> be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github.
Is not a bad option. Devs won’t pay for tools, but their orgs will. Isn’t that how it should be? My plumber’s employer pays for their Rigid $2k hydraulic copper fitting crimper, for example, because it saves time vs sweating pipes (enabling them to do more jobs, and generate more revenue).
Be the hydraulic crimper of dev tools. Expensive, but generating so much value no one batts an eye at paying for it (obligatory patio11 “you’re not charging enough” reference here). Some people will cheap out and pay $100 for the hand crimper and do their crimping by hand; don’t sell to them, they are not evaluating their time value efficiently (or they simply don’t need your tool).
For a recent example of this: Docker, going from $12M to $100M ARR within a year as soon as they started charging enterprise users.
Is not a bad option. Devs won’t pay for tools, but their orgs will. Isn’t that how it should be? My plumber’s employer pays for their Rigid $2k hydraulic copper fitting crimper, for example, because it saves time vs sweating pipes (enabling them to do more jobs, and generate more revenue).
Be the hydraulic crimper of dev tools. Expensive, but generating so much value no one batts an eye at paying for it (obligatory patio11 “you’re not charging enough” reference here). Some people will cheap out and pay $100 for the hand crimper and do their crimping by hand; don’t sell to them, they are not evaluating their time value efficiently (or they simply don’t need your tool).
For a recent example of this: Docker, going from $12M to $100M ARR within a year as soon as they started charging enterprise users.