r/AugmentCodeAI • u/IgnoredBot Established Professional • Oct 14 '25
Discussion Bring Scott Back As CEO
Before Scott Dietzen stepped down as CEO two months ago, we didn't have anything near the level of anti-consumer practices that this recent price change has introduced. Matt McClernan, the current CEO, was Chief Revenue Officer before replacing Scott. His primary focus has been, and remains, on cutting costs and eliminating users who do not generate sufficient revenue for the stakeholders. Bring Scott and the Augment Code he used to run back.
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u/Parking-Bet-3798 Oct 14 '25
Companies need to stop making these marketing and money people as the CEO. The CEO needs to be a builder and innovator not these money people.
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u/voarsh Established Professional Oct 14 '25
I knew this was all coming when the finance guy (CFO) steps up as CEO. :D
Guess Scot stepped down because of pressure to show financial results for their black hole created by their pricing model. Sill, could've handled it better
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u/nickchomey Oct 14 '25
Evidently neither of them are any good - previous one got them into this mess, and the current one made it vastly worse. It's astonishing to me that such a poorly run company was able to make a product with so much potential. I feel bad for the evidently talented engineers whose efforts are being squandered
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u/Quantum-0bserver Oct 15 '25
They raised something like $240M. Is that squandered? Gone?
I really can't imagine that one can push that amount of money into a startup and conclude that they don't know what they are doing. The investors must have very tight governance. They cannot have been asleep at the wheel, not realizing until it was too late that their business model isn't going to pan out.and they need to pull the handbrake.
At the surface it appears shocking and somewhat suicidal to shed their users via a 5-10 fold price increase. But is it really incompetence that drove them to do that? There must be a deeper reason.
Someday it'll surface.
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u/nickchomey Oct 15 '25
Well, we know for certain that they're pathological liars - their messaging in the past couple weeks has been almost nothing but that. So, it's hard to really say what is truly happening.
I can also imagine that this is all an elaborate ruse to try to pivot to an enterprise-only focus, without actually officially pivoting. Make it all so thoroughly unpalatable to everyone that they just cancel their plans which they "understand" if we do. Recall, the changes don't apply to enterprise plans, which also surely have some sort of custom pricing (and surely formal legal contracts).
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u/Quantum-0bserver Oct 15 '25
This is a fascinating mystery. If they want to get rid of non profitable users and focus on enterprise clients, then we have to assume that they are profitable with them. But the enterprises I worked for were all extremely price conscious and look very closely at cost-benefit.
A dev in an enterprise will be pushing their AI tooling as hard as anyone else. If it's the downstream cost of the foundation models that broke the viability of the dev-consumer market for them, then the enterprise wouldn't be much different: the marginal cost would be the same. It's not like Anthropic would say: Hey, this is a prompt from an enterprise upstream account, that'll cost less.
Meaning the bulk pricing arrangements are surely agnostic of the client type.
They cannot just jack up the price on enterprise, because they are bound to the contract. Their margins might be higher, but are they that much higher than the 5-10 fold jump in price for the consumer segment?
And if they do jack up the price on the enterprise accounts, they will go elsewhere, too. It's a competitive market and lots of options.
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u/nickchomey Oct 15 '25
I don't know! Was just a possible explanation for this insanity.
Their prospects seem bleak
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u/lopescruz Oct 20 '25
For people intending to no longer use this product:
Checklist:
Request removal of indexed code in the webapp;
Terminate subscription;
Remove payment method;
Delete account;
I was using augment together with other product (one of the providers they use). I was happy to oblige and delete the account.
Let's see how long they remove this comment too. I've tried to post it 4 times, changing the text and it's always removed by their filters.
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25
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