewal time.
  • Marketing-comparable lead volume in the first two quarters. DevRel compounds and paid spend does not - that difference is the reason to fund it, not a defect to apologize for.
  • Community size or pageviews as success metrics. Numbers that can only go up cannot prove anything, a failure mode the strategy page calls metrics theater.
  • Revenue targets DevRel does not control. Sign up for the leading indicators it does control, and show the causal chain to revenue instead of claiming the whole number.

A budget defense assembled the week of the budget meeting has already lost. Report the same honest metrics every quarter so the defense is on record before anyone asks for it.

If your measurement problem is that adoption increasingly happens where analytics cannot see it - inside AI assistants and agent workflows - the measuring AI-driven adoption page covers how to report that honestly too.

Sources & References:

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Definition of Developer Relations

A working definition of DevRel, what it is not, where the function should report, and how the definition shifts with company stage and product type.

DevRel Roles and Responsibilities

The four classic DevRel roles, the modern titles that grew out of them, who to hire first at each company stage, and where the team should report.

On this page

The question this page answersDevelopers decide, then someone signsThe network effect, worked throughA worked example: Twilio, in its own SEC filingWhat neglect actually costsSupport loadSilent churnDocs decayCompounding in reverseArguing the case internallyPut in the deckRefuse to promiseRelated