CC Chris Coyier Chris Coyier A web developer known for building tools and writing for front-end developers, Chris Coyier founded CSS-Tricks, ran it from 2007 to 2022, and co-founded CodePen...

“Nine years of usage of this product, and you never once felt compelled to become a paying customer of it. In a way, I'm not building the next generation of CodePen for you. I'm not. I can't do that. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision. I need to make a new CodePen for new people that aren't you that might be compelled to pay.”

Shop Talk Show · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“Nine years of usage of this product, and you never once felt compelled to become a paying customer of it. In a way, I'm not building the next generation of CodePen for you. I'm not. I can't do that. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision. I need to make a new CodePen for new people that aren't you that might be compelled to pay.” — Chris Coyier, Shop Talk Show

Coyier on complaints about CodePen's redesign from long-time users who never upgraded. He counts those nine unpaid years as the company's own failure, and still says he can't build the next version around those users.

Shop Talk Show · 2026-10-05 Listen to the episode → More from Chris Coyier → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

Shop Talk Show Around 38:54 into the episode
Speaker 2

we're trying to do. And it's, it's mostly fine, you know?

Speaker 1

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, I think like the podcast addressed it really well. Just like, yeah, it's like, you know, we, we know if we're going to launch, people hate new things immediately. You know, that's the default reaction, you know, like

Speaker 2

there's some hard lessons in here. Like, here's an example that, yeah. You, some user has a real affinity for CodePen. They've been using it for a long time, say nine years or something like that. They've never once upgraded. They're a long time user. It's not like they have no value. Maybe they created stuff that got shared around. Maybe there are some inherent markets. Marketing or something, but still not really a strong customer. That's a fail in my book. That's like us failing as a company. Nine years of usage of this product, and you never once felt compelled to become a paying customer of it. In a way, I'm not building the next generation of CodePen for you. I'm not. I can't do that. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision. I need to make a new code pen for new people that aren't you that might be compelled to pay.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2

It's just how it is. You know, I mean, you can't get trapped in by thinking, oh, what a loyal person. Their voice is looms large in this house. It doesn't. It should loom less. I don't want to piss them off. They can hang around. I'm not trying to take anything away from that person. I just can't bake the new thing based on what they say. That's all.

Speaker 1

Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. There is this element of like, cool. Like, I'm glad you like what we have. And, you know, what we have is great, but it was not great enough for you to pay for it. So I would love to architect a tool that people are willing to pay for. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. And if you say, never

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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“I don't need a comment that reminds me about a bug that happened once.” — Dave Rupert, Shop Talk Show “…I don't give a crap what other graphic designers like. It's not a metric that matters to me in musical taste. In fact, I probably have shared less in common with your average graphic designer than I do with a construction worker.” — Chris Coyier, Shop Talk Show