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You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already o

You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud. If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here. This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "His differentiator is being easy to install." Not just easy to install. Easy to install, maintain and extend. Those properties clearly have value, not just for those who can't afford to pay licence costs. The idea there's no market for Caddy is clearly false. As referenced in the linked article, there are already uses of it in commercial organisations, something you're suggesting can't possibly exist as "Nginx and Apache already own that market". The only criticisms I'd make is that the price is too high (in my opinion) and there should've been prior warning given before switching to a paid model, so that companies could budget for it in advance. However, that doesn't mean they won't have paying customers. Note that they've already got commercial sponsors.
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  Price being too high is an interesting question. I've found that people willing to pay, will pay a high price. You don't really gain anything putting it any lower. Those that want it free or else stay the same. Maybe others have different experiences...
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Consider what's cheaper, paying for Caddy under its current pricing structure or paying for a consultant to configure NGINX? If the key selling point of Caddy is that it makes web hosting easier to manage, but you can get around that cost by paying a one-off cost for someone to set up a free, high-performance web server, you've taken away the most of the potential benefits. As a reference, you can see the current pricing structure for Caddy here: https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing Note that the limited time introductory price is still more expensive over a year than paying a consultant for a couple of days to tweak NGINX.
    - AndyNemmity 9y ago
      That doesn't look more expensive than consultant, looks less. That's what I'm saying, if anything I think they may have underpriced that cost. That's way cheaper than most support options I've seen.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        If you're seeing companies spending $600 a day for a devops consultant, I don't know what to say other than you can get much more affordable, high quality advice elsewhere. That said, the super high wages of IT staff in some parts of the US is a frequent source of surprise for me.
- detaro 9y ago
  Related to this is the question of what types of users there are, and after some thinking about it I think that's what confused me most about the announcement. I might be totally off on that, but from my outside impression, there were a bunch of projects suggesting Caddy as a frontend for APIs (to get HTTPS etc), which would often be in a commercial environment. On one hand, great potential sources of customers, on the other hand it seems those using "new" projects like Caddy also are current on other practices: A lot of those projects seemed to be big on container-based deployments. In the HN thread already there were announcements of just building Caddy in the Dockerfiles (or other places of CI/CD) instead of using the official binaries. Once that has happened in one place, it seems likely that would be adopted widely (especially if a project is suggesting Caddy officially, it'll likely include those, since it doesn't want to require users to get Caddy licenses) On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who were looking for a simple server for their personal or small-ish projects. Some are go enthusiasts at the same time: building Caddy likely isn't a big issue for them, if they don't do it already because they tinker with plugins. Some others already use Docker etc, they also likely can switch easily to some process of building it. Others likely aren't, some aren't even much of developers or admins in general, and really were attracted to Caddy because of how simple it is to use (or it was recommended to them on that basis, e.g. as I've done to some people that are more designers or front-end devs). For those, nothing changes if it is just private use and they don't care about the sponsor-header. Otherwise, both options are pretty bad: Suddenly learning how to patch and compile Go projects is, while doable, exactly the kind of thing they wanted to avoid by choosing Caddy. The commercial pricing also is way to high for that: Spending >1k$ on a webserver for a freelancers homepage or a toy project just doesn't make any sense at all. EDIT: Some of the comments regarding "open-source community" also point towards this. Not all your users are open-source developers which consider compiling yourself trivial. This last group is the one for which the changes are the most annoying, and at the same time the group I before thought Caddy was targeting primarily. It likely makes sense for a commercial offering to target other users, but it isn't surprising when this group is making noise. Somewhere inbetween seems to be where Caddy's commercial pricing was targeting: Commercial, using a few Caddy instances for something profitable, and willing to pay over going through efforts to avoid doing so/interested in getting support. Similar to Nginx Plus customers. (Again, I might be totally misreading the situation here, since I'm not exactly part of the community, and certainly not every user falls into these categories)

