Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky.
They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust.
With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering.
If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.
This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.
I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.
True, opportunity cost is a factor, sorry if my reply sounded a bit brash. IMHO they are one of the few orgs who got this model right compared to lots of others who went the open core or support/consulting contract required OSS route.
Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.
But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.
> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?
That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.
I'm personally on the fence how much of it is intentional... from the_mitsuhiko's side it probably isn't, but "the purpose of a system is what it does" and all.
Don't believe the salesmen, self hosting Sentry has been the most liberating feeling in a long while. Buy a cheap dedicated server with 64 gigs of RAM from Hetzner, run their install script and it's literally up and running. I'm processing volumes that would bankrupt me on their managed service without breaking a sweat.
I think this is a great idea with the wrong pricing model. Look at all the one off payment products that involve code, they're all dead. Just charge a lower but recurring price so I can be sure that you make enough money that you keep working on it. $20/month flat price to keep the license working and source available if you shut down. If people like it and want the barebones Sentry then charge them $40 a month to provide code and host it. Wishing you the best of luck.
ONCE projects do get occasional updates. I don’t use boilerplate projects much, so I can’t speak to them.
My model isn’t a subscription. Think about it like buying rice. You might buy it every week, but that doesn’t mean you’re “subscribed” to rice.
Even if I release a new major version, you’re free not to update. And if it’s a major version, it’s fair to expect it to be paid. After all, major updates usually bring significant improvements. For example, if you played the original DOOM, you had to pay for DOOM 2 too, even though they run on the same engine.
There are so many people buying rice that's not hard for rice producers to forecast how many thousands of tons of rice they have to grow each year. And not many people look at how much they spend for rice year long. For the single box, yes, they do notice. So it's not a subscription but it looks like it is, at least from the point of view of the seller.
Yes but I don't rely on rice I bought a year ago or DOOM as a core component of my business. Trying to work around a business model (subscription saas) requires that you understand what people are buying, and often, especially with you vendors, that is a financial alignment between the two.
If you bought DaVinci Resolve several years ago, you're still able to update to 20.<whatever> and use the same licence key.
Granted they're not interested in taking 225 quid off you for a software licence, they're interested in taking 22 grand off Netflix for a complete edit desk.
That's a fair point. In my case, though, I'm a solo dev without a hardware ecosystem, so major versions help sustain development without forcing subscriptions. What do you think about models like that for indie projects?
The problem with ONCE is that software is never finished. This is why most ONCE software that is still available today is charging a one off licensing fee + update fee (e.g. charge yearly for major updates or 10% of the one off fee per year). This is sustainable, but your model isn't. You will notice down the road in 2-4 years that it's no fun to work for free for users that expect an update because it requires patching or there are breaking changes.
That’s a fair concern, but I see it differently. Software can reach a point of maturity - not “dead” just done. That’s the whole philosophy behind ONCE: build something great, maintain it responsibly, and stop when it’s complete.
https://www.reaper.fm/ uses that pricing and has... let's say fanatical following. You pay once for version X and X+1 just in case you miss out on an update coming in a month. Then you pay again for a big upgrade.
Alert fatigue. Down Detector will show an outage with a service when the intermediate network is down. Companies have to triage alerts and once they’re validated they are posted on a status page. Some companies abuse this to hide their outages. Others delay in a reasonable manner.
I have considered building something to address this and even own honeststatuspage.com to eventually host it on. But it’s a complex problem without an obviously correct answer.
Yeah. Down Detector is more or less meaningless unless something massive has happened, and as you say it has terrible consequences for knock-on services.
It's not even just intermediate networks, it's sometimes direct coinnections. For example, a flood of people reporting an outage on mobile phone network X when the problem they are experiencing is not being able to call a loved one who is on phone network Y, which is the one that is down. This happened a little while back in the UK, leading the other phone providers to have to deny there was some broad outage (which is not an easy thing to reassure when there are so many MVNOs sharing network Y)
Because the outcomes and demographics for sports betting vs the other two show different aggregate money movements and we make judgements about what we consider to be acceptably and unacceptably informed and consenting risk accepting behavior.
I build all kinds of “useless” stuff. Recently I did a LoungeBuddy clone[0]. Prior to that I made a bunch of other things you can see at [1]. I toss things on domains I happen to own if it makes sense. Sometimes they live on a path of an existing domain. If I don’t need the thing anymore I recycle the domain for something else. I’m fortunate enough that I can afford to pay this tax on my entertainment.
I build random things in the “indie hacker” way but it’s always more about doing stuff for me than others. I find it enjoyable and fun, and that’s what drives it. If I get some traction, then great, but if not, I also get the tool I wanted and the fun experience and learning of building it. While I wish this didn’t come at the expense of reading less, I am happy it means my TV backlog is growing.
I think you can celebrate the ingenuity of a moment in a conflict without condoning the whole of it. Shooting down a plane with a helicopter is hard, this is the first time it happened as far as we know.
Also, when I was taught about the Vietnam War there was a huge amount of respect paid to the creativity of the North Korean forces in how they ran their military operations. Obviously a 1/n anecdote.
