Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker Desktop without even thinking about it.

The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It&#x27;s a pretty tough spot to be in.<p>Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not alone.<p>Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure&#x2F;production deployments probably wouldn&#x27;t work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.

Looks like there&#x27;s a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop alternatives here, so shameless plug: I&#x27;ve been working on a new Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc:<p>- Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies)<p>- Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS from Linux, but there&#x27;s also access to the Linux filesystem from macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs with native FS speed.<p>- Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share resources.<p>- Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta<p>- Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL<p>- Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5 idle wakeups per second — less than most apps, while Docker wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron!<p>- Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS: clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and more I&#x27;m working on now. Will look into memory usage too, although I can&#x27;t guarantee a good fix for that.<p>- No root needed<p>Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS, but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!)<p>If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I&#x27;ll let you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or two at most :)<p>Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are other warts you&#x27;d like to see fixed.

Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we&#x27;ve made every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g. DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a quick way to drastically reduce reliance further.<p>Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely will just keep forking over license fees as it&#x27;s cheaper than the salary to remove the dependency.

The buildkit tooling such as `docker buildx bake` is great. I haven&#x27;t seen this level of innovation from the other OCI builders that are aiming to replace Docker.<p>I found the first scenario that I actually wanted to pay Docker for- a dedicated, hosted Buildx runner. Not some multi-tenant thing that reads and writes a slow cache to S3 before and after every build. A fast one, that keeps the cache hot.<p>I&#x27;d pay 2x whatever the EC2 instance cost would be to have this managed and updated automatically.

On debian and Ubuntu there is the podman-docker [1] package which is really convenient. It allows you to use docker commands with podman as the underlying engine.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;packages.debian.org&#x2F;bookworm&#x2F;podman-docker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;packages.debian.org&#x2F;bookworm&#x2F;podman-docker</a>

I&#x27;m surprised Docker Desktop drives so much revenue. As far as I know, it is a Mac and Windows-specific tool.<p>Are FAANG and FAANG-like developers not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers? Even for enterprise developers who use Mac and Windows, isn&#x27;t 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways?<p>I&#x27;ve never really quite grasped the need for Docker Desktop.

Great to hear that. While I’m not a big fan of Docker desktop I really wish they restart docker swarm and kill thad abomination named Kubernetes.<p>Docker compose and swarm are really cool technologies - easy to start with and more than enough for small and medium companies.<p>I really hope they would bring it back and we start seeing managed swarm from cloud providers.

The second there&#x27;s a CLI-only 100% compatible Docker Desktop replacement for macOS I&#x27;ll use it. Docker Desktop on macOS is insanely slow and there&#x27;s 0 reason it should be a GUI app that lives in my menubar, it&#x27;s just ridiculous.<p>So far all the alternatives are &quot;mostly&quot; compatible with caveats here and there.

I work at a pretty large corporation that uses docker desktop. The engineering team is in the low hundreds spread across the world. We happily pay for what we use and it&#x27;s all great. We don&#x27;t really use many features of docker desktop though. We have our own image space (ecr) and I don&#x27;t think anyone is using or relying on extensions. I&#x27;m sure some team will eventually socialize an alternative. The reason we went through with paying for docker desktop was probably the lost time and productivity of transitioning off without due diligence dedicated on getting another option to work just as well. I don&#x27;t know if our org gets customized pricing, but if it&#x27;s $24&#x2F;mo for us, that&#x27;s maybe a 1&#x2F;3 of an hour of the least expensive run rate engineer we have (worldwide, again), per month. That&#x27;s maybe 5 hours of run rate time per year per engineer. I can see why our org bought in at the time and continues.<p>On a personal note, I was fine with the change, since it allowed personal use still with docker desktop. When Docker Desktop for Linux came out, I gave it a try on a clean server. Unfortunately, even on a fresh Ubuntu install with fresh hardware, the reliability of Docker Desktop for Ubuntu was awful, crashing every few days into a stalled state. I had to make a cron job to watch it and maintain it&#x27;s uptime.

&gt; 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses<p>I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you?<p>Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term, but there’s no genuine selling point to it long-term and I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, so it doesn’t strike me as particularly sustainable revenue.

Who knew charging for your products and services instead of giving them away for free yields more money?

