Yeah, but it's still a lot for a small project which might easily run on a $5/month VPS. If your project is bigger than this then you don't gain much benefit from caddy: you might as well take half a day to setup certbot with nginx.

>> When I was a student I did managed to buy several software packages, with student discounts, at prices that would be around 100 to 300 euros nowadays.

Did you buy all of those packages yearly and for every one of your clients?

No, one time purchases, without distribution royalties.

And? Supermarkets don't take pull requests.

Good for you, but you can't expect that everybody is in the same situation as you.

Indeed, there are also plenty of stuff I cannot afford and have to contend with cheaper alternatives.

Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum.

>Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum

Sure you can.

And then upstream developers go work for a corporation and everyone downstream comes with their pitchforks to HN, bad luck.

$25 / instance / month. So if you have 5 side projects that make you no money and you want play around with some load balancing, etc you will probably have 3 sites with 1 instance an 2 with 2 each, so 7. Then you will want to play with some docker swarm clustering or whatever and you spread around your instances a bit and you end up with 10 instances. That is $250 / month. Not $250 one-off, but every month. Now you are paying $3000 per year for you side projects.

$2000-3000 per year is not something that I am willing to spend on my side projects.

Then search for other cheaper side projects, just like people on other professions happen to do, as they have to pay for their toys.

Software costs nothing to replicate. It's more advantageous to give hobbyists your software for free since they will not pay for any software and you can at least use them to make your software more popular.

Popularity doesn't pay bills.

You can not make money selling software to people who have $0 budget to buy it. Sell software to enterprises and give it away for free for OSS side projects.

Apparently before the FOSS wave they had money.

Because enterprises take it for free. The way you can prevent this is to use AGPL licensing and charge money to use it under a comersial license.

The problem is now no one uses your software because there are endless amounts of more permissive open source software available that work just as well.

>There are plenty of countries where small developers can afford it, US is not the only one.

In most of the world it's a lot though, even for developers. Being able to afford it is another thing than being able to comfortably afford it.