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Comment by dchest | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here charges too little for software.

  the free(MIT license) version is shakti.com/k/k.zip

  the supported version(supported and 10 to 100 times faster)
  is $100K per month(minimum)

https://groups.google.com/g/shaktidb/c/5SPufca3mo4

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They’ve been charging a that amount forever, it’s a crazy ask. But you’ll be happy to hear that the quoted price is about 80% off of the price in 2000, so take advantage of the discount. In 2000 it was $100K/month.

Inflation has been 80% since then, but that doesn't mean it's 80% off. $1000 in 2000 is $1800 today, so a discount of 44%. 80% off would imply it's $5000 today, but prices didn't 5x fortunately.

Good joke, though.

Good joke and good follow-through, haha.

I absolutely got it wrong, thanks for the correction.

k is widely used by a handful of big investment banks and big hedge funds for quant/finance stuff. There are only a handful of such companies in the world but they are extremely price insensitive, especially with regard to technology that lets them get a market edge. I suspect this is the dynamic that kx, the company, tapped into over the years. I also suspect this open source release is mainly because investment banks have come around on their desire for open source (rather than proprietary) software over the years, at least on some teams. You can see the open source release doc explicitly positions k vs Python, pandas, and polars.

For example, I have an old friend from a major investment bank who used to work on an internal (proprietary) pub/sub system but who, these days, works on integrations between that system and Apache Kafka.

I mean, it really depends on who your customers are. You can charge a lot if you can make the typical financial analyst 20% more productive.

Wouldn't work the same way if your core customer base is elementary school teachers.

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