What do you think about HashiCorp's business model?

[igaloly]

It seems like most of their revenue comes from support because their software is open source. It's a challenge to increase the margins from support because the more people pay for support, the more people HashiCorp needs to employ. How they will be able to grow financially?

[mooreds]

Lots of discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29110444

Looking at the "SUMMARY CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL DATA" from their S1 ( https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000119312521... ) it looks like licensing fees are growing faster than support revenue. The latter 6xed from 2019 to 2021, whereas the latter 4xed.

Their cost of support also didn't increase as fast as revenues (looks like it increased by 3.5x from 2019 to 2021), which is a positive.

So, in short, I think they're doing just fine. It's great to see another company succeed with OSS as a core part of the business model.

[speedgoose]

I am not sure why every company needs to become huge. A solid business with good working conditions is perfectly fine in my humble opinion.

[tomcam]

I second that. I ran such a business for 20 years and was grateful every day. It was a 4 hour work week-type thing, infinitely less stressful than answering to a bad boss or supporting corporate values I didn’t share.