ZenoArrow 9y ago

> "His differentiator is being easy to install." Not just easy to install. Easy to install, maintain and extend. Those properties clearly have value, not just for those who can't afford to pay licence costs. The idea there's no market for Caddy is clearly false. As referenced in the linked article, there are already uses of it in commercial organisations, something you're suggesting can't possibly exist as "Nginx and Apache already own that market". The only criticisms I'd make is that the price is too high (in my opinion) and there should've been prior warning given before switching to a paid model, so that companies could budget for it in advance. However, that doesn't mean they won't have paying customers. Note that they've already got commercial sponsors.

AndyNemmity 9y ago
Price being too high is an interesting question. I've found that people willing to pay, will pay a high price. You don't really gain anything putting it any lower. Those that want it free or else stay the same. Maybe others have different experiences...
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Consider what's cheaper, paying for Caddy under its current pricing structure or paying for a consultant to configure NGINX? If the key selling point of Caddy is that it makes web hosting easier to manage, but you can get around that cost by paying a one-off cost for someone to set up a free, high-performance web server, you've taken away the most of the potential benefits. As a reference, you can see the current pricing structure for Caddy here: https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing Note that the limited time introductory price is still more expensive over a year than paying a consultant for a couple of days to tweak NGINX.
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    That doesn't look more expensive than consultant, looks less. That's what I'm saying, if anything I think they may have underpriced that cost. That's way cheaper than most support options I've seen.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      If you're seeing companies spending $600 a day for a devops consultant, I don't know what to say other than you can get much more affordable, high quality advice elsewhere. That said, the super high wages of IT staff in some parts of the US is a frequent source of surprise for me.
detaro 9y ago
Related to this is the question of what types of users there are, and after some thinking about it I think that's what confused me most about the announcement. I might be totally off on that, but from my outside impression, there were a bunch of projects suggesting Caddy as a frontend for APIs (to get HTTPS etc), which would often be in a commercial environment. On one hand, great potential sources of customers, on the other hand it seems those using "new" projects like Caddy also are current on other practices: A lot of those projects seemed to be big on container-based deployments. In the HN thread already there were announcements of just building Caddy in the Dockerfiles (or other places of CI/CD) instead of using the official binaries. Once that has happened in one place, it seems likely that would be adopted widely (especially if a project is suggesting Caddy officially, it'll likely include those, since it doesn't want to require users to get Caddy licenses) On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who were looking for a simple server for their personal or small-ish projects. Some are go enthusiasts at the same time: building Caddy likely isn't a big issue for them, if they don't do it already because they tinker with plugins. Some others already use Docker etc, they also likely can switch easily to some process of building it. Others likely aren't, some aren't even much of developers or admins in general, and really were attracted to Caddy because of how simple it is to use (or it was recommended to them on that basis, e.g. as I've done to some people that are more designers or front-end devs). For those, nothing changes if it is just private use and they don't care about the sponsor-header. Otherwise, both options are pretty bad: Suddenly learning how to patch and compile Go projects is, while doable, exactly the kind of thing they wanted to avoid by choosing Caddy. The commercial pricing also is way to high for that: Spending >1k$ on a webserver for a freelancers homepage or a toy project just doesn't make any sense at all. EDIT: Some of the comments regarding "open-source community" also point towards this. Not all your users are open-source developers which consider compiling yourself trivial. This last group is the one for which the changes are the most annoying, and at the same time the group I before thought Caddy was targeting primarily. It likely makes sense for a commercial offering to target other users, but it isn't surprising when this group is making noise. Somewhere inbetween seems to be where Caddy's commercial pricing was targeting: Commercial, using a few Caddy instances for something profitable, and willing to pay over going through efforts to avoid doing so/interested in getting support. Similar to Nginx Plus customers. (Again, I might be totally misreading the situation here, since I'm not exactly part of the community, and certainly not every user falls into these categories)