Core's Paradox

SAAS Providers and Price Gouging

If you're a developer, I'm sure you've seen it happen. SAAS providers "improve" or "simplify" their plans for "a better experience" or "streamlined experience" which actually translates to "We stuffed a bunch of crap into your current subscription that we know most of you don't want and will never use, so that we could charge you more for the same product." Man, is that fucking exhausting or what? My most recent encounter with this has been with DockerHub, increasing their "Pro" subscription price by double! What do we get for this?

The image is a screenshot from the docker service website and reads: I’m a Docker Pro customer, what is new with my plan? Docker Pro now includes: Docker Build Cloud minutes increased from 100/month to 200/month and no monthly fee. Learn how to use Build Cloud. 2 included repos with continuous vulnerability analysis in Docker Scout. Get started with Docker Scout quickstart. 100 Testcontainers Cloud runtime minutes are now included for use either in Docker Desktop or for CI. Docker Hub hourly image pull rate limits will be removed. Docker Pro plans increased from $5/month (annual) to $9/month (annual) and from $7/month (monthly) to $11/month (monthly). If you require additional Build Cloud minutes, Docker Scout repos or Testcontainers Cloud runtime minutes, you can add these to your plan with consumption-based pricing. See the pricing page for more details.

I mean honestly, they know exactly what they are doing with this plan change, I mean most users on this sort of plan are using it exclusively for the private container registry, and preforming builds either locally or in their already configured build system. This is clearly just a way for them to sneakily double the price and justify it by saying they're providing you with "more features".

I'm absolutely exhausted with this sort of behavior, and it happens so often! And honestly, it would be way less insulting if they were just honest and said they need to increase the prices for whatever reason, but to compensate they are including new features, it still wouldn't make me keep the subscription in most cases, but it would be wayyyyy less infurating because it's honest. "Streamlining" subscriptions is never about the user, if it was about the user, you'd just simply offer more tiers or addons for a subscription, and make managing them not a pain in the arse, but instead vendors continue to lie and try to squeeze their users for every last penny they have.

Luckily, self hosting, and FOSS solutions become more abundant, cheaper, and easier all the time, and that is why I encourage anyone to learn some basic terminal skills, how to provision and manage a vps, and some basic networking. Not only will it open so many doors for you, save you money, and possibly give you a new hobby, it will also increase your resistance to media consolidation, censorship, lock in, and internet centralization!

#FOSS forever!

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