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Ask HN: Why Terraform Is Free?

by yevpats on 7/30/23, 5:29 PM with 5 comments

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?

  • by ecesena on 7/31/23, 3:45 AM

    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.

  • by anderiv on 7/31/23, 2:44 AM

    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.

  • by catchnear4321 on 7/30/23, 5:53 PM

    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.

  • by fragmede on 7/30/23, 6:36 PM

    That's not the world we live in, alas. Gone are the days where you build something useful, and then charge money for it.