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Everyone who has a "Free Team organization" just received the following email: > Docker is sunsetting Free Team organizations > Free Team organizations are

Everyone who has a "Free Team organization" just received the following email: > Docker is sunsetting Free Team organizations > Free Team organizations are a legacy subscription tier that no longer exists. This tier included many of the same features, rates, and functionality as a paid Docker Team subscription. > After reviewing the list of accounts that are members of legacy Free Team organizations, we’ve identified yours as potentially being one of them. > If you own a legacy Free Team organization, access to paid features — including private repositories — will be suspended on April 14, 2023 (11:59 pm UTC). Upgrade your subscription before April 14, 2023 to continue accessing your organization. > If you don’t upgrade to a paid subscription, Docker will retain your organization data for 30 days, after which it will be subject to deletion. During that time, you will maintain access to any images in your public repositories, though rate limitations will apply. At any point during the 30-day period, you can restore access to your organization account if you upgrade to a paid subscription. Visit our FAQ for more information. Basically giving everyone ~30 days to migrate their data (to another host or paid Docker plan) or lose access to it. As a funny side-note, the PDF seems to have been made so you cannot copy-paste text out from it, so no interactivity. But that also means that the "How much does a Docker subscription cost?" doesn't actually have any information about how much a subscription cost, and the link to the page doesn't work. Great work Docker Inc.

candiddevmike 4y ago
Minimum paid teams subscription is $300/yr. I use free teams and will be switching to GitHub or somewhere else because of how short notice this was. Docker really shit the bed on this one.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Potato potato. Like it or not, they ditched a bunch of free loaders and likely turned a significant number of them into paid customers (at least until they have time to migrate). Big corporate players were already paying, so from a MBA penny counting move, it is brilliant.
  - prepend 4y ago
    More likely they disrupted their users and now people are switching off them and hedging against the risk of docker doing disruptive things. They aren’t quite Novell/SCO levels of dumb, but it’s sad to see such a good company spiral into nothingness.
    - imiric 4y ago
      And organizations that don't switch, will begrudgingly pay up to avoid impacting their users, but will be left with a sour taste as they've essentially been blackmailed into paying. There's no way they're turning these orgs into long-term customers. Especially now when there are plenty of alternative image hosts. I don't get why they couldn't charge by usage, or have more granular tiers. For small teams and projects $300/yr is not an insignificant amount. What a tonedeaf and greedy decision, communicated in a terribly unclear way.
      - jen20 4y ago
        Just like Amazon released Finch as a response to the conversion of Docker Desktop to pay-only software, no doubt one of the big players will take advantage of this too.
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        The cost difference between projects must be enormous. Some comments in this discussing refer to projects with many millions of hits. Mine has 5000. A free tier with 10GB of image storage and some small number of pulls per month would be fine.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      The aggressive data retention requirements for the Docker client was the last straw for a lot of enterprises.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Going from $0/yr to $300/yr is a significant kick in the pants, at least for solo devs.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  How will they ever survive without you using the service for free...
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    People use dockerhub, become familar with it and then recommend it. I used to use dockerhub and recommend it at my workplaces, and we did indeed buy subscriptions. Now I don't use it and actively recommend a competitor. Indeed it seems more and more companies will stop using it.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    It's more than free users leaving. I have 2 orgs on Docker Hub, one is paid for my company's private images for our products and services, the other is an org for free images we maintain and give to the community. With this change we'll have to move the free org somewhere else... If we do that we may as well move the paid org too. So now they're losing out on revenue, because I'm not splitting my stuff between two different registries. We'll just migrate to a new one and that registry will get our paid team too.
  - ericb 4y ago
    I'm sure losing any one free-user is inconsequential and even advantageous per free account they rid themselves of. BUT, there's a massive brand-value to being the place, and the company that everyone goes to. Losing that status is something they might not survive, especially in the user-hostile manner they are acting. The hate-your-user approach works only if there are no alternatives and competitors who would like to eat your lunch (github, gitlab).
  - ahepp 4y ago
    Their (mostly free) users are the only asset they have. They didn't invent container technology, they made a nice interface that popularized it. That's fine, they did a good job, but it seems like they are getting funding on the premise that they're somehow going to be able to get money out of everyone running linux containers. What services does Docker actually provide? You don't need a crystal ball to know hosting image tarballs is going to be a very low margin business, even if you have the HUGE advantage of baking your URL into the client. And once you kill that goose, even if it only lays copper eggs, it's not coming back. Once users don't use docker.io, what relevance will the Docker client have?
Sytten 4y ago
I really don't understand the move. No way open source collectives will be able to pay the 300$/y minimum cost for an organisation and there is no way to convert an organisation back to a user. I expect there will be a lot of broken pulling of images on that day.
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  Gitlab registry is maybe the easiest way out of this, either payed or self-hosted using the community version.
  - nicce 4y ago
    GitHub container registry has no limitations for public projects, unlike GitLab.
    - noptd 4y ago
      No limitations for now.
      - folkrav 4y ago
        That could be said of any free container registry out there...
        troyvit 4y ago
        Exactly. Software development is in the middle of a clash with reality. It's just not sensible to expect to pay nothing for a piece of vital infrastructure.
        bongobingo1 4y ago
        100% agreed. Donate to cURL!
    - tedivm 4y ago

