Avo 4 is here - New UI, New Addons, New Everything

TL;DR;

Avo 4 is here with a new themable and accesible UI, new addons, and hundreds of improvements The two tiers have been split into one big subscription, three bundles or 17 addons (soon 21). You get to pick and choose. 14-day trial is available. Avo 3 customers get 50% off for the first three months and a nice upgrade path. If you don't plan on updating to Avo 4, you can keep using Avo 3 according to the terms.

About 2000 commits and 15 months in the making (a bit longer than we wished for), today we're releasing Avo 4 in General Availability.

About 50 teams have been testing it in a bunch of different configurations and edge-cases had just a few issues popped up. Not to say there haven't been any, but we can't not feel slightly impressed by that 😊

I want to talk to you today about a few things:

What's new? Pricing updates What changes for existing Avo 3 customers? Why do we still need Avo?

1. What's new?

I want to say "a ton".

New UI

First of all the looks. We changed our dated theme to a more modern look which features support for color schemes (light and dark modes), neutral and accent color changes and soon full on themes.

Dark mode

That's all I wanted to say 😎

Tech stack

It runs on Tailwind CSS 4, uses CSS variables to map colors, spacing and layout and a skilled front-end dev (or an LLM) can make what they want out of it.

The layout has changed as well. We took inspiration after teams with better designers like Shopify and Statamic. The spacing, typography, and colors have been greately worked on. We've sweated on the mobile experience as well. We are trying to get as much as we can from every pixel on smaller screens. Accesibility has been improved with a commitment for WCAG 2.2 going forward. Dark mode is here with tuning for the neutral and accent colors.

Like I stated before, this is a total redesign with an emphasis on consistency and a functional design.

Keyboard shortcuts

I (Adrian) am a big fan of keyboard navigation and Avo 3 totally missed this train with only one "internal" shortcut (try r+r+r). This has been a deep rabbit hole for me to get into. I started with simple things like annotating the controls (Back, Create, Edit buttons, and other standard ones) to annotating the actions dropdown and adding full arrow navigation to it.

Then, I noticed that I would love to be able to browse the records without touching the keyboard so I added Shift + t to focus the table (or grid) and then you can do up and down to browse the records with Return navigating to that record. Or you can directly use J/K to navigate without focusing.

Sidebar hiding has its own shortcut. Neutrals and accent colors + color schemes have their own shortcuts. Table, Grid, and Map views get a shortcut. Action controls get shortcuts. Resource search gets a shortcut. Global search gets a shortcut... you get the point.

It's almost VIM mode with Avo now. You, and your users can see all the shortcuts by hitting Shift + ?.

DSLs got some polish

Our Avo 3 to Avo 4 upgrade guide talks about all the DSL tweaks (which are also breaking changes). We only touched those which needed touching. Those which needed adjusting to better APIs.

Addons

Kanban boards

This has been a feature which we've built a while back for a customer and never released. It's coming just in time to create those nice kanban boards to manage your agentic processes 🫣

Forms

I bet some of you were waiting for this feature for a while now. It enables you to use the same def fields DSL to create on off forms where you can capture input form your users. Think of those feedback forms and settings screens.

Reactive fields

Another long-waited banger. You can use Ruby code to have the UI respond to field changes 🙌

Notifications

You can now give your internal tools the ability to respond to your users. Trigger notifications from any part of your app and you get the infrastructure to have seen/unseen, bookmarked, and "done" notification system.

Collaboration

This is your own mini chat window on every record helping your team collaborate and stay up to date with what is happening.

You can also use it to have a sort of timeline of what's happening to those records with special listening hooks.

HTTP Resource

This is a big one. Imagine an Avo resource not backed by the database but by HTTP endpoints 🤯 Yes, you heard that right. You'll be able to hook up any JSON API to your internal tool in a very perfomant way. It supports reads and writes and of course most of the fields and resource options.

JSON API

Another piece you can take out from your maintenance rotation. Avo now generates full-on REST-full JSON APIs fro your resources which you can use with other apps and your agents.

