Because it feels like a bad investment.

In terms of cash, $1200 a year is a lot to me personally, I'm a student, I have no income, and I'm trying to bootstrap a startup. $1200 could feed me for a year. Even when I had my PhD stipend, $1200 was a months stipend.

I originally chose to use Caddy over NGINX because it made https easy: just download, configure, run. If I have to remove the sponsor code and build it myself, it loses the advantage it had over NGINX because now I've got to spent time creating a build script and updating it whenever Caddy makes changes. With NGINX, sure, I'll have to configure it and letsencrypt, but I'll only ever have to do that once.

What on earth bootstrapped startup needs ~24 Caddy licenses? If you're operating at that scale and not generating revenue, your business won't last long anyway...

I do love the HN community sometimes, that's two people who've told me my startup will fail because I've decided Caddy's commercial licence isn't a sensible option for me, yet neither has actually understood the details of the change.

It's $100/month for 2 instances, you can only pay annually, so $1,200 is the minimum you can pay and it nets you two instances, not 24.

If it was $100 for a year and included 5 license to cover live and dev environments, I'd probably have just bitten the bullet and paid for it. I don't really care for the "basic email support" being offered, I just want to serve web traffic.