candiddevmike 4y ago

Minimum paid teams subscription is $300/yr. I use free teams and will be switching to GitHub or somewhere else because of how short notice this was. Docker really shit the bed on this one.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
Potato potato. Like it or not, they ditched a bunch of free loaders and likely turned a significant number of them into paid customers (at least until they have time to migrate). Big corporate players were already paying, so from a MBA penny counting move, it is brilliant.
- prepend 4y ago
  More likely they disrupted their users and now people are switching off them and hedging against the risk of docker doing disruptive things. They aren’t quite Novell/SCO levels of dumb, but it’s sad to see such a good company spiral into nothingness.
  - imiric 4y ago
    And organizations that don't switch, will begrudgingly pay up to avoid impacting their users, but will be left with a sour taste as they've essentially been blackmailed into paying. There's no way they're turning these orgs into long-term customers. Especially now when there are plenty of alternative image hosts. I don't get why they couldn't charge by usage, or have more granular tiers. For small teams and projects $300/yr is not an insignificant amount. What a tonedeaf and greedy decision, communicated in a terribly unclear way.
    - jen20 4y ago
      Just like Amazon released Finch as a response to the conversion of Docker Desktop to pay-only software, no doubt one of the big players will take advantage of this too.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      The cost difference between projects must be enormous. Some comments in this discussing refer to projects with many millions of hits. Mine has 5000. A free tier with 10GB of image storage and some small number of pulls per month would be fine.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    The aggressive data retention requirements for the Docker client was the last straw for a lot of enterprises.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Going from $0/yr to $300/yr is a significant kick in the pants, at least for solo devs.
dahfizz 4y ago
How will they ever survive without you using the service for free...
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  People use dockerhub, become familar with it and then recommend it. I used to use dockerhub and recommend it at my workplaces, and we did indeed buy subscriptions. Now I don't use it and actively recommend a competitor. Indeed it seems more and more companies will stop using it.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  It's more than free users leaving. I have 2 orgs on Docker Hub, one is paid for my company's private images for our products and services, the other is an org for free images we maintain and give to the community. With this change we'll have to move the free org somewhere else... If we do that we may as well move the paid org too. So now they're losing out on revenue, because I'm not splitting my stuff between two different registries. We'll just migrate to a new one and that registry will get our paid team too.
- ericb 4y ago
  I'm sure losing any one free-user is inconsequential and even advantageous per free account they rid themselves of. BUT, there's a massive brand-value to being the place, and the company that everyone goes to. Losing that status is something they might not survive, especially in the user-hostile manner they are acting. The hate-your-user approach works only if there are no alternatives and competitors who would like to eat your lunch (github, gitlab).
- ahepp 4y ago
  Their (mostly free) users are the only asset they have. They didn't invent container technology, they made a nice interface that popularized it. That's fine, they did a good job, but it seems like they are getting funding on the premise that they're somehow going to be able to get money out of everyone running linux containers. What services does Docker actually provide? You don't need a crystal ball to know hosting image tarballs is going to be a very low margin business, even if you have the HUGE advantage of baking your URL into the client. And once you kill that goose, even if it only lays copper eggs, it's not coming back. Once users don't use docker.io, what relevance will the Docker client have?

Sytten 4y ago

I really don't understand the move. No way open source collectives will be able to pay the 300$/y minimum cost for an organisation and there is no way to convert an organisation back to a user. I expect there will be a lot of broken pulling of images on that day.

Helmut10001 4y ago
Gitlab registry is maybe the easiest way out of this, either payed or self-hosted using the community version.
- nicce 4y ago
  GitHub container registry has no limitations for public projects, unlike GitLab.
  - noptd 4y ago
    No limitations for now.
    - folkrav 4y ago
      That could be said of any free container registry out there...
      - troyvit 4y ago
        Exactly. Software development is in the middle of a clash with reality. It's just not sensible to expect to pay nothing for a piece of vital infrastructure.
        bongobingo1 4y ago
        100% agreed. Donate to cURL!
  - tedivm 4y ago