We’re pleased to announce today the launch of npm Pro, an affordable new tool designed for independent JavaScript developers, and well-suited for consultant work, personal projects, and side hustles. We’re also announcing npm Teams, the new name for the product formerly known as npm Orgs (the feature set remains the same). And finally, we’re seizing this opportunity to talk a bit about our product landscape, and where that’s headed next. Read on to learn more.

Introducing npm Pro and npm Teams

Today’s launch of npm Pro is intended to bring independent developers – whether full-time consultants, part-time developers, or anyone working on a side project – a product clearly made for them. Key features of npm Pro include unlimited public packages, unlimited private packages, and the ability to share ownership of packages with other Pro developers. In addition, Pro inherits some key npm Free functionality and features with: you’ll get basic support and npm Audit (which alerts you to unsafe code), and your dedicated namespace is the same as your user name. At $7 a month, it’s an affordable option for anyone who needs private packages, and works mostly solo or with a small number of collaborators, but for whom team-based packages and permission sets would be overkill.

Along with rolling out this new product, we’re renaming an existing one: What was npm Orgs is now called npm Teams. The focus of this product today, and of our plans for its future, is on team development and collaboration, and this new name better reflects that. It shares two core features with npm Pro – unlimited public and private packages – and it also inherits the benefits of npm Free, but it features team-based management of packages and permissions. In addition, it allows you to create a namespace distinct from user name, so the team project is not permanently tied to any one user.

Our future plans for both Pro and Teams include additional features and functionality specifically designed for each, and you can expect to see us rolling those out over the next year and beyond. (Something on your wishlist? Let us know.)

The npm Product Landscape

Philosophically, we’re fans of the Unix principle that favors small, sharp tools designed for specific purposes, and today’s announcements are about being a bit truer to that philosophy. Admittedly, calling them small might be a stretch, but with Pro and Teams now distinct products, we have the opportunity for further sharpening – two different paths for feature development, each aimed at a different user and set of use cases. And together with npm Free, our most basic product, and npm Enterprise, our tool designed for very large teams at very large companies, we’re closer to our vision of a product line capable of serving the full breadth of the community. Stay tuned though; we’re busily at work on all of the above, as well as some new products in the general area of security and compliance, and we will have more to announce soon.

Finally – and of course – these products sit alongside, and help pay for, the two products you probably know best: the npm Registry and the npm CLI. While npm, Inc. is a regular company like any other, we pay all of the costs (staff, maintenance, and operation) of operating the Registry and building and delivering the CLI, but make it available to the community for free. That’s a labor of love for every one of us here, so we hope you continue to find them valuable as we continue to improve them. But we hope you will consider trying our paid products npm Pro and npm Teams as well.