I am more than willing to pay for NGINX Plus. It supports the authors and company that provides this amazing software. Expecting everything for free and open source is what I despise about the software industry. This anti-capitalist mentality causes great companies with amazing products to go out of business (see RethinkDB) and then everybody both entrepreneurs and developers lose.
Slava > And our users clearly thought of us as an open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee (which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all).
I wish there was a paid version without the heavy duty support cost built into it . The pricing scale up is massive. The cost of a single license in the lowest paid tier is 2500$.
I understand it's because of the support cost - but it makes the adoption very hard. You cannot go from 0$ to 10,000$ overnight. And that's the problem.
If your business cannot afford (let's say) $10,000/year for Nginx Plus then your business is probably still in the phase where you replace that financial cost with labour and you roll your own similar setup using other tools, and you debug and fix the problems yourselves.
And if you're operating at the scale where this doesn't make sense, and you still can't afford $10k/year, then maybe you need VC money? ;-)
> If your business cannot afford (let's say) $10,000/year for Nginx Plus
At my previous business we wanted to use nginx plus, so we asked them for a quote saying we had between 10 and 50 servers running nginx per day (autoscaled depending on load)
We got back a short email saying it's $2500 per server, so $125000/year.
Considering our total hosting costs at this point were around $30-40k, that is absolutely absurd.
>your business is probably still in the phase where you replace that financial cost with labour and you roll your own similar setup using other tools, and you debug and fix the problems yourselves
That is stretch of a statement - maybe you are not entirely incorrect. But the onus is on both sides. I'm also at that stage where I can migrate to traefik or caddy relatively easily... but I dont mind paying 100$ to nginx for something familiar and an almost negligible incremental cost to them.
I am not claiming a magic bullet, but there's a reason why SAAS companies with easy switchability have a gradually increasing payment plan. Instead of heartburn inducing 0-10K USD.
Are they going to compete with Nginx premium features? From http://openresty.org:
> OpenResty® is not an Nginx fork. It is just a software bundle. Most of the patches applied to the Nginx core in OpenResty® have already been submitted to the official Nginx team and most of the patches submitted have also been accepted. We are trying hard not to fork Nginx and always to use the latest best Nginx core from the official Nginx team.
If it wasn't for "open source mentality", the internet would have ossified in the 90s. People wouldn't be able to put up all the interesting individual sites that they do, and there'd be only a few major companies that could provide hosting. So many of the things we take for granted have grown out of side-projects that would never have taken off with a high barrier to entry that is commercial-grade software. Certainly the web wouldn't be as advanced as it is now, as 'vested interests' would have won far more frequently than 'pragmatism'. "Which DB do you use? MSSQL or Oracle?" - RethinkDB would never have gotten off the ground.
> because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in
Well, a production-quality database isn't really a 'developer tool', but even then, there are dev tools that have carved out a comfortable niche for themselves, such as SublimeText.
The problem isn't the open source mentality, the problem for RethinkDB was competing in a saturated market with a major competitor who had already won a lot of mindshare and gained a lot of traction.
Slava > And our users clearly thought of us as an open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee (which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all).