How big of a market do you feel developer tools are - IDEs, IDE plugins, build tools, monitoring tools etc? Is there space for small companies to build something and survive profitably here?<p>How about if we extend the market to include programming frameworks, libraries and database systems?
To answer your first question, <i>very big</i>.<p>From a qualitative standpoint, think of this way ... all companies are now tech companies and developer jobs are always in any recent "hottest job" list you can find. So, it stands to reason that tools for those companies and jobs will be a big market.<p>If you want real numbers, here's 2 examples: (1) Atlassian is now a public company and pretty much only makes developer tools. They started with one product (Jira) in 2002. They now have a market cap of $11B and annual revenues of $620M [0]. (2) If you read Indie Hackers, you'll find people like Mike Perham who makes Sidekiq. Sidekiq is an open-source tool for background processing in Ruby on Rails apps. Mike makes $80K/month on premium licenses/support. Think about that, it <i>does just one thing for just one developer framework</i> and he makes close to $1M per year with no employees.[1]<p>So, yes, I think there's a big market (in the billions) and plenty of room for small companies. Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for.<p>[0] <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq</a>
I have personally discussed this issue with a couple of people who worked for the big dev-tool vendors in the 1990s. The consensus is that open-source has almost completely destroyed the commercial viability of the dev-tool market. Eclipse is an example of open-source tooling that now has support from former commercial tool vendors.<p>There still is a small market (in terms of volumes) for dev-tools sold to enterprise clients. But AFAIK enterprise clients prefer to buy from "enterprise strength" vendors. Which makes it very difficult for a smaller developer to compete.<p>The biggest stumbling block to being a tool vendor is the demand for support. Even if you can make money on selling the tools in the first place, the on-going support is likely to cost you more than you can charge in on-going fees.