Hacker News Reader

Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

These rust based tools really change the idea of what's possible (when you can get feedback in milliseconds). But I'm trying to figure out what Astral as a company does for revenue. I don't see any paid products on their website. They even have investors.

So far it seems like they have a bunch of these high performance tools. Is this part of an upcoming product suite for python or something? Just curious. I'm not a full-time python developer.

View on HN

From "So how does Astral plan to make money? " (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358216):

"What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today. An example of what this might look like [...] would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry."

There's also this interview with Charlie Marsh (Astral founder): https://timclicks.dev/podcast/supercharging-python-tooling-a... (specifically the "Building a commerical company with venture capital " section)

That doesn't really seem like a way to avoid getting "Broadcommed." Vertically integrated tooling is kind of a commodity.

It doesn't seem to answer to anything.

hmm how well did that work for Docker ...

Take a look at their upcoming product Pyx to see where revenue can start to come in for paid/hosted services.

https://astral.sh/pyx

Conda apparently makes a ton of money just by selling access to "more secure" packages, so maybe they'll do something like that.

There are apparently 10 million Python developers in the world and pretty soon all of them will be using uv. I doubt it is that hard to monetise.

It doesn't really matter that it's Rust. npm is written in JS.

npm runs dog slow IME

Yep, it’s next up for language package tooling that runs dog slow in CI and is consistently a pain in my side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com