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The problem is that this market is also one that is familiar to every other engineer. It's is a terrible one to get into because developers hate paying for thei

by rapsey 6y ago

The problem is that this market is also one that is familiar to every other engineer. It's is a terrible one to get into because developers hate paying for their tools.

mekster 6y ago
With a modest pricing, I pay for stuff like JetBrains (even the full package), Office 365, Photoshop and TablePlus as subscriptions and some other one time payments that boosted my productivity. Stuff I don't pay is stuff I feel I can do better if I had some free time and rather gets in the way than properly solve problems and stuff that tries to charge more than what they're worth which can be said for many online developer services.
thu2111 6y ago
Did RethinkDB ever actually attempt to get people to pay for it? The massive, gaping hole at the heart of this analysis is "maybe we failed because we gave our product away for free as open source"?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- williamstein 6y ago
  Yes, my company paid for RethinkDB over a year before they shut down. They sold support to us for $100, and of course their engineers did far more than $100 of bug fixing for us. The reality was that RethinkDB was a very difficult product to create and when you pushed it hard in production it had some serious bugs. The other core issue is that pretty much the same unique problem RethinkDB solved for us (data storage and changefeeds) could be much better solved using a different architecture and better database (PostgreSQL with LISTEN/NOTIFY). https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.htm...
  - thu2111 6y ago
    A support contract for $100 !!! Wow, I thought I'd heard it all but that one is new. Even cheap consultants I know won't sell you only $100 worth of time.
orthoxerox 6y ago
A DBMS is not a developer tool. It's a crucial building block of your application, i.e. your product or service. If a dev tool fails, only the developer suffers. If a DBMS fails, your product/service suffers. Swapping a tried and tested DBMS for another requires a very compelling business case.

by rapsey 6y ago

The problem is that this market is also one that is familiar to every other engineer. It's is a terrible one to get into because developers hate paying for their tools.

mekster 6y ago

With a modest pricing, I pay for stuff like JetBrains (even the full package), Office 365, Photoshop and TablePlus as subscriptions and some other one time payments that boosted my productivity. Stuff I don't pay is stuff I feel I can do better if I had some free time and rather gets in the way than properly solve problems and stuff that tries to charge more than what they're worth which can be said for many online developer services.

thu2111 6y ago

Did RethinkDB ever actually attempt to get people to pay for it? The massive, gaping hole at the heart of this analysis is "maybe we failed because we gave our product away for free as open source"?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
williamstein 6y ago
Yes, my company paid for RethinkDB over a year before they shut down. They sold support to us for $100, and of course their engineers did far more than $100 of bug fixing for us. The reality was that RethinkDB was a very difficult product to create and when you pushed it hard in production it had some serious bugs. The other core issue is that pretty much the same unique problem RethinkDB solved for us (data storage and changefeeds) could be much better solved using a different architecture and better database (PostgreSQL with LISTEN/NOTIFY). https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.htm...
- thu2111 6y ago
  A support contract for $100 !!! Wow, I thought I'd heard it all but that one is new. Even cheap consultants I know won't sell you only $100 worth of time.

orthoxerox 6y ago

A DBMS is not a developer tool. It's a crucial building block of your application, i.e. your product or service. If a dev tool fails, only the developer suffers. If a DBMS fails, your product/service suffers. Swapping a tried and tested DBMS for another requires a very compelling business case.