Happy Valentines Day!
Ower the years, we have gotten used to companies having some of their functionalities as Open Source that are free to use and if you need to do something more enterprise, like having a federated identity management or full production support or a nice dashboard, then you needed a subscription.
And I understand the reason why companies like CloudBee that has a free (like a free puppy) Jenkins and an Enterprise offer and it is nice to be able to use Redis but as soon as you need to cluster, you need to have a good credit card.
Every developer either loves JetBrains IntelliJ or they don’t have anyone that pays for it. And I get it, companies want to get paid for their efforts.
There is one thing that has become more common over the last couple of years: individuals that has created something nice, and now want to monetise it by hiding early access, some of the documentation and exteded versions behind paywalls.
I call it PatreonWare.
I get it, as with any creator, you want to get paid for your effort. And as long as your product is a little familiar thing with a small community that likes what you do, I think it is a good way to get something for your work.
But where do you cross over from being a individ driven software to becoming an actual company? When you start getting invited to talk about your product at conferences? When you have more than 100.000 downloads of your plugin in JetBrains Marketplace?
Like today, I opened a file in a project to add a new component into it. The file is backed by a DSL and a component to generate what I need. It has well over 250k installs. I’ve used this for several years now in almost every projects I’ve been involved with and I like it and I have several times sent the developer some love using Buy Me a Coffee.
But this time, the plugin updated, and after that I got an error message that I did not have a key. Why do I need a key? This plugin is run towards a local server that was started using Docker? Oh, the Docker Image was also updated. And I was using features that has now been moved into the paid version and that required me to sign into my Patreon account and create a subscription for €24/month to get back the functionallity.
I don’t mind that developers put things behind a paywall like Patreon to get something back. I don’t mind that you need to pay to get priority access to ask questions or get help. Not at all.
But all of a sudden slapping all your users with “you need to pay up” is not love.
Happy valentines day!!!
