I'm curious if anyone is aware of pure CLI tools that that are monetised, either by premium support or by offering a free and paid version. Majority I've seen are extensions of some sort of SaaS or desktop product (IDEs, testing, etc.)
Not much. I've encountered a handful of esoteric file conversion tools, though I couldn't say whether any of those are still for sale/available now that you can hide the secret sauce behind a web front end.
It doesn't seem impossible in principle, but anything viable has to be better than any open source tools that might be out there but also able to command an audience with enough money and inclination to pay for it despite whatever level of license infringement takes place. It sounds like quite a narrow scope!
I would have said k9s (free) and k9s alpha (pay for additional features), but it looks like the k9s alpha site is not up/working at the moment. k9s itself still gets regular updates, but I’m not sure what the status of k9s alpha is anymore. I had assumed it was still available, but I never tracked it too closely.
(yes the domain name is silly, rebranding is on the todo list but customers come first).
It has plenty of customers paying a $45/month subscription, some of which are big name companies that unfortunately don't like to have their logo put on the web page. But it's a CLI tool, and it's monetized. What do you want to know?
The problem is that the company is named Hydraulic, but it only has one product, so it's confused branding. I think a lot of startups make this mistake so I don't beat myself up about it too much. The product has a different name to the company, but it's the product name people know, and so then they have to realign the branding around that - something I've never done.
For better or worse there are enough users and customers (it's free for open source devs), that fixing problems and addressing feature requests/support tickets tends to suck up the available time. I still live in hope that one day I will drain the high priority queue enough to be able to reorganize the docs and redo the web presence.
Basecamp the company changed their names after their main product, Basecamp, became successful. They only changed it back when they had more than one successful product. I wouldn't worry about your company name to be honest.
I like it too. Memorable is good! Why not just put Hydraulic in front of the name of each other product? Hydraulic Deploy. Hydraulic Build. Etc. Seems scalable.
Really? I think it's easier to monetize! There are tons of zombie or dying SaaS firms out there with large monthly AWS bills due to overbuilt infrastructure, yet hardly any users.
Conveyor has very small server footprint and I use a rented Hetzner machine as the primary server for everything (there are backup replicas for the licensing servers). Customers pay for the CPU load, disk storage costs etc because it runs locally. So the ongoing baseline costs are very low. There's also no costs involved with handling customer data, which can be significant for a SaaS, much lower demands on the security and enterprise compliance side because we don't have any sensitive access and so on.
It's definitely a niche product area. I didn't pick it because I thought it'd make me rich. It was a sort of retirement/burnout project, I was tired of doing projects in organizations or groups that ended up killing themselves through political activism and backstabbing. I was fortunate enough to be able to self fund the company until the product was mature, without needing a VC raise, so I was able to do things exactly as I wanted to. The code is clean, the customers are great: they are people just like me so we understand each other very well.
The nice thing about Conveyor is that it's such an unfashionable and small market, there's almost no competition and isn't going to be any. It doesn't yet replace a tech salary but it grows steadily as a business, and I don't have to worry about some VC-pumped startup giving away my product for free for a decade, killing me and later discovering they don't know how to monetize themselves.
Yes, this is a possible business model for developer tools. My declarative schema management product Skeema is primarily a CLI tool, available in both FOSS [1] and paid editions, with the latter adding extra functionality and optional premium support [2].
In my space, some larger competitors are more focused on SaaS/cloud offerings. But that can be a mixed bag for security-sensitive customers who prefer to self-host, as well as for folks who want to integrate a tool into an automation/CI/CD pipeline. CLI tools are more compelling in those situations.
Looks great. Similar model to what I was having in mind: open source + premium model with additional features. Is the revenue enough to work on it full time?
Thanks! My situation is pretty similar to the comment from mike_hearn – I started it as a retirement/burnout project, and self-funded the business for years until the product was mature.
If I was to start something like this today, personally I wouldn't use a permissive license for the free version next time. That's been really problematic as a bootstrapped business.
Fun part is that the CLI handles all the browser redirecting for the payment and saving the license (I guess). Just pass it a `--pro` arg and there you go.
But I’ve seen REPL instances (which are command line in a way but interactive) monetized. The AMPL optimization language is monetized. The very expensive KDb+ language and database is monetized.
Back in the day lots of DOS shareware tools like pkzip, etc were monetized as shareware.
It doesn't seem impossible in principle, but anything viable has to be better than any open source tools that might be out there but also able to command an audience with enough money and inclination to pay for it despite whatever level of license infringement takes place. It sounds like quite a narrow scope!
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