Ask HN: Why Terraform Is Free?

[yevpats]

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?

[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.

[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.

[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.