It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it.
In a year or two I think some of the companies that paid for licenses to avoid migrating are going to rethink their license costs, because the free alternatives will be just as good as Docker Desktop. Then we will see whether this revenue increase was sustainable or simply the transient result of holding customers hostage when they had no alternatives but to pay.
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.
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.
We don’t know where the gp is posting from; btw in places like London or Berlin a dev can make 2x that figure.
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.
IMO they need to improve documentation and drop the facade that it’s 1:1 Docker.
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.
Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.
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.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/However license management and compliance might be easier if you go with apps from an app store like Apple/MS/Steam/etc..
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
“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."
> "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.
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.
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.
Especially in this industry where you’re inevitably in competition with free software as well.
That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.
Whether you buy it, borrow it or build it; you’re locked in to the chosen solution.
Homegrown solutions are often harder to escape from than commercial or FOSS solutions.
It’s sometimes easier to escape from one commercial solution to another as companies will provide migration tools and docs as part of their competitive strategy.
You can mitigate solution lock-in through good architecture, but you can never eliminate the cost of change.
For commercial software (or FOSS-as-appliance) then you're stuck going along wherever your vendor wants to take you.
Example - I was working with jira server for several years at pretty small company. As business grew, there were better and worse moments and sometimes there were more important costs, than another yearly support fee.
Atlassian decided to drop this model and tries to force everyone to the cloud. They say that migration will take 9+ months.
That means if they ever do such change again it will take full annual cost of the license to get rid of them, with no option to avoid it.
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.
it is my list, and it is non-exhaustive.
> what's take home salary has anything to do with this?
you are moving the goalposts. You say that devs are overpaid, therefor time saved need only be a few hours to make back the money. I assert that this isn't universally true (that devs are paid well) and that it must apply to all developers (and everyone developer adjacent)
> $1,000 macbook
Nobody is using a $1k computer in the west. Not sure what that is meant to signify either.
> It's the cost of making business.
If you were a hairdresser and you had to pay a new license for every person who touched the chair, then you would have a parable. As it stands we have a lot of per-seat licensing and an SSO tax designed to get the most money from business customers, the result is that a lot of businesses (where dev costs are lower) simply cant (or wont) pay for every little tiny tool- even if it was priced in a reasonable way, because handling the purchasing and buying the license for the seats you need becomes a full time job.
this is why you sell it to management or business owners. If they see value, they will pay for it.
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.
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
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.
Which is a lot closer to reasonable if it can save you (@ $100 dev/hour) 2.88 hours of work per dev per year, then it's break even.
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.
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.
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.
If you can’t be bothered to pay for anything, why should anyone pay you for your software?
Judging by the developer rhetoric, Gates & co. were right in the end and the chickens are starting to come home to roost for FOSS. "Vive la contre-révolution!" I suppose.
So, never chase free stuff if you are an enterprise. Chase quality, value, operational efficiency.
After almost 20 years of using it, though, I thought "You know...this guy deserves his $20" and paid for it.
Though if my memory servers me right one time I bought it for a staff of the site which has.. quite dubious legal position by hosting the abandonware. Of course it was technically a breach of contract because there were multiple people who could use it, it was still one legal license more.
[1]: A semi humorous jab at Apple.
I don't mind licenses like JetBrains though. Ie purchase a year of updates, but it'll keep working regardless. Subscribe to Own also seems decent.. not sure i've used one though.
Here's an excerpt of their pricing terms:
Do I need a paid subscription to use the images on Docker Hub for commercial use? Images on Docker Hub can be used for commercial use, as long as Docker Desktop is properly licensed. Paid subscriptions are needed for commercial use of Docker Desktop at organizations with more than $10 million annual revenue OR more than 250 employees.
ps- I like this! I want the world to be like that.. but, reality check.. don't let suits find out
I assumed we were non-compliant as nothing had changed like no accounts or license keys.
It turns out it's more of a cover license where you purchase seats but from a developer PoV, nothing visibly changes.
Procurement and Legal are the ones you'd want to ask about it since that's their contact point
Small business selling is much more like selling to consumers.
The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But of course, it can't really just be free, or at least Dockerhub certainly can't be.
