Ten years snuck up on us. It was only a few months ago that we realized how close we were to ten years of shipping Binary Ninja to customers. It’s been an exciting journey and we’ve seen a lot of changes along the way. Our goal was nothing short of shaking up the decompilation market. We wanted to introduce some new ideas and challenge the status quo in how decompilation was done.
Ten Thirteen Years, One Timeline
This post might be finishing off our ten year celebration, but when we looked at the history we had to go back even further to before we started Vector 35! For all the details, check out out interactive timeline: every stable release, every milestone, and the community moments that have made this journey so special.
Let’s look at some of the highlights:
- Vector 35 was founded on January 14th, 2015, and Binary Ninja first went on sale July 23rd, 2016. That’s eighteen months of building before anyone could buy anything. In the meantime, we were self-funding from our work on the Cyber Grand Challenge and other contracting work.
- Two days after we incorporated, we shipped an MMO. Pwn Adventure 3: Pwnie Island ran as that year’s Ghost in the Shellcode CTF. The PwnAdventure series actually predates the company, and all of it is on the timeline in the pre-history section.
- The community existed before the product did. Our Slack went live during the beta, months before there was anything we were willing to sell. The API repository was also live and got its MIT license in April 2016, three months ahead of launch. We’ve always had a healthy plugin ecosystem as that was a goal right from the start!
- Binary Ninja was not a decompiler for its first four years. High Level IL didn’t go a stable build until 2.0 in May 2020. While some of our customers considered MLIL good enough for work, we always considered 2.0 the first “true decompiler”.
- We started with, and remain committed to open source. The original Python prototype, the core architectures, Decompiler Explorer, the Debugger and WARP are all out there under open licenses, a trend we expect to continue into the future.
You can also see how the rate of commits has been increasing over time! Not linear with the team-size, but we’ve been rapidly improving the rate at which we ship featuers, even prior to the advent of semi-trustworthy AI coding.
What the Last Ten Days Looked Like
We ran our first-ever sale. A major 35% off in celebration of the last decade for the last ten days and it’s now closed. If you caught it, thank you! If you didn’t, and you’re reading this before the upcoming 6.0 release and are interested in a commercial license or above, you should still consider buying (or renewing) now before the upcoming price change! (Non-commercial will actually see a price-decrease at the 6.0 launch)
We also gave something away every single day: shirts, bottles, mugs, stickers, a training seat, and several full licenses including an Ultimate license. Winners are listed as they confirm in the original post.
Because we’ve had a number of unclaimed prizes so far, once we let all the 5 business day limits pass, if we have any remaining un-allocated prizes, we’ll do a separate narrower drawing to limit the number of folks who are inelgibile or uninterested.
Alongside all that we published the details behind our upcoming pricing changes, and rolled out a brand refresh – new logo, more character art, and updated styling working its way across the product, the site, and the documentation. There’s even more changes to come with the website, so keep an eye on it!
Thank You
Ten years is a long time to work on one problem, and the only reason it’s been possible is the people who bought licenses, filed bugs, wrote plugins, gave talks, argued with us in Slack about issue priority, and generally made this a community rather than a customer base.
Thank you. Genuinely. We had a great ten days celebrating with you, and we’re looking forward to finding out what the next decade’s timeline looks like.
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