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.
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? ;-)
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 $30-40k, that is absolutely absurd.
That is stretch of a statement - maybe you are not entirely incorrect. But the onus is on both sides. I'm also at that stage where I can migrate to traefik or caddy relatively easily... but I dont mind paying 100$ 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.
> 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.
> 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).