7 ms·

Caddy 0.10.10 Released Along with New Pricing Structure

43 points by stevekemp 9y ago

JamesMcMinn 9y ago
So, launching a product or service 101: speak to your potential customers first to gauge their response and limits. This is a good change. I'm glad they listened to feedback on pricing and removed the header. Had the commercial licence lunched like this, would there still have been unhappy people? Probably, yes, people like to complain and don't like to pay, but I don't think it would have even been on the same scale. Instead, I think the majority of people would have understood that developers need to live. The pricing change seems great - the startup plan looks good (you can pay monthly!), and the price per instance for other commercial use looks much more reasonable.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists. I think it's good they're trying to monetize though, it allows them to keep the lights on a focus on their project full-time without having to hand it off to another major org like Apache or anybody else.
  - JamesMcMinn 9y ago
    > To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists. That's kind of the point though - a quick survey at download time, or a post on a blog describing proposed pricing and the caddy-sponsors header would have given them a lot of the information they needed to make an informed choice. Instead they made assumptions and got it very wrong. Unlike most commercial launches, they already had a large userbase to gather information from, they just chose not to use it.
    - jlgaddis 9y ago
      Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work? Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on? Good luck.
      - JamesMcMinn 9y ago
        > Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work? They've already got something built into the download page to configure plugins. All it would have taken was an additional question and a few radio options: I plan on using Caddy for: [ ] my personal website [ ] my startup [ ] other commercial > Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on? People already follow their social accounts etc. to be notified of updates. Plenty of people will read a post "We're thinking of charging for Caddy", and even a 5% response rate would be in the hundreds or thousands. Plenty of people have done it in much more difficult markets with fewer resources. It's never easy, but Caddy had some good options they never used. Welcome to the world of market research. It's how you avoid launching a bad product at the wrong price. The alternative is getting it very publicly wrong and having to backtrack.
  - agibsonccc 9y ago
    Just want to say: Just because you hand your project over to a foundation doesn't mean it automatically allows full time development. We've moved our open source bits to the eclipse foundation recently..and surprise! We're still the primary developers. Granted, this was recently, but apache projects can also go to the apache attic where they go to "retire". Generally, you still need some sort of revenue stream in there to sustain/subsidize a "community". A lot of apache projects have a company behind them driving development.
- troydavis 9y ago
  This is the real meta-lesson, and particularly that "speak to your potential customers first" doesn't mean just asking sponsors[1], it means asking the entire community that the company hopes to serve. Before making a significant change in business models, best case, publish a blog post explaining the changes (or a few possible scenarios and their perceived pros and cons) and ask for comments. Not being confident enough to do that is probably a sign that the change is higher-risk than is being acknowledged. And even in that case, pick, say, 100 random users and email them for their opinions. [1]: Caddy stated that they asked sponsors, but that they incorrectly interpreted silence as support or at least neutrality.
  - mholt 9y ago
    We asked our sponsors about the header, not the pricing. And we did ask people for information about how they used Caddy but virtually none of the commercial use cases came up. For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private. I'm glad that at least some of them came out of the woodwork this last month. We look forward to more established business relationships in the future.
    - danesparza 9y ago
      "For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private" You're not talking to enough people.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      > For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private. - Everyone who comes to my restaurant loves my food! They all told me that! - So why is no one here? - I don't know. It must be the decor!
geostyx 9y ago
This is a good change. Your typical side project making a few $/month probably doesn't need custom plugin hosting.
egeozcan 9y ago
So now the free official binary distribution doesn't allow commercial use but you can build it yourself from the source (which is licensed under Apache 2.0) and use it commercially for free: """ Q: Which license do I need? A: If your company uses official Caddy binaries internally, in production, or distributes Caddy, a commercial license is required. This includes companies that use Caddy for research. The personal license is appropriate for academic research, personal projects, websites that aren't for profit, and development at home. Q: Is Caddy open source? A: Yes, it is. Caddy's source code is licensed under Apache 2.0, which requires attribution and stating changes made to the code when forking it, using it in your own projects, or distributing it. This website distributes official, compiled Caddy binaries, which are licensed differently. """
- vog 9y ago
  Assuming that one day there will reproducible builds, how will they ever tell apart the legal use from the illegal use of the (bit-for-bit identical) binary?
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    Code signing maybe? Not entirely sure otherwise.
    - vog 9y ago
      How would that work? The signature of the official binary would be also valid for the "other" binaries.
      - giancarlostoro 9y ago
