Sourcegraph went dark

I wonder from all the people commenting here how much they relied on Source Graph, and how many actually paid for it. Running an open-source company is hard, just like running any company is. Sometimes you understand there are things you just can't give out for free, and that's part of maturing as a company.

100% this.

Devs have to learn the hard way to behave like the other professionals, want nice things to stay around?

Pay for the tools.

Paying doesn't guarantee anything. There are tons of examples of devs selling out even though their program/SaaS is paid.

Companies are run based on margins, not just subscriptions.

That individual account you are paying for most likely does not have the RoI needed to manage it due to a mix of larger customers abusing individual accounts to get a discount or individual account users overrepresenting themselves in support tickets, asks, and feature requests.

If you don't like the direction a tool you like is going, go build a competitor and manage it to your liking.

For most products, the revenue skew is 80-20 so if you're not part of the 20% you aren't going to be heard.

Until supermarkets and landlords start taking pull requests as payment, it guarantees more often than not.

My company looked into paying Sourcegraph many times in the past, but they were prohibtively expensive every time we checked.

It's 49 USD per user per month for Code Search, like what the hell man? It's more than twice as expensive as Github Enterprise. Almost twice the cost of Gitlab Premium.

At some point it was 100USD per month per dev, I also remember it being "Starts from 5k USD per year", you can find some quotes for that in old submissions regarding Sourcegraph going open, closed, open and closed again.

You mean pay for your own tools and then get fired for circumventing the corporate security policies on what tools you can use?

This tool is $49/user/mo. That’s more than the price I pay for a single 12-core + 64GB RAM server!

Edit: Ah, and it’s 50 users minimum, so the starting price is $2450/mo.

That's so often the case. I was recently looking at supply chain security / SBOM software. "Coincidentally", 3 different vendors with 3 very different products quoted us the exact same annual price for the features we wanted, and that price was on the order of magnitude of "hire someone to do this manually full-time".

There are IMO too many companies that have no tier between Free and Enterprise. I understand the desire to focus on a small number of whales, but can't help feeling like that's leaving money on the table from all the smaller companies who'd be willing to pay something in the middle.

Ouch. That's also well above the threshold where we'd have to get IT approval to use them as a vendor, complete with security reviews, comparison shopping with other vendors, bringing in the legal team to look at the contract, etc. It's not "just" writing a check for $30K and calling it a day.

Pretending to embrace open source while you're getting a foothold and then abandoning it as soon as you become successful isn't "maturing". It's pulling the ladder up behind you.

I expect my employer to pay for the tools they require me to use for my job.

Likewise I pay in various forms (books, donations, one time payment, subscriptions), for the tools I use regularly outside my job, for side projects.

Yes, now do the math, if you owned a company, how much monthly revenue you must get per month to pay everyone at a similar salary level, plus government related taxes, office space, electricity, water.

The unfortunate truth (that I've had to learn the hard way as a founder) is that whole IT approval process is inevitable for any vendor indexing source code.

Even when I've tried to offer lower price tiers, ~every company of 20+ people puts a ton of bureaucracy in place before disclosing source code. Dealing with this bureaucracy has a fixed cost, so it's inevitable that many companies end up excluding the lower end entirely.

The sweetest words in any purchase: "on prem". It avoids so very many such hassles.

Customers who insist on on prem require the most support burden and hassles.

Have you shipped commercial on-prem software? Nobody wants to do it for <$1k. It's miserable.

I have and you're right. But in the context we're discussing here of buying software that has access to sensitive company data, on-prem is so much easier to approve.

I pay for the product, not the company.