The setup (February 2025)

  • The company was pushing for profitability on SST's monetization; in February they had one month of money left and broke even at the same time — oddly calm through it. That breathing room let them ask "what do we actually want to build?" 16:14.
  • On hype waves: anything with real potential attracts so much investment that most of it makes no sense, which makes it easy to dismiss the whole wave — but a few things in the wave make a lot of sense, and sitting out entirely means missing those 17:09.
  • They took several AI swings that were abandoned before launch. Then Claude Code became the first AI coding tool that stuck for the team — and Dax's reaction was "why weren't we the ones that built this? We should feel bad about that" 17:31.

The positioning thesis

  • There was a market full of coding agents, but nobody had claimed the open-source territory — and in dev tools (databases, compilers…) the open-source option eventually becomes the default 18:15.
  • Combined with brutal model-provider competition (billions invested; no one letting Anthropic win), a neutral open-source harness that works with all models is a super valuable position. Initial push: ignore the market noise and claim that spot 18:40.
  • "If you get your positioning right, the world just keeps handing you wins you didn't even expect" — they never predicted the exact Anthropic scenario, but the fundamental read was right: companies with billions will use a neutral party to advance their own interests 26:17.

Growth numbers

  • Launched summer 2025 with 3 people (the co-founders); a friend joined to build the initial version (4th), and a designer joined in the fall 19:13.
  • Monthly active users: 650k (Dec 2025) → 2.5M (Jan 2026) → 6.5M (last month) → ~8M projected; next milestone 10M 19:38, 19:59.
  • Unusual signal: growth into the December holidays — with every previous dev-tool product they'd seen a holiday dip and a January spike; this time usage rose even while people were off 20:47.
  • The January explosion was amplified by Anthropic's ban attempt — "Anthropic accidentally put us and them in the same sentence" (see 05) 21:08.
timeline
    title OpenCode monthly active users
    Summer 2025 : Launch (3 people)
    December : 650k
    January : 2.5M (Anthropic ban week)
    Last month : 6.5M
    This month : ~8M, aiming for 10M