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For large companies to buy something, there's considerable overhead: legal review, finance review, management, budget, etc.

That's _after_ someone at the company has figured out what the product is and that it makes sense to buy.

We wouldn't want all of this overhead involved every time a developer adds a new package to an app. And if it were involved for all the thousands of deps most teams have these days, there would be a whole second team just managing the purchases.

As a practical matter, software teams need to buy dozens rather than thousands of products.

By grouping a lot of packages together, Tidelift lets those thousand transitive dependencies benefit, while previously only the largest high-profile projects had a chance.

This reality (that buying stuff has a lot of friction) also explains why Tidelift builds "fund a sales team" into the model.

Here's an interesting article from patio11 on enterprise sales and purchasing: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...