Hi, I recently heard a lot of developers complain about how much time it takes to setup open source tools like Metabase or sentry within their infrastructure. Hence wanted to do a dipstick survey with this community as well to see if it's a large enough problem worth solving for?
If you believe this is a problem please feel free to fill this form up https://my.forms.app/form/62bdab12bd94a175bbbacfdc , it will help me shape my thinking around how to solve for this.
Top comments (2)
In a simple answer, Yes, it is a problem. How large it is? Depends on who you ask.
When it comes to Open source tooling, there are two things, Either do it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. Thats the only tradeoff parameters. A lot of popular open source projects like supabase, nocodb, etc offer their product as free for self-host if you can manage yourself, or as a paid subscription where they would manage an instance for you.
A student or hobbyist may choose to self-host and manage it themselves as this would provide an opportunity to learn some new stuff.
A company owner would rather pay them to maintain so that they could focus on their actual work.
As an employee, it's not that difficult to justify products with an enterprise license. Most companies are concerned with time to market and live product support. Vendor consulting hours and support contracts come with many paid products. Being able to call someone when you're stuck or caught in a production situation is a game changer.
I do know that for smaller companies money is tighter and it might be harder to justify a paid product. For those, the best you can hope for is a well-documented project with an active community.
No matter where I've worked at, setting up infrastructure was probably one of the biggest time sinks. I miss the days where you had dedicated ops teams that would handle infrastructure related tasks.