Maybe there's a comp strategy i don't know about - but they've created SO much value for the world.
I will say that people are using spaCy for free because that is what we asked them to do. I chose to make the library free and open-source when I first released it because I had the idea that I would be able to make that work out for me, if I could make this thing that would be useful to people and if they could be convinced to adopt it. And in order to convince people to adopt it, we've been telling people that spaCy will stay free and that we'll continue to work on it. So everything's going to plan here. Even if things weren't working out well for us (and they are), the fault would be entirely ours. I don't think we'd have any right to suddenly say, "Oh none of you jerks are paying, how unfair".
(For the record, we make money from sales of our annotation tool, Prodigy: https://prodi.gy . If you're reading this and you like spaCy, check it out ;)
Please invest more in SEO; I didn't find you guys two weeks ago when I researched different options for audio annotation :D.
Your project was 1 of the 2 instrumental tools in my project to structure the transcripts of every word said on the floor of the New York State Senate over the past ~30 years in order to develop a topic-based “proximity” heuristic (based on CorEx, the 2nd instrumental tool) for which state senators were focused on which issues, based on the things they actually said on the record, not based on their press statements or their voting records (the latter of which doesn’t capture all the information you’d hope it would due to procedural nuances too obscure to detail here).
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Using Amazon ground truth which works fine (although seems quite MVP outside the core functionality e.g wrt reporting or user creation).
What tool have you had success with?