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Comment by umpalumpaaa | Hacker News Reader

I think DevTools can be a very good money maker… I wrote two apps that were basically dev tools and they were the biggest of my money makers. I think it’s easier to make money from dev tools that are “apps” than dev tools that are “fundamental technologies” though so it probably heavily depends on the type of dev tools…

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It's probably also easier to make cottage-industry money from a single useful tool and some associated services/consulting than it is to turn the whole thing into a big company expected to do the hockey stick curve thing (eg Docker).

It'll be interesting to see where Astral ends up landing on that; afaik they have a small team and have only raised seed money, but who knows.

I don't know if it's easier. I definitely think it's better, but there can be a lure to VC money that puts a company like Docker on that path. There's a world where Docker is a small company earning individually good money but with no hockey stick curve, and I think that's more sustainable and ultimately better for them.

I suppose they might disagree, of course :)

Docker was not gonna make it as a small individual tool as something podman like would get traction in that market.

Maybe, but I think it could have made a small team very wealthy and successful much more than it did a large company.

It was obviously pitched as an ecosystem/platform play, like "the next vmware" or something, but there was never anything close to a real moat there. Running a registry involved a lot of storage and transfer costs plus spam/abuse management, and private registry was always going to be a better fit for being integrated with CI platforms and the like more than a standalone service with its own auth and billing concerns.

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