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Comment by katdork | Hacker News Reader

I'm never sure why people speak so positively of IHP. It's like, yes, I'm a fan of Nix and Haskell, but IHP is effectively paid (at $25/mo! that's not even a paltry sum) for any of the more worthwhile features regarding account management. I have no clue why I'd want to buy into an ecosystem where such features are sequestered away from me by default.

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Most of IHP is available open source and free. Like 99% of it. The IHP Pro features are mostly targeted at people making money with IHP (e.g. companies and freelancers). The idea is that the Pro plan provides a longterm incentive for maintaining the framework. When we make a great framework that creates a lot of value for developers, we will have a lot of paying customers. When we have a lot of paying customers, we can be sure that IHP will be actively developed far into the future.

If you want to learn a bit more about the ideas why we added the paid plan to IHP, check the initial announcement post here https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/blog/6392ad84-e96a-46ce-9ab... :)

I am a paying IHP user, working on it commercially, and I for one support the paid plan.

If I used it for pure hobby, the paid version features wouldn't really matter that much to me anyway, but professionally these are timesavers.

I always get help, and I don't feel bad asking for support. I get listened to when suggesting improvements, and many times they do the job of implementing well thought out suggestions.

It's not purely based on devs working on it on their free time (although some do that as well). The core maintainers have a real incentive to keep the framework going strong.

The paid features are stuff like third-party oauth and Stripe, and does not bring limitations on the framework itself.

So that's some arguments, although biased, by being a fan of the framework :)

I think another element is if you are a single or part of a small team of developers you realize quite quickly the value IHP adds to your project in terms of time savings:SES, Sentry, deployment... Etc. Also When you rely on IHP for anything in production you end up exploring some of the more remote corners of the design and I've found the quality is still very high even for niche features. From this perspective paying the monthly fee to keep the team developing IHP interested becomes a very good investment.

(I’m the author) The only feature in the paid list that I’d agree with you on was support for building docker images. I thought it was silly to charge for <15 lines of nix code that do something so fundamental for a web framework, so I wrote this blog post and convinced the maintainers to make it a free feature.

Now I think the remaining stuff is fine, paying for a stripe integration and oauth libraries doesn’t trigger any alarms for me, personally.

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