If spending was our thing perhaps we'd have gotten into woodworking, or photography, or whatever it is that can take a good chunk of change to get into deeply instead.
The phrase is gold. I understand from this that companies which provide tools and infrastructure for professional developers must not only attract the devs themselves, but also (and maybe more importantly) market/advertise and sell to the "suits", their managers and employers.
Not sure if that's what you intended, but I'm now seeing the value of glossy Gartner magic quadrant BS, and thinking how to apply it in my own projects.
I would have loved to have HashiCorp Vault Enterprise for instance, but the math just wasn't working out to get a feature you can get by... just running more of them.
Also, some developer tools want outrageous prices that are in no way proportionate to their value if you compare them to some standard paid tool (i.e. a JetBrains IDE)
I'm honestly not sure how pricing and licensing will work yet, but there will be some way to try it for free. Maybe something like Docker Desktop: free for personal use, license required for companies? That seems like a risky bet as an indie dev.
There's also the whole question of one-time purchases vs. subscriptions. Subscriptions seem like the optimal model for this, so I'm not sure how to accommodate people who just don't like them.
Would love to hear if you have any thoughts on how it could be done to reach as many users as possible.
My company is just large enough to require Docker Desktop licensing, and a per-seat continuous drip is too much for us. So, if you're looking to differentiate, having a buy-out option that gives permanent access to at least a range of versions would be big.
FontAwesome, TablePlus, and some others I've paid for multiple seats on do this and it's great. Some we just paid for the one year, and others we were able to see enough ongoing value to keep paying on the subscriptions.
That's how it works currently.