On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly. And I don't think anybody ever strongly doubted that aspect, it just was more doubted whether you could make a business out of it. But lo and behold, Dockerhub was integrated enough into the ecosystem and without an a strong enough alternative that it didn't seem to matter.
I assume Docker Desktop also factors into this somehow, but I don't know. I don't use it. Even on Windows and macOS, in the event I must use them to do dev work, I just use Podman Machine. Works well enough for me, and I don't care about a desktop UI (although apparently a couple do exist.)
I am glad that at the end of the day, I haven't seen any super bad fallout from this. I'm still able to use Docker images on my NAS without paying a monthly subscription. Whatever their rate limit is, I'm not hitting it. I'm sure it's a super bad pain in the ass for certain parties though. Like I bet GitHub has a deal to keep Dockerhub unlimited in it's CI, but smaller providers that do CI like srht are probably screwed. That's a shame for the entire ecosystem.
That said, Podman Desktop[1] does most of this stuff and it's free. Maybe it isn't as polished (Docker has definitely put a lot of engineering into the filesystem stuff on macOS for example) but to me it looks similarly nice to Docker Desktop. So if you are working as an individual and don't want to deal with licensing restrictions, there is a reasonable alternative at least.
Yeah tools and common container format is why it got popular but with amount of alternatives that's not monetizable either.
Docker desktop is a smart move honestly, monetize stuff around the containers (managing, making sure its secure) that generally requires a lot of knowledge without it, so the pitch is not just "make the job easier" but "maybe allow company to skip hiring person(s) dedicated to running the whole house of cards"
This is a self inflicted wound. They placed themselves there but never though about the costs of running a free service with PBs of traffic.
> On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly
And they should had taken money from enterprise from the day 1 for Hub services.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but then I learned about Docker "eco-system" (especially things like Watchtower) the traffic costs was one of the first things what I though about.
also they are in a tough spot, because if they limit the download of the most popular images, they limit their own basic usability, and those images happen to be almost all free super-fungible stuff (alpine, ubuntu, node, redis, postgresql, nginx, apache, and all the hundreds and thousands of common stuff FOSS stuff)
tying downloads to clients requires some development, requires setting up rate-limiting, etc.
I think what they ended up doing is not a terrible outcome (require login above a certain number of pulls, plus - I imagine - they require login if an IP address pulls too much anyway), but they can't really charge too much, because setting up a caching proxy is kind of trivial.
For their private 'hubs'? Pretty likely. The usual SaaS stuff. "You can run it at home, with bells and whistles, but you can just pay us...". Add in some corporate mumbo jumbo about auditing, logging, archiving et cetera, et cetera.
> also they are in a tough spot, because if they limit the download of the most popular images
They did it eventually, though from the other end.
> and those images happen to be almost all free super-fungible stuff
Yep, this is what eventually became their success story - providing a service everyone uses without even thinking about it.
> tying downloads to clients requires some development, requires setting up rate-limiting, etc.
Aaand this is exactly what they did.
> because setting up a caching proxy is kind of trivial.
It's the question of convenience. Anyone can spin-up a private registry (pulling from https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/, heh) but it's PITA to configure, maintain, care. Setting up a caching proxy.. Probably can be done, but again, this requires the resources, both hardware and very software.
My company received the memo from Docker to upgrade to paid version, and I helped many to move on to Podman. However there were teams for which getting a Docker Desktop license was easier than the Podman move. I am sure there are many more companies that can easily afford the convenience of Docker Desktop for a trivial fee.
Pricing virtual assets is hard
//
imo the thing to look out for is actual vendor / architecture lock-in. So just don't make things complicated yourself... Docker has it's uses, but right now it's being used for literally everything. I've been using jails, vms, and containers since the 90s. Docker is niceish, but somehow got lots of attention.
Oh, and you need to be sure your platform won't eat all your revenue.. like oracle :)
Especially on servers, and especially if for some stupid reason licensed software need internet access to confirm it is licensed, coz that's extra crap that needs to be added on proxy or firewalls and will inevitably break when they change something.
If it's "hey, pay us X and we trust you don't cheat us" yeah, it's just extra invoice ,whatever.