I&#x27;m skeptic how long this will last unless they bring out some cutting-edge innovations. I frankly used and loved Docker Desktop for a long time because it was the easiest way to get going and I believe even k8s is included now which is great for hobbyists and those who just want to get things done. But, I&#x27;ve been annoyed by the UX changes and the push to login to docker hub.<p>While in 2023, there are most certainly great alternatives that are relatively easy to install from the terminal and get going, I guess there&#x27;s not yet a definitive replacement that comes with the GUI too. Best I can think of is Podman Desktop Companion[1] but not sure how well this works.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iongion.github.io&#x2F;podman-desktop-companion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iongion.github.io&#x2F;podman-desktop-companion&#x2F;</a>

Yeah and everyone I know is moving to podman or colima

I&#x27;m more interested in seeing if Amazon can productize firecracker to create a substitute for docker. The security of firecracker is pretty good compared to docker and can also enable development that puts serverless architecture first

&gt; ... capturing the credit card of the end-user developer for low-priced seats as a wedge into seat expansion in the org.<p>What a weird and gross series of words and concepts, all strung together like that.

Everyone talks about how docker desktop will be replaced as it&#x27;s a commodity and I agree. However I see no one talking about the value Docker hub brings which is now bundled with all paid users.<p>By paying we didn&#x27;t have to migrate anything and are now building and pushing every commit on our app as a 800mb image (I know its a little to big...). We are storing hundreds if not thousands of images and uploading &#x2F; pulling TBs.<p>This kind of usage appears much pricier in container registry offered by cloud vendors

Can&#x27;t speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. We&#x27;ll see how well that goes.

I&#x27;ll be interested to see how this turns out. This is already looking more positive for them than I expected.<p>Rancher Desktop has been working great for me, so I&#x27;m not sure they&#x27;ll be able to keep increasing their numbers with so closely comparable free competitors. I&#x27;d be curious what the breakdown is in terms of how much of their value is from Docker Desktop vs. Docker Hub vs. ancillary features.

There is a high cost of switching tech stack for companies, especially when availability of alternatives is unclear yet. So lots of companies will have no choice but pay for it.<p>But for individuals it would be a complete different story. I&#x27;ve been playing with PodMan on linux in my home lab for a while now and I&#x27;m super happy with it, especially it doesn&#x27;t need root in most of the cases.

When they started charging for Docker Desktop I immediately uninstalled it and just installed the cli-client on my mac machine, and started running Docker itself in an Ubuntu VM and set the $DOCKER_HOST on the host machine and do everything in the CLI. The only reason I use $DOCKER_HOST at all is because I&#x27;m just too lazy to have an SSH session constantly open to the vm to run docker commands, otherwise I would just install the docker snap in Ubuntu and call it a day and use it directly.<p>My company is still small enough that we could use Docker Desktop for free, but I refuse to get sucked into such a shitty value proposition.<p>I question your competence if you can&#x27;t run docker commands in a terminal and think $5 per month for a lousy electron app that wraps the commands with some buttons is good value. The fact they they are making $135M ARR and the company is valued at over a billion dollars is absolutely insane when superior alternatives that are Free exist.

Tried several gui alternative because docker desktop offer nothing and ends up enjoying lazydocker <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jesseduffield&#x2F;lazydocker">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jesseduffield&#x2F;lazydocker</a>

I am pretty happy they&#x27;ve managed to grow.<p>I&#x27;m also pretty happy with the pro plan, it&#x27;s pretty convenient to use as its default most places, free storage and transfers for images, no surprise costs.<p>Haven&#x27;t seen the appeal of docker desktop though as linux user...

Slightly off-topic: Has anyone ever figured out how to stop Docker Desktop from symlinking the ~&#x2F;.aws directory from Windows to WSL2 distributions?<p>I&#x27;m a paying customer (through my company) and it&#x27;s a pain in the ass.

I really enjoy using docker compose to run most of my hobby and small project websites on small cloud nodes. With the remote builder functionality, it makes CICD and deployments trivially easy for me as well.

For the many here who have moved to an alternative (colima, Rancher, podman, etc), other than cost, is there a compelling (ie technical) advantage to these options? (on macos specifically)

Enjoy while it lasts. People are pissed about the approach they took to gain marketshare before changing the terms. Soon enough there will be a viable free alternative.

Happy for them, even though containers were already extant, docker were the ones who came up with the container image format and made it all easy peasy.

For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;d call this &quot;Docker 3.0&quot; given that the first iteration was dotCloud, their Heroku competitor — I liked using that!

I use Docker all over the place but I don’t pay Docker inc one cent.

SJ rulz!

So they waited until it was ingrained in most companies and then started charging for it?<p>This seems like twist on the common play of subsidize with VC dollars until you have a large market share then increase the price to profitability.