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What is the right way to fund these kinds of tools? Right now, it seems like it only happens a few ways: - be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use

What is the right way to fund these kinds of tools? Right now, it seems like it only happens a few ways: - be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github. - be linux and be a big enough critical piece to where companies actually fund you directly - pay software engineers oodles of money so that they can have leisure time to maintain the plethora of random FOSS software that's out there - leech off the social safety nets of other countries and let engineers subsisting off ramen in the netherlands write your foss software - play the donation-to-COL arbitrage game and write FOSS from a third-world country where a meager stream of USD donations/purchases can sustain you reliably Pretty much every single one of these except the linux one is pretty awful. And we can't all be Linux. The second least problematic is probably the one where you pay engineers shittons of money and then let them do shit as side projects, but it seems really indirect.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
> be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github. Is not a bad option. Devs won’t pay for tools, but their orgs will. Isn’t that how it should be? My plumber’s employer pays for their Rigid $2k hydraulic copper fitting crimper, for example, because it saves time vs sweating pipes (enabling them to do more jobs, and generate more revenue). Be the hydraulic crimper of dev tools. Expensive, but generating so much value no one batts an eye at paying for it (obligatory patio11 “you’re not charging enough” reference here). Some people will cheap out and pay $100 for the hand crimper and do their crimping by hand; don’t sell to them, they are not evaluating their time value efficiently (or they simply don’t need your tool). For a recent example of this: Docker, going from $12M to $100M ARR within a year as soon as they started charging enterprise users.
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toomuchtodo 4y ago

> be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github. Is not a bad option. Devs won’t pay for tools, but their orgs will. Isn’t that how it should be? My plumber’s employer pays for their Rigid $2k hydraulic copper fitting crimper, for example, because it saves time vs sweating pipes (enabling them to do more jobs, and generate more revenue). Be the hydraulic crimper of dev tools. Expensive, but generating so much value no one batts an eye at paying for it (obligatory patio11 “you’re not charging enough” reference here). Some people will cheap out and pay $100 for the hand crimper and do their crimping by hand; don’t sell to them, they are not evaluating their time value efficiently (or they simply don’t need your tool). For a recent example of this: Docker, going from $12M to $100M ARR within a year as soon as they started charging enterprise users.

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