Hello everyone, Borja here. I’ve been wanting to chime in here for a few days now, and I apologize for not having had the opportunity to do so earlier. But first things first, I want to let everyone know that even if we’re not engaging here daily, we are indeed reading this thread, and your comments and concerns have been heard loud and clear – you can rest assured of that.
Nobody today would argue the positive effects Docker containers have had in our everyday lives dealing with software. Seldom does a technology have an impact on its industry like Docker has. And while disruption and innovation are always welcome and appreciated, they often come bundled with their own complications. One such complication is pricing, and how one goes about calculating the value derived from a new product by a diverse set of customers and use cases.
I want you all to know that we thought long and extensively about pricing before we launched Docker Cloud. Our current pricing model and future pricing plans (Docker Cloud is just getting started) are NOT the results of a quick brainstorm session to get the product shipped as soon as possible. On the contrary, this plan was put together after countless months of internal research, user interaction analysis, customer surveys, user interviews, external third-party market research, user testing and extensive customer validation. As a matter of fact, during this process over a dozen models were proposed, of which 5 distinct pricing models were considered, each with their own number of different tiers and permutations.
During this time, we came to realize that this indeed was a complex problem to solve, as there is no apparent winner nor fairest model to govern them all. In the process, we considered container-based models, as well as memory-based, CPU-based, subscription-based and multi-dimensional pricing models, among others, before we settled on a node-based model. They each had their own pros and cons. We were not trying to create an innovative pricing model and instead were focused on offering something that was both familiar and worked for a majority of our users. And to somebody else’s credit, it wasn’t us who first put a node-based pricing model into effect in this space.
With all this mind, I want to stress how much we can actually relate to many of the comments and arguments on this thread, emails and private messages you’ve sent our way. This is because each and every one of those scenarios and use cases you’ve brought up was considered during our planning. Ultimately, and very analytically, having reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of use cases, it was deemed that the node-based pricing model was best for our users. There were alternatives that could potentially have made more economical sense to Docker, Inc. that were discarded in favor of best satisfying the anticipated needs of our customers today. So, while some may argue that a container-based model is better fitted for the company that popularized the application container, those use cases spinning up hundreds of containers every few seconds across a handful of nodes would clearly disagree.
As a company, Docker aims to provide tooling and services to cater to and cover the end to end software delivery lifecycle, as manifested in the “Build, Ship, Run” part of our slogan. As per your feedback on this thread, we understand that our current Docker Cloud pricing isn’t accommodating to the demands of hobbyists and small projects. We value your business and want to see hobbyists and startups alike thrive using Docker Cloud. We’re continuing to explore viable options and tiers to ensure Docker Cloud caters to and supports as wide a number of use cases, team sizes and project sizes as possible. As our pricing plans evolve to accommodate for these additional scenarios, we will communicate any changes to our users through the normal channels (email and in-app notifications, blog, forums, etc.). I’d also like to take this opportunity to invite everyone to check out the free and awesome open source projects available today from Docker, such as the Docker Engine, Swarm, Compose and Machine. Docker and its great open source community have all put a lot of effort into these tools and we hope everyone can benefit from them.
In the interest of continuing to make the best possible use of this forum, I will be locking down this thread. We ask that you open a new thread per topic, question or concern that you may have that warrants a general discussion if one does not yet exist.
As always, thanks for your ongoing support.