Extracted other features into Addons

We took the time to extract all of the other features from a few gems which bundled them together to separate gems and addons so now you get to pick and choose which oens you want.

Hundreds of under and over the hood improvements

You'll see that the Global Search has been totally overhauled, and that the Resource Search is in-page now. Besides the new features, there have been hundreds of tiny improvements in our existing addons like Dashboards, Dynamic Filters, Nested Records, Menu, Custom controls, and, of course, the main Avo repo

Still a few features incoming

We are still polishing a few addons for release.

MCP Servers - Similar to the JSON API you'll have an automatic, authorized MCP server at your disposal. CLI & LLM Skill - This is another bit that we can help with and generate for your a fully working CLI and skill for your LLMs to use in your teams workflows. Meta - is an addon which enables you to add dynamic fields to your resource directly in your production app without touching code, no app deployment needed. Backed by an in-memory schema and the Database, it will enable you to have much quicker iteration times. Dynamic Collections - Similar to Meta, you'll be able to create in-memory and database-backed resources right on your server. Imagine what you could do with that, the JSON API and an MCP server 💪

2. Pricing updates

You'll notice that we've change the pricing structure altogether. Instead of two rigid tiers which we had to "shove" new feature into and which had no real connection between themselves, we listened to a lot of your feedback and made a decision.

We un-bundled. Then we bundled, but I'll get into that in a minute.

Unbundled pricing

No two apps are the same or require the same features and some features are more valuable than others. You all told us that in one way or another, and we kinda knew it but couldn't articulate it. Now we did. Every feature is an add-on. Pick and choose whatever you need.

Bundled pricing

After laying them all out "on paper" we figured that some have some commonalities so we bundled them together and offered a big discount versus what they would cost separately. I guess most apps will start with the Essentials Bundle and move their way up.

Get everything!

Yup. And at some point we figured that some of you will just have the whole package so we created an Everything Bundle which gives you, well... everything.

One change

We did do one thing different. We removed the perpetual fallback license. So when you stop paying the subscription, you stop using the product... just like every other SaaS product out there. From Basecamp to Gmail. We had too many folks subscribe and cancel rendering the product to a single-use product.

Everything is a subscription

We know. That's your first thought and probably got a bit mad about it. "Why do I need to pay $20 every month for INSERT_YOUR_FEATURE_HERE?" Well, because we worked a lot to bring all of this to life and still work on it to maintain, keep secure, easy-to-use, and improve. We work on it upfront and the customer pays in instalments... just like every other SaaS product out there 😳

"Yeah, but this is code, not a hosted service." It's actually more than code. It's thinking about it, architecting it, building it, iterating through the bad decisions, collecting feedback, maintenance, security audits, making it work for everyone, etc. We do that so you don't have to.

And, it's also a feature that it's code. You get to run it in your app. It's not a set of APIs where you call a product which is hosted in the cloud, jumping through hoops to make it bend the way you need it. It's living where your app lives. You get to take control as much as you want to.

You get to override partials, CSS, JS, Ruby business logic. Things which you can't do in a cloud product. We don't think of it as "just code".

Also, it's a living piece of code. When something doesn't work, we fix it. We find a way to make it work. Again, we make sure it's secure and worthy of your trust.

So yeah. It's a subscription. It's the way we build a business, pay salaries, donate to open-source, create cool things like the Ruby Passport, and more. We can't do that on a once-pay product, and from what we heard, nobody else really could.

3. Avo 3 to Avo 4 upgrade

Many of you took the leap and are on the latest Avo 4 beta and the upgrade will be a click of a button on avohq.io/projects/latest. All Avo 3 users get a three-month 50% discount upon upgrading. All Avo 3 users get a 14-day trial to test out the features and ensure their production environment works properly.

What if I still like Avo 3?

We know that not everyone is ready to jump on Avo 4. Our answer: keep using 3! When you're ready you can jump on Avo 4.

For as long as you pay a subscription you'll get access to updates. We plan on supporting Avo 3 for a loooong time with security updates and critical bugfixes.

4. Do we still need Avo in this LLM-enabled age?

This is the question that baffled us from November to February.