· 3 min read
Where do you advertise developer tools without wasting money?
Developers block ads and distrust marketing, so most channels fail them. Where devtool advertising actually works in 2026, and what each channel costs.
Developer tools face the hardest advertising audience there is: people who run ad blockers, distrust marketing reflexively, and buy on documentation quality. That kills most channels and concentrates the survivors. (Disclosure: this is published by BidSurvivor, which appears below with its wallet visible.)
Where developers actually see ads
EthicalAds. The Read the Docs network: text-only ads on documentation pages, where ad blockers are often off and intent is high. Self-serve from the low hundreds, with openly published CPMs — the transparency standard the rest of the industry should envy (we compared it in Carbon Ads alternatives).
Carbon Ads. Same audience at a managed level: hundreds to thousands per month, human in the loop. Right when the budget is real; wrong for a first test.
Newsletter sponsorships. Dev newsletters (JavaScript Weekly and its many siblings) sell one-off placements from roughly $100–500. The audience opens email voluntarily, which already beats display.
Where developers find tools without ads
The uncomfortable truth: most devtool adoption is not ad-driven. GitHub (a public repo with a great README is the channel), Hacker News (unbuyable and unfakeable — an honest Show HN outperforms most paid campaigns), documentation SEO ("how to X" articles that your tool happens to solve), and conference/community presence. Every dollar of advertising competes with these free channels' credibility.
The cheap experiment tier
BidSurvivor — ours. Two twelve-hour slots a day on one board, sold by open auction: empty slots free to claim, outbids from $1.00, $100 of house credit for every account, and every brand's click-throughs published. For a devtool it answers one narrow question at zero cost: does cold, general web traffic click on your one-line pitch? If your tagline can't earn clicks here, it won't earn them at Carbon's prices either — that logic works in both directions, and testing it here is free while testing it there is not. Scale is honestly small; the point is the measurement.
The order for a bootstrapped devtool
- README + docs SEO (free, compounding, the real channel).
- One Show HN when there's something to show.
- A free slot to pressure-test the one-line pitch.
- EthicalAds when there's a few hundred to spend on the audience that converts.
- Carbon and sponsorships when the funnel math is known, not before.
The theme: buy attention only where you can check what it did. Developers extend that courtesy to nobody, and neither should you.