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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> I’m ___, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal

To be honest - it feels weird seeing a company launch a free terminal, in 2022. How will the company make money? How long will this tool be around for? How will this company degrade the experience, or my privacy, so they can make money?

I also don't know how to square my thoughts on the above with the need to have sustainable open source development which no one seems to pay for?

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Anyway, neat to have a new terminal that isn't Electron, but I'll stick to MS Terminal. At least they already have all my telemetry data.

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Here's my idea! A repurposed "sl" (the stream locomotive program) that displays ads every 300 characters you type.

You can target it, ie. if you invoke javac more than once a day, it could recommend local depression clinic services.

We're going to need more analytics on customers use pattern before we can launch this idea publicly though.

Warp engineer here.

The terminal is totally free for individuals. Our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.

We will not degrade your experience: we would never charge for anything a terminal currently does. No paywalls around SSH or features that don't cost us money. We will never sell your data. We treat privacy seriously at Warp: check out www.warp.dev/privacy for more information.

We are planning to open-source parts and potentially all of the terminal.

> Our business model is to make the terminal so useful for individuals that their companies will want to pay for the team features.

why would businesses pay for something that was always free?

selling bottom to top is terrible strategy that rarely works (been there, done that)

you should instead market it to decision-makers who actually have a say what services the business purchases or not

developers have no say in business and have no access to credit cards

basically if you want to sell a terminal app, don't sell a terminal app, instead sell your "productivity platform" and terminal is just needed to "access productivity benefits"

The collaboration tooling stuff sounds interesting. It's the same model as Postman.

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