Freeplay

Freeplay built a platform for developing and improving AI applications and agents, combining prompt management, evaluations, and production observability. Engineers, product managers, and domain experts could experiment with prompts and models, review outputs, and turn production traffic into test datasets. Online and offline evaluations connected testing with monitoring, helping teams assess changes before deployment and examine behavior in production.

Co-founders Ian Cairns and Eric Ryan previously worked together at Gnip and Twitter; a 2025 interview identified Cairns as CEO and Ryan as CTO. Freeplay supported two ways to manage prompts: teams could let the platform manage versions so non-engineers could change prompts and models without code changes, or retain their codebase as the source of truth and synchronize templates through the API. Platform-managed prompts could be fetched at runtime or bundled during builds.

Freeplay’s self-serve platform reached general availability in 2025, with customers including Chime, Help Scout, and Maze. Its documentation also described enterprise and self-hosting options. Freeplay’s reported planned shutdown was scheduled for May 15, 2026; completion of that shutdown and continued commercial availability remain unconfirmed.