[notdonspaulding]

Can somebody tell me how Hashicorp makes money? They seem to employ people, and they have a page that sends traffic off to technology and solutions partners, but where do they make their own money?

We use Vagrant at work and I'm considering whether and how we could use more of their tooling. But I always want to know about the business model behind the tools I recommend before I recommend them.

Anyone?

[mitchellh]

As the founder of HashiCorp, I feel qualified to answer this.

The adjacent comment about Atlas is correct. Atlas itself is admittingly poorly marketed (something we're working on right this very moment) right now. The best way to describe how we make money is: we target the enterprise user and give them the features, integrations, and support they need in their regulated, legacy-encumbered, etc. environments. Atlas in particular is focused on giving enterprises a flexible application delivery pipeline that is opinionated in a certain way, but flexible enough to support their diverse environments (all at once: containers, VMs, physical machines. Windows, Mac, Linux. Etc.)

Due to our adoption we have the rare benefit of primarily letting open source adoption happen organically, and having large companies approach us as they get more serious about our software.

Vault, in particular, is a good example of this. Vault suffers from an issue where most impressive people who use Vault can't actually publicly say they use Vault. So we have a hard time talking about how widely adopted it is. The best I can give you is from what I said at our HashiConf keynote: "If you traded stocks, used a credit card, or did anything involving a bank, then you've interacted with Vault-secured data." As specific as I can be as to how widely spread Vault is right now.

Anyways, a digression from the original question: enterprises have interesting needs they're willing to pay for. We address those needs in enterprise products (Atlas, others that aren't public yet) and support. We don't have any SaaS-like "enter your credit card and pay us" (other than the Vagrant VMware plugin which predates all of this), and instead do deals with larger companies in a way that most of HN would likely perceive as old school in some sense. :)

Note when I say "enterprise" I'm not trying to exclude anyone. If you're a relatively small company (I didn't click your name to find out), then still feel free to email us any of your concerns and we should be able to either help you ourselves or route you in the right direction.

[lifeisstillgood]

> Can somebody tell me how Hashicorp makes money?

> As the founder of HashiCorp, I feel qualified to answer this.

And that's why I stick with HN. Really good citations :-)

[lifeisstillgood]

On a slightly more serious note, how do you build your sales pipeline? Is it really as lusciously simple as build great OSS stuff, promote the hell out of it, get a call from Dev lead at Mega Corp? do you have traditional enterprise sales people?

[Terretta]

Mega Corp has engineers who know what's up. When they're ready, Mitchell gets a call.

This works in specialties where an enterprise solution is very hard and only a very few are tackling it well.

[notdonspaulding]

    > As the founder of HashiCorp, I feel qualified to answer this.

Well, OK then.

Thanks for taking the time to write down such a thoughtful reply. We are a relatively small company, but a lot of the products we make are enterprise-focused. I'll be sure to check out Atlas here in the near future.

[tvmalsv]

I think they make the bulk of their money* off of Atlas, which is a subscription service that ties together and automates a lot of their free products. They also have a paid add-on to Vagrant for VMware support.

* I would also bet they do consulting & support for companies that are using their products, and/or other automation advice. Whether that accounts for more or less revenue than Atlas, I have no idea :)