uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust

So how does Astral plan to make money?

Apparently VC(1) so far, I'd assume there will be LTS support contracts and tailored enterprise features down the line; for the moment I'd assume it's just a bunch of talented devs fixing problems they've been tired off / see as long term existencial threats to the python ecosystems.

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/12rk41t/astral_next...

Anaconda makes on the order of 100M a year “solving” data science package management. I would argue it has a significantly worse product, attacking a much smaller part of the ecosystem.

It seems easy to imagine Astral following a similar path and making a significant amount of money in the process.

Anaconda isn't free. I don't want to pay per-seat fees for slightly improved versions of open source tools which is why I'm very skeptical of Astral and uv.

One day they're going to tell me I have to pay $10/month per user and add a bunch of features I really don't need just because nobody wants to prioritize the speed of pip.

And most of that fee isn't going to go towards engineers maintaining "pip but faster", it's going to fund a bunch of engineers building new things I probably don't want to use, but once you have a company and paying subscribers, you have to have developers actively doing things to justify the cost.

Here's a loose answer to that question from uv founder Charlie Marsh last September: https://hachyderm.io/@charliermarsh/113103564055291456

I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).

What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.

An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]

But the core of what I want to do is this: build great tools, hopefully people like them, hopefully they grow, hopefully companies adopt them; then sell software to those companies that represents the natural next thing they need when building with Python. Hopefully we can build something better than the alternatives by playing well with our OSS, and hopefully we are the natural choice if they're already using our OSS.

Enterprises don't care about faster, but they do care an enormous amount about security. Astral is very well positioned here.

In theory, Anaconda solves the next higher level of the Python package management nightmare, namely knowing what versions are compatible with each other. But that could presumably be done on top of uv.

They are hijacking the entire python's ecosystem in a very smart way, that's all. At some point we, probably, will find us vendor locked-in, just because the initial offer was so appealing. Take a closer look at it: package manager, formatter/linter, types, lsp. What's left before it will poke cpython one way or another? Maybe cloud-based IDE, some interesting WASM relationship (but RustPython is not there yet, they just don't have enough money). Otherwise, Astral is on a pretty straightforward way to `touchdown` in a few years. It's both, the blessing, and the curse.

Let's be honest, all tries to bring a cpython alternative failed (niche boosters like PyPy is a separate story, but it's not up-to-date, and not entirely exact). For some reason, people think that 1:1 compatibility is not critical and too costly to pursue (hello, all LLVM-based compilers). I think, it's doable and there's a solid way to solve it. What if Astral thinks so too?

Honestly... I don't really care. If in 5 years they turn around and try to charge for uv we'll still be in a much better place than if we'd all stuck with the catastrofuck that is pip.

I don't think Anaconda is targeting a smaller part of the ecosystem, rather a different but overlapping ecosystem (remember Anaconda does more than just Python, and there's more to data science than Python). Astral I suspect won't try to move outside of Python, which limits what its tools can be used for.