HACKER Q&A
📣 pramodbiligiri

Have developer tools become commercially viable again?


A few years back it seemed like developer tools had no way to monetize. Open Source alternatives and the Cloud providers routinely came in the way of straightforward ways of monetization.

But in recent years, there have been successful SaaS offerings and APIs targeted at developers (Stripe, Twilio, PagerDuty, Postman, Cloudflare, Tailscale and so on). Trends like product-led growth and solo entrepreneurship are aligned with the growth of developer tools.

So do you feel it's becoming commercially viable to sell tools to developers again?

  👤 physicsguy Accepted Answer ✓
They've always been monetized? A few years ago, you didn't get private Git repositories unless you paid or ran your own server. That's shifted and money is made from CI minutes and things now. Editors - JetBrains, VS, etc. are all commercial.
👤 Flankk
I don't know what you're talking about. It's always been commercially viable.