Hello OutSystems Community!

It's been a while since I connected with you, and I would like to start by thanking you for your valuable partnership and continued support. This community is the heartbeat of OutSystems. Hearing stories of your collaboration (like the Kilian Award) and all you've achieved together – the strength of this community – simply blows my mind. 

Last year, we got together again in person at the ONE and NextStep conferences, where I had the privilege of feeling the community's passion up close and where we announced our Generative AI Roadmap, giving you a sneak peek into Project Morpheus. Your excitement for these announcements and the sheer love you expressed for OutSystems were inspiring. Thank you! 

This year, this already large community reached over 737.000 members, crafted more than 6400 components, and granted almost 13.000 OutSystems certifications. It's humbling to look at these numbers. They show we are welcoming more and more developers into the low-code world and changing people's lives through technology – this has been our vision since day one.

I'd like to take a moment to reflect on some of last year's achievements but also to acknowledge some mistakes, as they are an essential part of our growth journey.

The Agile Cloud

When we consider what didn't change last year, the need for agility immediately comes to mind. Having the agility to change and scale continues to be in high demand as it is a decisive factor for business success.

In January, we released the OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) to the general public, giving our customers more power and autonomy to develop cloud-native apps and services with much smaller teams, less effort, and at a fraction of the cost it would take them to build the infrastructure. ODC is now at full speed, delivering cloud solutions to hundreds of customers globally, and we're creating tools to support those who wish to migrate from O11.

I believe that moving to the cloud and adopting a composable mindset is a fundamental step for organizations looking to become more agile, so I was delighted to see OutSystems going strong at number 30 in the Forbes Cloud 100, a list that recognizes the world's best private cloud computing companies.

Artificial Intelligence

Thinking about what did change in 2023, I believe the same pops into everybody's mind – the groundbreaking advancements in Artificial Intelligence with the release of Chat-GPT. For OutSystems, these AI developments created a quantum leap in the research we had started back in 2018 on Machine Learning and AI-augmented software development. We were able to speed up the development of new capabilities and unveiled Project Morpheus for the first time in June.

It was humbling to witness the excitement of the community around our features in development and to see customers looking for ways to innovate and disrupt their businesses using OutSystems. We will continue to invest heavily in our AI roadmap to bring new capabilities into our platform and offer teams more speed, less toil, and more time to focus on making a difference. 

We're on a journey to create the most powerful low-code platform in the world and our community is a fundamental part of it. All the programs we currently have in place (OutSystems MVPs, OutSystems Champions, and our User Research Program) are designed to bring you closer than ever to our product, so that we can learn from each other and win together.

Recent changes in pricing

2023 was a great year, but we also faced some challenges. One of the most difficult ones was the change we made to our pricing model. This community, being as vibrant as it is, shared concerns and raised questions regarding the impact of these changes. We heard you loud and clear, and we value every word – it's how we realize if something's wrong and take action to set it right.

Since we started OutSystems back in 2001, we have believed in an exchange of value where we get paid a fraction of the value we provide to customers. 

Recently, we conducted a change to our pricing model aimed at creating a more balanced exchange of value and cost. Pricing is a complicated issue and changes are always a sensitive topic. The overwhelming majority of our customers understood the reasoning for the change and many benefited from a reduced cost. But we missed the mark with some customers, who were unhappy and shared negative feedback about our pricing and commercial process. This feedback was invaluable. It allowed us to course correct and we will do better moving forward. 

How we are course-correcting

A huge part of our culture since the early days as a start-up was "fail fast", which basically means being quick to acknowledge a mistake, solve it, and learn from it so it doesn't happen again. We are already taking steps to address these specific cases and working on several new initiatives to serve our customers better.

This is to say, we heard you. And even if only a small percentage of you shared that feedback, at OutSystems, one dissatisfied customer is too many. 

In 2024, we will continue to invest heavily in our product and progress on our AI Roadmap so that you can continue to build better software faster, and with the latest advancements the industry has to offer. 

We're living exciting times in the low-code scene, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you build with OutSystems in 2024!

Paulo Rosado

OutSystems CEO