Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year.
Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer more effective, and companies in our industry would rather spend several months of developer time building an alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach every new individual coming into the company how to use.
For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time.
The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels.
I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms.
However license management and compliance might be easier if you go with apps from an app store like Apple/MS/Steam/etc..
Through that doesn't really change your arguments point.
Through I also would argue that while some companies are tightly coupled to docker desktop many others are not (and can easily migrate) or need to migrate to other tooling for other non-payment reasons.
If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1).
(1): Through that is only on Linux and it's not a clear cut "this is better" but more a "subtle differences can make it much better but also worse depending on what you do/are looking for".
> (1): Through that is only on Linux
If you only need Docker CLI on Linux, the open source version of Docker works fine, so you don’t need any alternative to the proprietary licensed Docker
The problem I saw firsthand in moving off Docker Desktop for Mac, is (last I checked) nothing else had as seamless networking and filesystem integration on Mac as Docker Desktop does. Funnily enough the Docker Desktop networking stuff is open source (VPNKit), but at the time nobody else seemed to have integrated it with the open source bits of Docker in a way which just worked.
With Docker Desktop for Mac, our Gradle scripts which created Docker containers on the Linux CI infrastructure worked unchanged on macOS. We tried moving to minikube or podman and with both we lost that
True.
Also these $150k+/yr devs are the ones that eventually roll out the next opensource docker replacement...
It was much faster, had the exact fields we needed, and the exact workflow we wanted. It provided email alerts using the rules thst made sense for us and did I mention it was ridiculously faster?
We went from a single developer probably spending a few weeks in a year to maintain/augment a ticketing system that worked really great for us, to paying hundreds of thousands for something that doesn’t work well at all.
Just another day
the 250 person companies are not building the replacement, the 2k+ ones will. And likely ones that fit their internal architecture better so there are productivity gains to be had on top of that
Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime.
The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?
$250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years.
Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means things are slow for a day, developers can't google for easy answers, developers have to port things into our system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs. That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out to "never".
Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the cost of actually having someone actually maintain our replacement product, and the math's even shittier.
This is an extremely aggressive assumption, and affects the entire equation. What happens when you achieve parity in 1 month, because actually, docker isn't that important? nerdctl + containerd basically eliminate my need for docker in a work context. nerdctl only for my local development.
Tech companies with XX thousand employees already have dedicated infrastructure teams of all sorts. This math doesn't feel like it reflects reality of the marginal costs and payoff time.
As I type this my laptop is hot because docker needs to be reset and restarted.
Let's say there was no open source replacement (that's not true, or at least it's not going to be true when Podman and Rancher improve, but for the sake of argument...)
What would prevent Docker from doubling the subscription right now? Tripling it?
That's 5 minutes every day of the year for every single developer, sounds like a large assumption to me.
Your developer costs are also way over the global average.
Nobody seriously cares about docker hub. Nobody cares about the SSO, or the access management, or SCIM. Nobody uses anything but the app that makes it simple to run stuff in MacOS. That’s not worth 270k a year.
Always bear in mind that when "the Internet" complains about some minor price issue, it's usually individuals who are responding.
Individuals tend to have limited cash, and all decisions are cash. They are time rich and cash poor. They run Linux on the desktop over Windows to "save money". [1]
Most companies though are cash rich and time poor. If they can outsource a task for small money then they will. Yes, there's a place where the outsource cost is too high, but that's really high. They run windows on the desktop because that saves time. They'll continue to use docker because switching costs a lot of time.
So Docker will do just fine. Companies are more than happy to spend money. See AWS as exhibit A.
[1] there are many reasons to use a Linux desktop, saving money is the least interesting.
“Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.”
“$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast
“That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.”
2 months later.
"Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs:
Gitlab: 19/m
Docker: 24/m
Slack: 12.5/m
Copilot: 19/m
Office: 12.5/m
Tailscale: 15/m
oslash: 6/mo
pagerduty: 41/m
Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m
Calendly: 16/m
Bonusly: 4.5/m
Snyk: 98/m
Figma: 42/m
Lens: 20/m
Postman: 29/m
Sourcegraph: 99/m
Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m
or:
Jetbrains: All: 78/m
This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group.
That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y
This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period.
So there can easily be overages.
So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce).
That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
You either need these tools to make engineers, sales and other people to provide value and generate revenue, or you don't.
> That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
Firstly, what's take home salary has anything to do with this? Are Swedish developers paying for these tools out of their pocket? These are business expenses. It's disingenuous to use that number.
Secondly, so what? How much do you think it costs for a pilot to fly a plane? The software they need? The hardware they need? While developer needs a $1,000 MacBook and a few optional double digit monthly expenses to generate insane value.
Again, this list is exactly why I don’t want to sell to developers. Because from business point of view these are such minuscule $20 p/m expenses for the value they provide, especially for one of the most highest paying employees these days. And if you think they don't provide enough value, you just cancel the subscription.
It's the cost of making business. And compared to other industries, we in tech are spoiled and we have it very easy.
That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.
Not saying that people couldn't make licenses a bit more friendly. But saying it's expensive to purchase tools you could just not purchase if they weren't worth it doesn't make sense.
> "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
That is wildly optimistic.
The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
this is why you sell it to management or business owners. If they see value, they will pay for it.
Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.
we have roughly 160 developers, sso is a requirement so Business license it is.
160 x24 x12 = 46k + dealing with Budgets + sso Integration
vs telling everyone to install colima, podman, whatever and replacing the commands.
if you need 3 people to replace docker, I have no clue what you are doing.
120 * N * Y vs M * Y looks very attractive for large N and small M, esp when that 120 may suddenly increase without warning (again).
It's still just math.
They should make their revenue by phoning home with private data they can exploit for revenue like everyone else.
They could be a $1B company if they sold code snippets to MS to train their code generators.
Yes… that was sarcasm.
Ten bucks a month for the value that Docker brings is a fantastic deal. I regularly see people pay much more for far less.