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> 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses I have never met a si

by hnarn 4y ago

> 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you? Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term, but there’s no genuine selling point to it long-term and I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, so it doesn’t strike me as particularly sustainable revenue.

iancarroll 4y ago
> Why would you? Because the license often requires it.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Just like I don't know anybody that pays for Oracle... because I live in a bubble.
- hnarn 4y ago
  Oracle had a 2022 yearly revenue of $42.4 billion. If Docker increased their revenue ten-fold it would still be around 40 times smaller than Oracle.
  - rat9988 4y ago
    It's still tangential to his point though.
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Doesn't that prove the point however? If a company as large as Oracle has unseen customers, then Docker definitely does.
  - tinco 4y ago
    So you're saying they could grow to 1.2B ARR and you still wouldn't know anyone who would pay for it? I need to get in on this.
schoolornot 4y ago
If they partner with the Business Software Alliance to start offering bounties, their revenue will drastically increase. They already proved not to give a crap about telemetry in their products. I bet they start using callhomes and registered IP space to figure out quick who is cheating.
unity1001 4y ago
> Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term Huh? I normally pay for Docker for hosting container images for K8 to pull from there. Why wouldn't I pay.
- benatkin 4y ago
  ...because GitLab also has a convenient container registry Also Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, and even DigitalOcean.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    Ok. Docker is also a convenient container registry. And its independent of ALL of those infrastructures so if i cancel any of them or move elsewhere, Im still good. So why should I not pay for Docker?
    - hnarn 4y ago
      > independent of ALL of those infrastructures Ok, so where is Docker Hub hosted? Do they run their own data centers?
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        Irrelevant, because if they move at some point in the future, users won't have to change anything.
    - jen20 4y ago
      > independent of ALL of those infrastructures I want the container registry a local hop away from the thing using the images, not across the public internet…
      - unity1001 4y ago
        That doesn't make a difference. With most of the stuff, images will only be pulled when they are not locally present or stale. Ie pull if not present in K8. So doesnt make any difference.
acdha 4y ago
> I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you? Because it's a hard requirement of the license and their salespeople will call your boss to ask why you're using the non-commercial install for company work?
Patrol8394 4y ago
I think they just cashed out; enterprise had to pay, for now, while evaluating and migrating to free alternatives. I don't think it will be a sustainable growth.
- hnarn 4y ago
  My point exactly, I see very little proof that this is without a doubt a “reboot” of the company from a financial standpoint, it looks more to me like finding income out of desperation while doing nothing to improve the base value prop. But I could be wrong, I don’t wish for Docker to fail more than anyone else.
  - jitl 4y ago
    The essential maxim in all the startup literature is “you’re not charging enough”. That was very much the case for Docker Desktop. At the current price there’s gonna be churn but that’s the case with anything customers pay for.
- jitl 4y ago
  For a 100-300 developer company running macs, I don’t think the current “free” alternatives would be less expensive than paying for Docker Desktop. I managed wrappers around Vagrant when Airbnb was that size and boy howdy did the whole org pay for every bit of the quality difference between Virtualbox+Vagrant and the Docker Desktop of today. I would rather buy a reliable GUI for fiddling and resetting the VM, wrangling file shares etc over implementing it myself. Maybe Colima will get much better but today doesn’t seem like a good choice unless you’re at 500+ devs and want to spend Dev Infra headcount polishing it up & supporting it.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Well, check in a year when alternatives will have both userbase and time to develop.
BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
It's a value-add in macOS-heavy environments since it handles a lot of annoying cross-architecture VM and filesystem management for you under the hood. Of course teams can roll their own alternatives, but that takes more resources (i.e. effort, productivity, money) especially as the number of internal users you need to support grows.
adriancr 4y ago
> I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, Docker hub is cheap enough and convenient enough to compete against self hosted. For self hosting you would need to manage/monitor, factor in redundancy, make it somehow easy to access to other tooling, etc... Just the redundancy and storage would be more then 7$ pro plan dockerhub has. If people already have setups in place for other things then it might make sense. Then there's aws ecr and others... I don't like things that can surprise me when it comes to billing.
shoo 4y ago
i worked in a megacorp on a 1000 person initiative - with hundreds of developers - that had standardised on giving everyone macbooks, and many teams were using docker for mac to develop and run containerised integration tests locally. when the docker pricing model was announced, there seemed to be a pretty strong value proposition to just paying the monthly per-user license fee to continue using the software and not disrupt what teams were doing vs putting the effort into migrating to something else. what were the alternatives? develop a new linux+some other hardware soe, migrate everyone off the macbooks to that, then migrate to podman? etc. it could be done but the switch cost and effort would be a big distraction, and it'd require a lot of re-work and risk to reimplement all the enterprisey things that had been established for the macbook soe (like email, "endpoint protection", video conferencing, etc). another alternative could have been to burn a lot of engineering effort to eliminate the use of local container-based workflows, say, or for someone to build out a developer VM soe so that people could remote into linux machines to develop with podman. it was interesting that a lot of the docker pricing model is about container image storage in docker hub, in the enterprise context i was working in, that job was already been done by running private container registries in the chosen cloud vendor's platform, so the docker hub offering didn't really add any value.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
Some teams in my company happily pay for Docker Desktop because of the ease. I know several other companies in Berlin that do that as well. There is a world outside FAANG and related companies that dominate HN mindspace.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alfalfasprout 4y ago
For companies that use macbooks docker for mac is still much better than the alternatives. It's really not that much $$ at the end of the day. If docker is affecting your bottom line the business is fundamentally flawed. It's not like the pricing is unreasonable.

