Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this is representative of the majority of traefik’s users. Most of us use it as an HTTP entrypoint for a container stack (docker compose, in my case) or for local development, and the FOSS version works great for that, with better dev tooling than anything else i’ve seen.
I disagree. If you're a heavy Traefik user you're eventually going to need a feature that has been carefully omitted from the F/OSS projects.
That's literally the point of open core software. It's free and open source at the core, but "enterprise" / "scale" features are behind a license.
Enterprises/Scaled users that can pay, have to, to get the features they need. Everyone else can enjoy and profit off fully free and open source piece of software.
Win-Win-Win.
It's probably the only software business model that allows for a company to actually make money while also giving out most of their products for free as open source. Just selling support/services does not work and does not scale. Cf. literally everyone, the only orgs that somewhat pull it off are foundations/volunteer based projects like Django, Debian, etc but they are not commercial for-profit entities (there is nothing wrong with that, but most people want to be paid well). And your $1k/year, while decent towards a volunteer organisation, would be probably worse than nothing for a commercial company that has costs associated with each contract (legal, administrative, support, etc). For a fun story on the topic, check out HashiCorp's first commercial deal with Apple for a Vagrant plugin, that resulted in HashiCorp losing money on the deal due to the amount of money spent on lawyers reviewing Apple's terms and time spent supporting them afterwards. The only existing somewhat exception is Red Hat, but even they have moved more and more into open core with Ansible Automation Platform and OpenShift, which are their money makers, and have scrapped CentOS as a RHEL compatible free OS.