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.
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.