        Code signing involves attaching a certificate from the author which nobody else can reproduce unless a CA is compromised. Think SSL certs to some degree. This only proves identity of person signing it. This would differentiate the binary enough I would think.
mmgutz 9y ago
Can someone explain why this is worth paying for over Envoy or Nginx for commercial use? For personal projects Go and even node Express/Koa seems good enough.
- mholt 9y ago
  If you're already writing a Go application, you probably don't need an instance of your own server in front (I word that carefully because services like Cloudflare can still be valuable). As for why use Caddy over NGINX or similar, I have some thoughts on this that I might turn into a blog post someday, but a few highlights: - Memory safety. No Optionsbleed, Heartbleed, or similar bugs and security vulnerabilities. (Thanks to Go) - The most mature HTTP/2 stack. Caddy uses Go's HTTP/2 implementation which has been around at least a year longer than that of other servers and has been widely deployed in many, many environments. - Some of Caddy's individual features are more mature than that of other servers. For example, Caddy's automatic HTTPS has been around longer than any similar module in other servers. Caddy's TLS stack is also advanced, and rotates STEKs on a regular basis. Caddy has the most mature, robust OCSP implementation. Caddy's QUIC implementation is second only to Google's library. Its markdown rendering and Turing-complete templating features are second-to-none. - Caddy's plugin ecosystem is one-of-a-kind. With plugins, Caddy can do things that other web servers can't do (without writing your own custom modules in C or whatever). - Several of Caddy's features that are freely available are only available in paid versions of other web servers (such as h2 server push and proxy health checking). But, I understand if these are not of value to your business; like any software, it's not for everyone. And like every software, it's not perfect. But it's pretty good.
  - weitzj 9y ago
    Does Caddy handle upstream http/2 proxying (as a gRPC LoadBalancer)?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    As much as I dislike this licensing kerfuffle (it was kind of the nail in the coffin for me, after Caddy's long-time lack of deb/rpm support), all these points are true. Especially the automatic TLS functionality is very valuable and works well.
koolba 9y ago
I'm definitely not target market for this, but even trying to think open mindedly, I still I don't see people paying for this. I just don't get it. It's not specific to Caddy either, I just don't see people paying to install any web server software. The hurdle of coordinating an install that requires any kind licensing vs. something that's baked into the core package repos for my OS makes it a non-starter. Then there's the instance counting. From the FAQ: >> What is an "instance"? > The commercial license grants the right to use Caddy in a commercial context based on how many instances you run or how many employees will be using Caddy ("users") at any given time. An instance is an OS process of Caddy. For example, if you have 2 instances of Caddy in production and 3 web developers using Caddy locally to build your website, that's 5 instances. (A single developer who starts multiple instances of Caddy temporarily in local dev can still just count as 1.) If you also spin up a maximum of 3 containers at a time with Caddy binaries inside it, that's a total of 8 instances. If you distribute Caddy to others, contact us for distributor pricing I'd suggest getting rid of the local developer license. If anything, you want more people using it locally so that they end up using it in production. I know that the vast majority of people will not try things out if they think they're going to be paying $25/mo per developer. Heck, I'd get rid of non-prod pricing entirely. Best of luck on this but I just don't see the commercial angle working out for it. And it's not something like a PaaS or DBaaS where you can offer it as a SaaS.
- sheetjs 9y ago
  There really is no good way to monetize the existing open source product outside of support contracts. Developers will know that building from source is an option. The approach that nginx and other projects use involves an open source core that solves one problem well and a series of proprietary extensions that solve related problems. It's not clear if the caddy extensions are worth paying for, and it's definitely not clear if those solutions are better than nginx offerings
- mholt 9y ago
  The main problem with that is it can be hard to distinguish local development from internal service that is constantly being developed. The line between production and Dev can be complicated or blurry. So to keep things simple it's just straight instance counting. We lowered the price to account for that.
sondr3 9y ago
I really dislike the new download page, instead of just being able to download the piece of software I want I now have to jump through at least three hoops just to get the link. Meh, it's quicker to download Nginx.
edwhitesell 9y ago
> For example, if you have 2 instances of Caddy in production and 3 web developers using Caddy locally to build your website, that's 5 instances. (A single developer who starts multiple instances of Caddy temporarily in local dev can still just count as 1.) If you also spin up a maximum of 3 containers at a time with Caddy binaries inside it, that's a total of 8 instances. This reminds me of Microsoft’s CAL licensing scheme(s). Those were ALWAYS confusing, and [in my experience] rarely followed correctly. I'd wager this won't generate any meaningful revenue, but may open doors for legal action of people in violation. Hopefully that's not the goal.
ozfive 9y ago
At this point after the entire debacle that is the PR mess that this company has made for themselves it's obvious to me and my company that we will be going with NGINX for future projects. This whole situation has left a bad taste in my mouth about Caddy. Spending any more time on this is a waste of time.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

