
Ask HN: How did the open-source monitoring service netdata raise 20M? - twebber
Dear readers,<p>Today I am very thankful to use the netdata tool to monitor few Kubernetes clusters (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netdata.cloud&#x2F;).
It&#x27;s a free, open-source on GitHub and useful product. They have wonderful UIs, great quality of code, high performance.<p>The main issue, as with many open-source projects, is that they have no business model, not event a premium service, 
and yet they were able to leverage 20M$ from Bain Capital Ventures and Marathon Venture Capital.
Considering these funds religiously capitalist, I can&#x27;t imagine them suddenly having an interest in IT innovation 
or any altruistic concern to help the rest of the world.
At the end, this is a monitoring tool doing the same as its well-established open-source competitors (like prometheus and grafana),
therefore, the industry didn&#x27;t need another monitoring tool.<p>Is there any business model I don&#x27;t see?
Is it a form of whitewashing, or a simple marketing operation intending to give them more credit and attractiveness?
Or, have these VCs really become angels?<p>-- 
T. Webber
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carloshpf
Yes, there is. according to this ([https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/netdata-
a-monitoring-start...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/netdata-a-monitoring-
startup-with-50-year-old-founder-announces-17m-series-a/)):

"In addition to the open-source version of the product, there is a SaaS
version, which also has what he calls a “massively free plan.” He says the
open-source monitoring agent is “a gift to the world.” The SaaS tool is about
democratizing monitoring and the pay version is even different from most
monitoring tools, charging by the seat instead of by the amount of
infrastructure you are monitoring."

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cakrit
You can read all about it here: [https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/netdata-
cloud-announcement/](https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/netdata-cloud-
announcement/)

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SuperSandro2000
Maybe they collect your data and sell it? See
[https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366)

~~~
cakrit
Did you actually read that thread?

