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Ask HN: Why Terraform Is Free?

6 points by yevpats ↗ HN
I recently thought about this and terraform is used pretty much everywhere but it is completely free while lot's of effort is being put to maintain providers such as AWS/GCP/Azure. Doesn't it create mis-alignment - for example their cloud product is quite expensive because it needs to subsidize the free providers which are used by everyone and not paid by anyone which makes a vicious cycle of less people using the cloud version and so on. Wouldn't it make sense if terraform would cost money?

5 comments

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catchnear4321
businesses have to be convinced to use something before they can be convinced to pay for something.

this is a common saas/open source model. the company works on the source, and has a for-pay slightly better version with some proprietary features.

any drug dealer knows you get more customers if you give a bit out for free.

techbuttman
Windows has always been cheap or free for universities for similar reasons.
fragmede
That's not the world we live in, alas. Gone are the days where you build something useful, and then charge money for it.
anderiv
I think perhaps Hashicorp sees terraform as a loss-leader, at least partially intended to be an on-ramp to their other, much more costly tools like Vault and Nomad.
ecesena
Monetizing open source is an art.

One common (?) rule is to make free features intended for individual contributors and make non-free features for executives.

Terraform seems to follow this pattern, but I have no affiliation with Hashicorp, so I can only speculate.