Pricing

Short answer: no, Echoes does not require access to the codebase! The long answer however depends on your source control manager.

• With GitHub, Echoes does not request repository permissions and is therefore prevented from accessing the content of your files by GitHub itself.
• With GitLab, fine-grained permissions over the API are not available. Although Echoes will not access the content of your git repositories, it is technically in possession of a token that would allow it to do so. We provide a solution for companies looking to mitigate that risk.

You can give members of your organization access to Echoes at no extra cost.

• Echoes billing is strictly based on the number of active contributors to your GitHub or GitLab instance. Inviting additional members to the dashboard will not impact your bill.
• Echoes also support role-based access control (RBAC) on all plans, which makes it possible to grant a read-only access to anyone without risking configuration mishaps.

Echoes reports require day-to-day efforts to be tagged with their intent. This is typically as simple as adding labels to GitHub pull requests or GitLab merge requests, and there are multiple ways in which Echoes makes this task even easier.

• A GitHub pull request or GitLab merge request automatically inherits its intent from the issue it resolves, if any. This makes it possible to express the purpose of the change only once during the filing of the issue.
• Echoes optionally integrates with the most popular issue trackers and follows linked issues to determine the relevant intent without any developer action. For example with JIRA: a pull request may inherit an intent from a linked task, a parent user story, and a parent EPIC, in such way that a single annotation at the topmost level will propagate to the entire subtree.
• Untagged units of work are transparently reported in the dashboards, where they can be linked to an intent directly from Echoes' interface. This makes it extremely easy to tag leftovers and reach 100% coverage in reports.
• When used with GitHub, Echoes integrates with the GitHub Checks API and can report a CI failure when an intent annotation is missing. This behavior is optional, and disabled by default for members of the organization who have not been onboarded to Echoes as well as external contributors.