Price Increases for Developer Tools

I think the problem (for humanity) is that there are some users who don’t care about the price and will pay $100 (or $200 or whatever) a year for a diffchecker. And this makes up for that hundred a who might pay $1/year or the thousands where 1% May tip $10 or whatever.

This means that the wealthy few will get tools and everyone else doesn’t use it. Not the end of the world on a case by case basis, but in aggregate leads to a world that doesn’t live up to the digital promise of zero marginal cost, post scarcity digital copies of everything.

People have to eat and creators get to set their prices.

I think the solution is incentivizing more volunteer based development and contribution of open source tools so creators can choose to build stuff and give it away (thanks gnu devs, etc etc).

This is harder for saas stuff so I’m thinking about something where there’s like a cloud commons to donate grid space for things that really need to run remotely but aren’t very computationally intensive so I don’t mind donating 1% of my hosting compute to run the saas equivalent curl to let strangers use it (for good purposes). For example, I’d gladly pitch in compute and disk to run an OSS-version of GitHub but will not donate a recurring monthly amount. This is part philosophy and part because I have unused disk and compute that I can donate without any loss to my own functions.

Dev tools are such an interesting product space. On the one hand, you have a group willing to pay for good tools because they're earning a living using them. On the other hand, it's a population almost uniquely able to and interested in making their own tools.

Just this week I saw yet another new diff/merge tool: https://juxtacode.app/

Seems like a tough market to keep moving up in.