The Y Combinator-incubated Meteor JavaScript application platform today announced that it has acquired Percolate Studio, a design and engineering shop with a lot of experience in building and supporting Meteor-based applications. Meteor is going to use Percolate’s expertise for its commercial developer support subscription, which is also launching today.
This is Meteor’s second acquisition. The company bought FathomDB last October.
“With Meteor’s adoption and deployment accelerating, and JavaScript being embraced as the standard for web and mobile apps, we want to be able to deliver commercial-grade support that matches the development experience we are known for,” explained Geoff Schmidt, Meteor’s CEO, in today’s announcement.
The developer subscription is the company’s first paid service — though launching a support business is obviously a very typical play for any open-source product like Meteor.
The new support offering will give developers access to technical support while building their apps, proactive alerts about security issues and the option to set up a one-day, on-site architectural review of their application. Percolate co-founder Zoltan Olah will lead Meteor’s customer success efforts.
We’ve asked Meteor for more details about how it will price its support plans and will update this post once we hear back from them.
“We’ll be offering an annual contract, accessible to any business with the aim of releasing a production app,” Schmidt tells us and notes that pricing “will depend on scope, but you can imagine a couple of thousand of dollars a month for a majority of apps.”
After its initial release in 2012, developers quickly got excited about Meteor, largely thanks to its ease of use (you can write both your front-end and back-end code in JavaScript, and the framework comes bundled with MongoDB as its default database) and focus on real-time applications. What we haven’t seen all that much, though, is Meteor apps that are used in production. That’s probably why this first support offering focuses so heavily on helping developers architect and scale their applications.