A lot of developers have a "I could build that myself" attitude and they pain has to be very high before they would buy a solution.
This is one of my learnings from the last 6 months. It's much easier to sell to the "business side".
However, building trust is the foundation of any sales process.
Sure you can go top of funnel, still, these people are usually technical, and if they're not, they will most probably push it down the funnel so it'll end up in the Devs lap anyway.
What happens then is the Dev (most probably) will not trust it be lcause he has no reason to.
However, if the communications from that company came to him directly or indirectly through some good "problem-silving" content, then that's a different story.
Very hard to do though. Covering the top and bottom of the funnel is no easy task.
Making money with dev tools is super hard from all I have experienced and seen.
The best way is probably "use locally for free to make your development easier" and then have a "use it as a team" paid tier but still pretty hard. Kind of like docker is free but hosting docker images isn't because that's what business profit from.