43 points by stevekemp 9y ago

So, launching a product or service 101: speak to your potential customers first to gauge their response and limits. This is a good change. I'm glad they listened to feedback on pricing and removed the header. Had the commercial licence lunched like this, would there still have been unhappy people? Probably, yes, people like to complain and don't like to pay, but I don't think it would have even been on the same scale. Instead, I think the majority of people would have understood that developers need to live. The pricing change seems great - the startup plan looks good (you can pay monthly!), and the price per instance for other commercial use looks much more reasonable.

giancarlostoro 9y ago
To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists. I think it's good they're trying to monetize though, it allows them to keep the lights on a focus on their project full-time without having to hand it off to another major org like Apache or anybody else.
- JamesMcMinn 9y ago
  > To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists. That's kind of the point though - a quick survey at download time, or a post on a blog describing proposed pricing and the caddy-sponsors header would have given them a lot of the information they needed to make an informed choice. Instead they made assumptions and got it very wrong. Unlike most commercial launches, they already had a large userbase to gather information from, they just chose not to use it.
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work? Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on? Good luck.
    - JamesMcMinn 9y ago
      > Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work? They've already got something built into the download page to configure plugins. All it would have taken was an additional question and a few radio options: I plan on using Caddy for: [ ] my personal website [ ] my startup [ ] other commercial > Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on? People already follow their social accounts etc. to be notified of updates. Plenty of people will read a post "We're thinking of charging for Caddy", and even a 5% response rate would be in the hundreds or thousands. Plenty of people have done it in much more difficult markets with fewer resources. It's never easy, but Caddy had some good options they never used. Welcome to the world of market research. It's how you avoid launching a bad product at the wrong price. The alternative is getting it very publicly wrong and having to backtrack.
- agibsonccc 9y ago
  Just want to say: Just because you hand your project over to a foundation doesn't mean it automatically allows full time development. We've moved our open source bits to the eclipse foundation recently..and surprise! We're still the primary developers. Granted, this was recently, but apache projects can also go to the apache attic where they go to "retire". Generally, you still need some sort of revenue stream in there to sustain/subsidize a "community". A lot of apache projects have a company behind them driving development.
troydavis 9y ago
This is the real meta-lesson, and particularly that "speak to your potential customers first" doesn't mean just asking sponsors[1], it means asking the entire community that the company hopes to serve. Before making a significant change in business models, best case, publish a blog post explaining the changes (or a few possible scenarios and their perceived pros and cons) and ask for comments. Not being confident enough to do that is probably a sign that the change is higher-risk than is being acknowledged. And even in that case, pick, say, 100 random users and email them for their opinions. [1]: Caddy stated that they asked sponsors, but that they incorrectly interpreted silence as support or at least neutrality.
- mholt 9y ago
  We asked our sponsors about the header, not the pricing. And we did ask people for information about how they used Caddy but virtually none of the commercial use cases came up. For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private. I'm glad that at least some of them came out of the woodwork this last month. We look forward to more established business relationships in the future.
  - danesparza 9y ago
    "For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private" You're not talking to enough people.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private. - Everyone who comes to my restaurant loves my food! They all told me that! - So why is no one here? - I don't know. It must be the decor!

geostyx 9y ago

This is a good change. Your typical side project making a few $/month probably doesn't need custom plugin hosting.

egeozcan 9y ago

So now the free official binary distribution doesn't allow commercial use but you can build it yourself from the source (which is licensed under Apache 2.0) and use it commercially for free: """ Q: Which license do I need? A: If your company uses official Caddy binaries internally, in production, or distributes Caddy, a commercial license is required. This includes companies that use Caddy for research. The personal license is appropriate for academic research, personal projects, websites that aren't for profit, and development at home. Q: Is Caddy open source? A: Yes, it is. Caddy's source code is licensed under Apache 2.0, which requires attribution and stating changes made to the code when forking it, using it in your own projects, or distributing it. This website distributes official, compiled Caddy binaries, which are licensed differently. """

vog 9y ago
Assuming that one day there will reproducible builds, how will they ever tell apart the legal use from the illegal use of the (bit-for-bit identical) binary?
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Code signing maybe? Not entirely sure otherwise.
  - vog 9y ago
    How would that work? The signature of the official binary would be also valid for the "other" binaries.
    - giancarlostoro 9y ago
      Code signing involves attaching a certificate from the author which nobody else can reproduce unless a CA is compromised. Think SSL certs to some degree. This only proves identity of person signing it. This would differentiate the binary enough I would think.

