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I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings wer

I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings. Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry. So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.

georgyo 3y ago
This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    A global enterprise can pay a whole team of senior engineers in Warsaw or Cluj for a million a year.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    You missed my point I think. Terraform is immensely valuable. The open source bits is 90% of that value. An enterprise will _already_ have a team managing terraform infra. Them building the parts they need from that remaining 10% may be cheaper then paying HashiCorp. This is a difficult sell. Also, a ton of Terraform's value comes from the fact that there are modules for everything. Some or developed by HashiCorp but most are developed by vendors or even users who want terraform support.
  - vasco 3y ago
    You've either done a lot of tech sales yourself or bought into the kool-aid software salespeople hand out. Their bread and butter is overstating per-engineer costs and hardware ownership costs, but it doesn't mean they're right. In many places in europe you can hire a team of ~10 engineers already fully loaded for $1 million a year, or like 2 seniors and 4 midlevels or any combo like this. This is based off of 1st hand experience hiring for these salaries.
  - Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
    Yeah, but it buys 3 senior consultants, and they’re a fixed cost/capital expense and can be cut at any time. Operationally, it’s not that expensive to keep a Terraform platform floating. It’s expensive to build, and most companies need it yesterday. But bring in 3 people to support a team to build it in a year, then cut them free when it’s in v1, and leave your team to iterate and update. And now you’re not paying $1mm a year or more after that forever.
elorm 3y ago
> I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Couldn’t keep out a personal dig at Mitchell, who happens to be one of the most unproblematic people at Hashicorp and certainly doesn’t care or participate much in governance ? Seems like a lot of personal feelings were packed into this innocuous-posturing statement.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  It wasn't innocuous or posturing. I actually pack my real feelings about a whole range of topics under this pseudonym all the time. And no, I don't particularly like Mitchell.
  - benterix 3y ago
    In this context I don't see your point. If I remember correctly, Hashimoto was the founder/CEO when Hashicorp products were being released as Open Source. Now he is no longer in charge (doing some development work I think) and someone else took the decision to change the license to BSL. So I don't see any relevancy here.
benterix 3y ago
> Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. To clarify: the products themselves were and still are very good, with minor quirks. As for pricing, there is a class of companies that set extremely high margins (this doesn't apply just to Hashicorp, see the the pricing of Gruntwork which I believe contributes to OpenTofu). This game reduces the number of customers but also the number of problems you need to deal with. This strategy is perfectly fine and I have no complaints - I built my own HA Vault cluster solution and used remote AWS backend instead of Hashicorp Cloud. But the license change was a game changer - Hashicorp is still a strong player in the market, but no longer the default choice.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  We actually used Gruntwork at a past company over paying HashiCorp for enterprise Terraform. Their prices then were around 5k for a ready to go Reference Architecture. Apart from that one-time cost which we didn't pay because we built an RA ourselves, Gruntwork's prices were extremely reasonable. I don't think the comparison here is fair unless Gruntwork's prices have dramatically changed since then (I just checked: seems the same now as it was then). I also don't particularly agree with your clarification on my part. I think their products are slim on features especially in light of what you're paying and a Terraform shop should almost always be opting for a TACoS solution over HashiCorp's.

georgyo 3y ago

This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.

Terretta 3y ago
> 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
- adrianN 3y ago
  A global enterprise can pay a whole team of senior engineers in Warsaw or Cluj for a million a year.
- georgyo 3y ago
  You missed my point I think. Terraform is immensely valuable. The open source bits is 90% of that value. An enterprise will _already_ have a team managing terraform infra. Them building the parts they need from that remaining 10% may be cheaper then paying HashiCorp. This is a difficult sell. Also, a ton of Terraform's value comes from the fact that there are modules for everything. Some or developed by HashiCorp but most are developed by vendors or even users who want terraform support.
- vasco 3y ago
  You've either done a lot of tech sales yourself or bought into the kool-aid software salespeople hand out. Their bread and butter is overstating per-engineer costs and hardware ownership costs, but it doesn't mean they're right. In many places in europe you can hire a team of ~10 engineers already fully loaded for $1 million a year, or like 2 seniors and 4 midlevels or any combo like this. This is based off of 1st hand experience hiring for these salaries.
- Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
  Yeah, but it buys 3 senior consultants, and they’re a fixed cost/capital expense and can be cut at any time. Operationally, it’s not that expensive to keep a Terraform platform floating. It’s expensive to build, and most companies need it yesterday. But bring in 3 people to support a team to build it in a year, then cut them free when it’s in v1, and leave your team to iterate and update. And now you’re not paying $1mm a year or more after that forever.

elorm 3y ago

> I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Couldn’t keep out a personal dig at Mitchell, who happens to be one of the most unproblematic people at Hashicorp and certainly doesn’t care or participate much in governance ? Seems like a lot of personal feelings were packed into this innocuous-posturing statement.

emptysongglass 3y ago
It wasn't innocuous or posturing. I actually pack my real feelings about a whole range of topics under this pseudonym all the time. And no, I don't particularly like Mitchell.
- benterix 3y ago
  In this context I don't see your point. If I remember correctly, Hashimoto was the founder/CEO when Hashicorp products were being released as Open Source. Now he is no longer in charge (doing some development work I think) and someone else took the decision to change the license to BSL. So I don't see any relevancy here.

benterix 3y ago

> Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. To clarify: the products themselves were and still are very good, with minor quirks. As for pricing, there is a class of companies that set extremely high margins (this doesn't apply just to Hashicorp, see the the pricing of Gruntwork which I believe contributes to OpenTofu). This game reduces the number of customers but also the number of problems you need to deal with. This strategy is perfectly fine and I have no complaints - I built my own HA Vault cluster solution and used remote AWS backend instead of Hashicorp Cloud. But the license change was a game changer - Hashicorp is still a strong player in the market, but no longer the default choice.

emptysongglass 3y ago
We actually used Gruntwork at a past company over paying HashiCorp for enterprise Terraform. Their prices then were around 5k for a ready to go Reference Architecture. Apart from that one-time cost which we didn't pay because we built an RA ourselves, Gruntwork's prices were extremely reasonable. I don't think the comparison here is fair unless Gruntwork's prices have dramatically changed since then (I just checked: seems the same now as it was then). I also don't particularly agree with your clarification on my part. I think their products are slim on features especially in light of what you're paying and a Terraform shop should almost always be opting for a TACoS solution over HashiCorp's.