by hnarn 4y ago

iancarroll 4y ago

> Why would you? Because the license often requires it.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

Just like I don't know anybody that pays for Oracle... because I live in a bubble.

hnarn 4y ago
Oracle had a 2022 yearly revenue of $42.4 billion. If Docker increased their revenue ten-fold it would still be around 40 times smaller than Oracle.
- rat9988 4y ago
  It's still tangential to his point though.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Doesn't that prove the point however? If a company as large as Oracle has unseen customers, then Docker definitely does.
- tinco 4y ago
  So you're saying they could grow to 1.2B ARR and you still wouldn't know anyone who would pay for it? I need to get in on this.

schoolornot 4y ago

If they partner with the Business Software Alliance to start offering bounties, their revenue will drastically increase. They already proved not to give a crap about telemetry in their products. I bet they start using callhomes and registered IP space to figure out quick who is cheating.

unity1001 4y ago

> Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term Huh? I normally pay for Docker for hosting container images for K8 to pull from there. Why wouldn't I pay.

benatkin 4y ago
...because GitLab also has a convenient container registry Also Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, and even DigitalOcean.
- unity1001 4y ago
  Ok. Docker is also a convenient container registry. And its independent of ALL of those infrastructures so if i cancel any of them or move elsewhere, Im still good. So why should I not pay for Docker?
  - hnarn 4y ago
    > independent of ALL of those infrastructures Ok, so where is Docker Hub hosted? Do they run their own data centers?
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      Irrelevant, because if they move at some point in the future, users won't have to change anything.
  - jen20 4y ago
    > independent of ALL of those infrastructures I want the container registry a local hop away from the thing using the images, not across the public internet…
    - unity1001 4y ago
      That doesn't make a difference. With most of the stuff, images will only be pulled when they are not locally present or stale. Ie pull if not present in K8. So doesnt make any difference.

acdha 4y ago

> I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you? Because it's a hard requirement of the license and their salespeople will call your boss to ask why you're using the non-commercial install for company work?

Patrol8394 4y ago

I think they just cashed out; enterprise had to pay, for now, while evaluating and migrating to free alternatives. I don't think it will be a sustainable growth.

hnarn 4y ago
My point exactly, I see very little proof that this is without a doubt a “reboot” of the company from a financial standpoint, it looks more to me like finding income out of desperation while doing nothing to improve the base value prop. But I could be wrong, I don’t wish for Docker to fail more than anyone else.
- jitl 4y ago
  The essential maxim in all the startup literature is “you’re not charging enough”. That was very much the case for Docker Desktop. At the current price there’s gonna be churn but that’s the case with anything customers pay for.
jitl 4y ago
For a 100-300 developer company running macs, I don’t think the current “free” alternatives would be less expensive than paying for Docker Desktop. I managed wrappers around Vagrant when Airbnb was that size and boy howdy did the whole org pay for every bit of the quality difference between Virtualbox+Vagrant and the Docker Desktop of today. I would rather buy a reliable GUI for fiddling and resetting the VM, wrangling file shares etc over implementing it myself. Maybe Colima will get much better but today doesn’t seem like a good choice unless you’re at 500+ devs and want to spend Dev Infra headcount polishing it up & supporting it.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Well, check in a year when alternatives will have both userbase and time to develop.

BHSPitMonkey 4y ago

It's a value-add in macOS-heavy environments since it handles a lot of annoying cross-architecture VM and filesystem management for you under the hood. Of course teams can roll their own alternatives, but that takes more resources (i.e. effort, productivity, money) especially as the number of internal users you need to support grows.

adriancr 4y ago

> I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, Docker hub is cheap enough and convenient enough to compete against self hosted. For self hosting you would need to manage/monitor, factor in redundancy, make it somehow easy to access to other tooling, etc... Just the redundancy and storage would be more then 7$ pro plan dockerhub has. If people already have setups in place for other things then it might make sense. Then there's aws ecr and others... I don't like things that can surprise me when it comes to billing.

shoo 4y ago

i worked in a megacorp on a 1000 person initiative - with hundreds of developers - that had standardised on giving everyone macbooks, and many teams were using docker for mac to develop and run containerised integration tests locally. when the docker pricing model was announced, there seemed to be a pretty strong value proposition to just paying the monthly per-user license fee to continue using the software and not disrupt what teams were doing vs putting the effort into migrating to something else. what were the alternatives? develop a new linux+some other hardware soe, migrate everyone off the macbooks to that, then migrate to podman? etc. it could be done but the switch cost and effort would be a big distraction, and it'd require a lot of re-work and risk to reimplement all the enterprisey things that had been established for the macbook soe (like email, "endpoint protection", video conferencing, etc). another alternative could have been to burn a lot of engineering effort to eliminate the use of local container-based workflows, say, or for someone to build out a developer VM soe so that people could remote into linux machines to develop with podman. it was interesting that a lot of the docker pricing model is about container image storage in docker hub, in the enterprise context i was working in, that job was already been done by running private container registries in the chosen cloud vendor's platform, so the docker hub offering didn't really add any value.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

Some teams in my company happily pay for Docker Desktop because of the ease. I know several other companies in Berlin that do that as well. There is a world outside FAANG and related companies that dominate HN mindspace.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alfalfasprout 4y ago

For companies that use macbooks docker for mac is still much better than the alternatives. It's really not that much $$ at the end of the day. If docker is affecting your bottom line the business is fundamentally flawed. It's not like the pricing is unreasonable.