If it were $3675/business/year, I might agree. But $3675/server-instance/year is insanely expensive for many very real businesses. That's $300/month! Imagine a business like Shopify, but with one server instance per customer. No way can you afford to do that if you have to buy nginx pro for each instance. Unit economics still matter to lots of businesses.

That said, you can run quite a big site without any of these features just fine. Also nginx is open source and you can implement these features yourself, either using C or Lua, relatively easily as well.

nginx is a reverse proxy. You're not meant to be running dozens of instances, you're supposed to stick one instance in front of a whole collection of application instances. Your nginx costs don't scale with your server load, they scale with your infrastructure complexity.

Nginx is a lot more than a reverse proxy, including a not too shabby static resouce host. In fact Netflix hosts their videos ultimately from Nginx.

You're saying anything that makes under $4k a year isn't a business, but you're using it to justify that anything that makes under $8k a year isn't a business. Because you're earmarking those profits to go to a vendor, which then are not profits.

Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature? Can you run a small website without throttling these days?

> Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature?

Where is this attitude of entitlement coming from? Are people entitled to use Nginx's code for free? Yes, free software is a wonderful thing, and I do believe that most software should be free. But the reality, in this world, is that software developers need to eat, and relying solely on donations only works for a handful of projects (as does relying on selling support). Open-core is a reasonable middle ground.

If somebody wants to reimplement that feature on top of Nginx and release it under a free license, there's absolutely nothing stopping them. If you want to use an already written and well-integrated version from Nginx themselves, then you can pay up.

On the other hand, though, why does anyone believe they're entitled to a bot-throttling feature for free?

Certainly someone could write and release a third-party, open-source nginx module to do bot throttling, if they wanted to.

Profit is the difference between hobby and not?

Non-profits are not hobbies.

I didn't say anything about profit. Non-profits do (and should) make and spend money, too.

Charities should make money?

Best to you.

It's one cost of so very many these days.

These prices (per instance!) add up; there are many other pieces of software clamoring for their share, hardware costs, networking costs, labor costs. It's death by a thousand cuts.