(I was already working on those instructions when the pricing change reached our attention, so it became a viable free alternative only by coincidence, but still.)
One other thing I learned: HN crowd is biased towards people who want to learn and understand their tools to a degree. Workplace use of Docker has large component of people who don't know what Docker is for and don't really care, but they need it for some task, so they want a hassle-minimizing option they can use to get their job done, and then forget about.
I bet it's a huge market, not just for Docker, but any other software tool. One that's somewhat alien to the HN audience.
In hindsight, I would say, it costs several man-months of senior engineers' with good connections in various departments.
And this comes on top of productivity losses prior to the solution.
The whole of Docker Desktop isn't replaceable with a drop-in alternative today but parts of it are, and the rest could be very soon if an org with the resources and ability keeps developing things like podman.
So what would Docker as a company do when the equivalent of what happens to Swarm happens to Desktop? Pivot again?
Not meant negatively towards Podman, maintaining such a package in a constantly moving ecosystem is hard. The point is more that you pay Docker to do the extensive testing for you, so that the work-stopping issues are ironed out before they roll out to customers.
And yet there are horror stories of finance not approving purchases that would significantly improve productivity.
While obviously greater than the $5/9/24 you bring up, I've heard of companies not wanting to buy a second monitor for their engineers, whereas I'd wager the productivity gain would pay for itself in only a couple months.
Yes, but only because they ran a massive marketing campaign, and then achieved market penetration as a result of years of developer cargo-culting.
Containers have been around years before Docker, docker added a ton of bloat and a repository. So what? None of the predecessors (Jails, OpenVZ, etc.) needed tens of millions of dollars. Docker just capitalized on something that was open source and shamelessly monetized it. Great for them but not really worthy of admiration or anything to be remotely impressed by.
I think it's worth noting that the only thing they make much money off of now is their desktop application.
They made it possible for clueless users to "run containers" on Windows and Mac OS (nevermind it's just a Linux VM...). Technical users had long been capable of doing similar themselves with Linux or BSD or Solaris or what have you, but that's not the important piece of what Docker brought to the table.
(And yes, many developers are "clueless users" when it comes to this sort of thing)
True, but docker made it easy peasy. They came up with the packaging format and other things in a neat little package. This was what made everyone take up docker when it came out.
that's exactly what they failed to deal with - Ops people were already fine & happy all the way with _existing_ solutions (they even know the difference between OpenVZ and Jails). Who was/is struggling is the Joe The Average Frontend developer and Project Managers hearing "sysadmins still setting up our Jails".
Or take from other angle - I'm on Windows, my colleague is on Mac, our grey beard devops guy is on Linux-Arch-Btw something - and we all can use the same Dockerfile and play around without not-giving-a-shit how it works under the hood and what kind of NAT/iptables/sysadmin-mumbo-jumbo is beneath. Total win!
Isn’t this kind of monetization problem quite common for tech companies in general?
$135 mio in revenue is great, but they need 4.3 billion in profits.
I never understood what the point of Docker Desktop was on Windows if WSL exists.
Its CLI is similar/same as docker
There is no apt on macOS.
Might be a similar issue for ECR.
https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#can...
if you don't want a command line, docker itself (the underlying utility that the docker-desktop GUI drives) is free, in contrast to the GUI portion. Or kubernetes.
so the direct answer is "brew install docker".
"brew install docker" is just another way to install Docker Desktop. It does not run Docker natively on MacOS, because that is impossible.
No, it's not! that would be "brew install homebrew/cask/docker". As you can see here!
https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/docker
This is the docker CLI utility, ie "brew install docker" which is what I said:
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/docker
Again, please actually look at the commands you are referencing before spreading misinformation, you are confidently incorrect and being rude about it.
Not only that but the information you are providing has legal implications because these two (completely different!) pieces of software have different licensing... docker-desktop is commercial license, not open-source!
You clearly do not understand the distinction here between the docker CLI utility and backend, and the docker GUI application, and it's very important here.
rancher-desktop is the equivalent to docker-desktop, ie the commercial portion, and docker itself can be used freely because it is (as I said) open source.
I would have been a docker desktop user for years but the one time I went to install it they required me to create an account to get to the download.