
Ask HN: What is the market for developer tools like? - curiousgeek
How big of a market do you feel developer tools are - IDEs, IDE plugins, build tools, monitoring tools etc? Is there space for small companies to build something and survive profitably here?<p>How about if we extend the market to include programming frameworks, libraries and database systems?
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callmeed
To answer your first question, _very big_.

From a qualitative standpoint, think of this way ... all companies are now
tech companies and developer jobs are always in any recent "hottest job" list
you can find. So, it stands to reason that tools for those companies and jobs
will be a big market.

If you want real numbers, here's 2 examples: (1) Atlassian is now a public
company and pretty much only makes developer tools. They started with one
product (Jira) in 2002. They now have a market cap of $11B and annual revenues
of $620M [0]. (2) If you read Indie Hackers, you'll find people like Mike
Perham who makes Sidekiq. Sidekiq is an open-source tool for background
processing in Ruby on Rails apps. Mike makes $80K/month on premium
licenses/support. Think about that, it _does just one thing for just one
developer framework_ and he makes close to $1M per year with no employees.[1]

So, yes, I think there's a big market (in the billions) and plenty of room for
small companies. Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen
developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for.

[0]
[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM)

[1]
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)

~~~
BjoernKW
> Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas
> that I'd consider paying for.

Would you care to share and discuss those? There are quite a few categories of
developer tools, a non-comprehensive list of which could include:

\- generic, one-size-fits-all tools that reach a very wide audience: IDEs,
issue trackers, CI and code quality tools

\- frameworks and libraries, which also are fairly generic

\- one-off / niche tools and scripts for very specific purpose: Those are
usually developed in-house to solve a specific problem and out-of-the-box they
often don't have a lot of reproducible value outside of a particular
organization.

Most of those don't real lend themselves to being realised as commercial
products, in part because of existing tools, particularly open source ones and
also because the target audience is more likely to implement a tool they need
than any other audience ([http://threevirtues.com](http://threevirtues.com)
...).

~~~
callmeed
I'd be happy to discuss in an email (too lazy to list them out here right
now).

Regarding open source, I agree that's tricky. But its been proven it can be
done one way or another. I think ansible and docker have shown that in the ops
space.

Regarding one-off/niche tools, that's where glue tools like zapier become
commercially viable.

------
CyberFonic
I have personally discussed this issue with a couple of people who worked for
the big dev-tool vendors in the 1990s. The consensus is that open-source has
almost completely destroyed the commercial viability of the dev-tool market.
Eclipse is an example of open-source tooling that now has support from former
commercial tool vendors.

There still is a small market (in terms of volumes) for dev-tools sold to
enterprise clients. But AFAIK enterprise clients prefer to buy from
"enterprise strength" vendors. Which makes it very difficult for a smaller
developer to compete.

The biggest stumbling block to being a tool vendor is the demand for support.
Even if you can make money on selling the tools in the first place, the on-
going support is likely to cost you more than you can charge in on-going fees.

~~~
amerkhalid
Agreed. Developers are hard bunch to sell to. We go out of our way to find
free tools and almost look down on people who use decent IDEs or other tools.
One example, when I finally got legit license for Sublime Text, all of my
friends made fun of me for paying for a free software.

~~~
jetti
I think it depends on your market. I would imagine it would be easier to sell
to developers on Windows rather than Linux (possibly macOS). I can think of a
few tools that we pay for to make our lives easier to develop on Windows:
Visual Studio, Resharper (Ultimate, which comes with a few other JetBrains
tools) and Artifactory. On the flip side, when I'm on my personal laptop I run
Linux and have no tools that cost me money. It isn't that I'm opposed to it, I
just haven't found anything worthwhile to pay for that is definitely better
than the open-source/free versions.

