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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

This is the Javascript hipster effect. FastAPI and Pydantic are pushed heavily because of their fancy docs page and the evangelism which thrives on reinventing the wheel. So we are all now stuck with everything being Pydantic this Pydantic that, instead of existing frameworks which are frankly better.

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To be fair I do think that Pydantic leaning into the type annotation story is nice. If you’re really going lean or performant the restrictions work well in your favor. Just like… for the bog standard B2B SaaS the expressivity tradeoff just doesn’t feel worth it.

In a more just world pythons typing story was closer to typescript’s and we could have a fully realized idea like it that supports the asymmetric nature of serializing/deserializing and offers nice abstractions through the stack

Right now Pydantic for me is like “you can validate a straightforward data structure! Now it’s up to you to actually build up a useful data structure from the straightforward one”. Other tools give me both in one go. At the cost of safety (that you can contain, but you gotta do it right)

Which existing framework is better?

What alternatives do you suggest then?

It's a tough answer because we have had years of artificially-pumped support and development and ecosystem growth of Pydantic.

But if I had to roll the clock back I'd recommend marshmallow and that entire ecosystem. It's definitely way less bloated than Pydantic currently, and only lacks some features. Beyond that, just use plain-old dataclasses.

https://marshmallow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It's also because Pydantic has VC money and needs to grow fast now, or else.

What’s the story here, can anyone enlighten me? How can they make money being a Python library?

I can stretch my imagination about Astral monetizing their tools, but this one is too difficult

Pydantic (the company) owns logfire, a logging service. There’s a lot of money in logging/observability. The pydantic library itself is not monetizable, as you indicate.

Wow really I had no idea. This rabbit hole goes deeper then I expected!

In 2022, the project evolved into a commercial entity called Pydantic Services Inc., founded by Samuel Colvin and Adrian Garcia Badaracco, to build products around the open-source library. The company raised $4.7 million in seed funding in February 2023, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Partech, Irregular Expressions, and other investors. This was followed by a $12.5 million Series A round in October 2024, again led by Sequoia Capital and including Partech Partners, bringing the total funding to approximately $17.2 million across rounds. The Series A funding coincided with the launch of Pydantic Logfire, a commercial observability platform for backend applications, aimed at expanding beyond the core open-source validation framework. As of mid-2025, no additional funding rounds have been publicly reported.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/sequoia-backs-open-source-...

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