Tiers of a clown – or the early days of a better service model?
Opinion Docker has a problem: too few whales. Its user demographic is hugely skewed to free plan subscribers, while heavier users (meaning corporate customers) are too thin on the ground to generate enough money through their paid-for tiers. As Docker’s financial whizzes can read a spreadsheet as well as anyone, the vendor has been adjusting who gets owt for nowt for some time. It’s a really interesting problem: the company’s growth is a death march if the increased operating costs from happy punters outrun the revenue growth, but as in classic freemium models you rely on the bottom tiers to feed a critical mass of adoption to create a viable ecosystem of experienced users and Docker-compliant workflow tooling. The company’s latest wheeze is to charge its bigger customers for a management tool, as well as more expensive tiers and some cogent roadmaps for intrinsic security and compliance management – which is grand, but not here yet. The new pricing strategy is where it’s at. Quite subtle stuff. It’s also some way advanced from the „free for noncommercial use“ simple approach. That can work well, especially when you factor in paid-for support, but not where you have substantial per-user operating costs. If the only things your free user asks of you are a download of a software image and the occasional update, then that’s very different from day-in, day-out service usage. That makes Docker’s problem worth watching. You must now pay for Docker Desktop if you’re a company with more than $10m revenue or 250 employees, which one presumes was set based on a careful analysis of who’s using it already and how important it is to them.
