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Comment by krelian | Hacker News Reader

This is answered in their FAQ: https://zed.dev/faq :

We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:

       Channels and calls
       Chat
       Channel notes

We plan to offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.

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For a VC-backed company, this will never ever generate enough revenue growth. So, the real answer is: "If all goes well, we will keep raising VC money and get acquired and shutdown / butchered in 5-10 years".

Like Bluesky, this monetization plan they present is just something to calm down the haters and sceptics. But if you think for two seconds, it does not make sense.

It might happen the way you describe, or, if they get more popular, then may try to think harder and offer more paid options. Now they're in a growth stage - they need to convince the largest possible number of developers they should switch from VS Code, and that is already a difficult task.

I know, this is the standard VC playbook: First growth at all costs to get everyone into the ecosystem, then pull up the net and monetize. The latter phase is usually when all the subscriptions, value-add nag screens, data sharing agreements and other enshittification goodies pop up.

And how would it work otherwise? You can't perpetually offer a product for free (in all senses of the word) AND satisfy exponential ROI expectations at the same time.

If this is what's going on here, I'm worried what the "monetization" phase will entail.

The other option I see is being owned by a behemoth like Microsoft, in VSCode case, who can pay millions per month in engineering salaries and PaaS, while keeping it free.

They are so big they can monetize it using Copilot or not even monetize it properly, just to get good faith from Developers, Developers, Developers.

I like it.

No, the other option is something like Sublime Text that has a small team working on it and is paid for by a very fair one-off payment by the customer.

Sounds like a third option. I have a Sublime license and I like it.

But no need to discard VSCode.

They are different tools anyway.

And while doing this, they fuck the whole market.

Well as an end user this is pretty much OK right, so long as you are aware of the deal? VC funded companies have subsidized and then abandoned a lot of useful OSS code over the years.

Whenever you encounter a VC backed open source project you know the rug pull will come eventually. It doesn't make the code they have written any less useful. If the tool is good enough then it will be forked and live on.

No, it's not ok. It fucks the whole market by subsidizing the growth with VC money. Either a big company will buy them, consolidating their power, or they will IPO and the VCs will cash out and let the public bear the cost. It fucks the customers who are not as well-informed about this as you are. In summary, it fucking sucks.

They're already laying the groundwork for a rug pull.

The fact that the developers will happy let you hide any button in the UI except the sign in button is a giant red flag.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/11802

This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.

Really? I’ve had employers pay for my Jetbrains subscription.

But with Jetbrains products, you pay or the entire software, not just part of it .

Community edition is free, and it’s a sizable chunk of the entire product

The difference is, all the important features are behind a paywall. This will not be the case for Zed it seems.

I have never worked at a place that uses Jetbrains products which does not pay for their premium offering.

With Jetbrains you're paying for the IDE.

Zed's vision is that the editor is free and you're paying basically for Teams-lite.

If you're a big company, you're already using a service like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.

If you're a small company, then there's free alternatives like Discord.

And say you want to talk to someone other than a programmer, then you'd need something else anyway. Because a project manager wouldn't need an IDE installed.

Indeed seems very uncommon where I am, even the IntelliJ’s are more often pirated than paid for.

From my perspective it is very weird to expect to beat MS (who produces two great IDE’s, not one) on their own game with this approach to dev.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to have the most important features replicated, but, c’mon, this is software, it breaks as it builds and some things are not possible Overnight even if you have the worlds top top top talent around.

You don't need to beat microsoft in order to have a viable business. You just need to get enough market share.

But, you also have to be better than what’s freely available by enough to get someone to pay for it. Having a good product isn’t good enough, you have to be significantly better.

Dev tooling is a notoriously difficult space to make money. Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version. (For better or worse)

> Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version.

No, free tools win because a proprietary license is a rent-seeking ball and chain on your means of production.

Btw Jetbrains made Webstorm (web editor) and Rider (.NET C#/F#) editor free now for non commercial use.

This might hurt Zed.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

That’s the thing. Whatever editor I finally migrate from neovim to I’ll likely donate to.

I get so much insane value from open source and companies building for the platforms that I use that I’m happy to pay for them especially for small shops of really passionate hackers like the folks behind Zed.

You can donate to neovim too ;)

I don't have much hope in anything replacing it for me. Zed does a lot right but feels very very far away and with a weird focus (from my perspective).

Haha I already do!

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