mmgutz 9y ago

Can someone explain why this is worth paying for over Envoy or Nginx for commercial use? For personal projects Go and even node Express/Koa seems good enough.

mholt 9y ago
If you're already writing a Go application, you probably don't need an instance of your own server in front (I word that carefully because services like Cloudflare can still be valuable). As for why use Caddy over NGINX or similar, I have some thoughts on this that I might turn into a blog post someday, but a few highlights: - Memory safety. No Optionsbleed, Heartbleed, or similar bugs and security vulnerabilities. (Thanks to Go) - The most mature HTTP/2 stack. Caddy uses Go's HTTP/2 implementation which has been around at least a year longer than that of other servers and has been widely deployed in many, many environments. - Some of Caddy's individual features are more mature than that of other servers. For example, Caddy's automatic HTTPS has been around longer than any similar module in other servers. Caddy's TLS stack is also advanced, and rotates STEKs on a regular basis. Caddy has the most mature, robust OCSP implementation. Caddy's QUIC implementation is second only to Google's library. Its markdown rendering and Turing-complete templating features are second-to-none. - Caddy's plugin ecosystem is one-of-a-kind. With plugins, Caddy can do things that other web servers can't do (without writing your own custom modules in C or whatever). - Several of Caddy's features that are freely available are only available in paid versions of other web servers (such as h2 server push and proxy health checking). But, I understand if these are not of value to your business; like any software, it's not for everyone. And like every software, it's not perfect. But it's pretty good.
- weitzj 9y ago
  Does Caddy handle upstream http/2 proxying (as a gRPC LoadBalancer)?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  As much as I dislike this licensing kerfuffle (it was kind of the nail in the coffin for me, after Caddy's long-time lack of deb/rpm support), all these points are true. Especially the automatic TLS functionality is very valuable and works well.

koolba 9y ago

I'm definitely not target market for this, but even trying to think open mindedly, I still I don't see people paying for this. I just don't get it. It's not specific to Caddy either, I just don't see people paying to install any web server software. The hurdle of coordinating an install that requires any kind licensing vs. something that's baked into the core package repos for my OS makes it a non-starter. Then there's the instance counting. From the FAQ: >> What is an "instance"? > The commercial license grants the right to use Caddy in a commercial context based on how many instances you run or how many employees will be using Caddy ("users") at any given time. An instance is an OS process of Caddy. For example, if you have 2 instances of Caddy in production and 3 web developers using Caddy locally to build your website, that's 5 instances. (A single developer who starts multiple instances of Caddy temporarily in local dev can still just count as 1.) If you also spin up a maximum of 3 containers at a time with Caddy binaries inside it, that's a total of 8 instances. If you distribute Caddy to others, contact us for distributor pricing I'd suggest getting rid of the local developer license. If anything, you want more people using it locally so that they end up using it in production. I know that the vast majority of people will not try things out if they think they're going to be paying $25/mo per developer. Heck, I'd get rid of non-prod pricing entirely. Best of luck on this but I just don't see the commercial angle working out for it. And it's not something like a PaaS or DBaaS where you can offer it as a SaaS.

sheetjs 9y ago
There really is no good way to monetize the existing open source product outside of support contracts. Developers will know that building from source is an option. The approach that nginx and other projects use involves an open source core that solves one problem well and a series of proprietary extensions that solve related problems. It's not clear if the caddy extensions are worth paying for, and it's definitely not clear if those solutions are better than nginx offerings
mholt 9y ago
The main problem with that is it can be hard to distinguish local development from internal service that is constantly being developed. The line between production and Dev can be complicated or blurry. So to keep things simple it's just straight instance counting. We lowered the price to account for that.

sondr3 9y ago

I really dislike the new download page, instead of just being able to download the piece of software I want I now have to jump through at least three hoops just to get the link. Meh, it's quicker to download Nginx.

edwhitesell 9y ago

> For example, if you have 2 instances of Caddy in production and 3 web developers using Caddy locally to build your website, that's 5 instances. (A single developer who starts multiple instances of Caddy temporarily in local dev can still just count as 1.) If you also spin up a maximum of 3 containers at a time with Caddy binaries inside it, that's a total of 8 instances. This reminds me of Microsoft’s CAL licensing scheme(s). Those were ALWAYS confusing, and [in my experience] rarely followed correctly. I'd wager this won't generate any meaningful revenue, but may open doors for legal action of people in violation. Hopefully that's not the goal.

ozfive 9y ago

At this point after the entire debacle that is the PR mess that this company has made for themselves it's obvious to me and my company that we will be going with NGINX for future projects. This whole situation has left a bad taste in my mouth about Caddy. Spending any more time on this is a waste of time.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]