The developer tools market is REALLY difficult.
Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]".
No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.
Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]".
No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.
I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.
The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission.
Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introduction of new unknowns/things-to-check adds enough uncertainty to make them uncomfortable. "The new thing always puts things here instead of there and it doesn't handle these cases. I miss the way we used to do things."
There's a secondary problem here that many developers are employed and don't typically have a personal tools budget. This narrows the market effectively to developers that are free lancing or the bosses of developers that are employees.
The team managers will scrutinize a lot of spending on this front and typically not have. a lot of budget for this. And there is no such thing as a personal tools budget for developers in most companies.
Freelancers mostly just use the same tools as the companies that pay them. Which is mostly free tools. Non free tools actually complicate getting freelancers because now you need to worry about getting licenses for your contractors as well. So, there's a bias towards keeping things simple here and just avoiding such tools.
And you know where developers hang out and what kinds of things do well there. So everything's good, right?
But as you said, many of them don't want to pay for things, and many will find open source solutions that'll do the job needed instead, even if it's a tad less convenient than your potential solution might be. Plus, you're literally selling people whose job/life involves creating software, so their answer could just as easily be "build something myself to do this" instead.