Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.
Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project.
So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.
Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.
It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.
A vendor that releases some free software and some proprietary software is a proprietary software vendor. (This describes, for example, both Microsoft and nginx.)
The cherry on top is the OpenResty “community”. You know the one that call you an idiot for not pretending Lua is orgasmically good; the one that declares you “just” implement thousands of lines of code because there’s no possible way a useful library could exist; the one with the ecosystem full of awful, worse than js leftpad garbage that hasn’t been updated in three years.
Give me a break. F nginx and openresty.
Caddy has sane defaults for many settings and I only need to add a couple of response headers, drop the domain name, and where to proxy the requests to. It takes care of maintaining things like the list of TLSv1.2 ciphersuites.
Adding more domains takes two lines of config thanks to parameterized includes — another important thing nginx misses that has to be implemented manually via scripts using something like envsubst (or again, full-on automation which is problematic if many of your servers are just a little bit different from each other — for good reasons).
Apache httpd has it by the way: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html
We do pay them, for a bunch of boxes. But I can't afford to run their plus version in front of every microservice. Or even in front of our entry point server. That's 5 times as many machines, plus staged versions of the app, plus other services running on the same boxes.
If you're running anything that is not multithreaded, you're running a reverse proxy in front of it. And even then you can still improve server availability by running a reverse proxy.
I really wish companies would come up with SMB pricing to help us side project hackers out so we could grow into paying for the bigger plans. Also, I understand why they don't. SMB support is a huge PITA.