Renovate is Now Part of Mend

We’re excited to announce that Renovate has joined Mend, the world’s leading Software Composition Analysis solution. Read on to learn about the great things this brings to Renovate users. 

Strengthened Open Source

Mend eats and breathes open source security and is excited to continue Renovate’s open-first approach. Like we’ve always done, Renovate’s core features will continue to be developed in our open source repository and OSI-licensed. i.e nothing changes and we’ll continue publishing the Renovate CLI to npmjs and Docker Hub. 

Additionally, we’re really thankful for the 100+ open source contributors to Renovate who have helped make it what it is today, and we want to see that number continues to rise as we encourage community contributions. Speaking of community contributors, we recently added two new maintainers to the project – Jamie Magee and Michael Kriese. Jamie and Michael have been long-time contributors to Renovate and authored some great features. Jamie was even interviewed by Microsoft recently about his work on Renovate here and also gave a great introductory presentation at Copenhagen JS. Naturally, I’ll continue my work as Renovate maintainer too, and find some new colleagues to contribute with me soon.

Speaking of open source features, did you know that Renovate recently added support for Helm Charts, and Cocoapods support is in the final stages of development?

Everybody Gets a Car

Thanks to Mend, Renovate’s offerings will now be entirely FREE.

Prior to the acquisition, Renovate had two paid offerings – a hosted GitHub App with plans for private repositories, as well as a Renovate Pro edition for self-hosted GitHub Enterprise and GitLab. We’ve decided to make these both free for all users, because we want to help all developers keep up-to-date effortlessly and use open source freely and fearlessly.

We’ll rebrand the App and Pro editions under the “Mend Renovate” umbrella and make them free with immediate effect. For the app, this means that all accounts can downgrade to our one-and-only free plan on GitHub Marketplace.

For Renovate Pro, it will no longer be necessary to have a time-limited trial mode option available and instead the existing activation approach will be replaced with a simple registration/activation key process. It will be called “Mend Renovate Server”, and bump it to v1.0.0 to begin following strict SemVer releases. Fill out the form here to get you an activation key.

The Future of Renovate

Here’s what we hope to achieve:

• With Mend together with our active open source community, Renovate will extend its cross-platform and multi-language leadership. We want Renovate to cement its place as the “keep absolutely everything up to date” DevOps tool, not limited to just programming languages.
• We’ll continue releasing the now FREE Mend Renovate Server in regular release cycles, keeping things as well-tested and stable as possible. This will provide a good balance with the open source project’s non-stop automated releases. It will remain partially closed source though, as we will develop it in a shared monorepo with some of Mend’s products and benefit from the QA we do there.
• We’ll expand the FREE Mend Renovate app to support Bitbucket Cloud and Azure DevOps in addition to the existing GitHub and GitLab cloud support. With an extended user base, we can gather crowd-sourced dependency data that will make using open source less risky and make updates less time consuming than ever.
• For corporate Renovate users who would like commercial support, you are now welcome to contact Mend’s fantastic customer support team, already experienced and working daily with open source and dependencies. We hope you also enjoy our industry-leading Vulnerability and License management solutions while you’re at it.

Thank You

If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance that you are one of the people I’d like to thank for your support over the past two years. It’s been a whirlwind ride that has seen Renovate go from “something I open sourced in case others found it useful” to a multi-product offering that may not be a household name but is now used by companies that even my kids can recognize. It’s really satisfying to see Renovate find a home at Mend where it can expand its capabilities and user base even further. I look forward to interacting with you for years to come and in the meantime, you can always reach out to me on GitHub, Twitter, or email.