Hi Ron, congratulations on the release. My question is: how will you make money? I see you are the CEO, there is a company, and you have employees. Crunchbase links to news articles that make it seem like you've raised $24MM. Maybe I'm just missing it, but I can't see any pricing information on your landing page or in your docs. After I log in to FloxHub with my Github profile, I don't see any billing options. What is your plan?
Appreciate the call out. Regarding pricing, bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it.
What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise.
Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.
Good luck! My experience of Nix, and similar "robust engineering" solutions like Bazel is that there are a handful of people that get it, and see the benefits. But there are hoards more that think you should just write hacky shell scripts and bugs don't really matter anyway.
There are also the people who get it and see the benefits, but don't want to put up with the work required to have your system or environment managed with Nix. If this tool simplifies things, it could get traction.
