Docker pricing changes hike mid-tier costs

Docker user reaction muted so far; analysts see upsides

One subscriber to Docker Pro, Jeff Geerling, an author, developer and founder at Midwestern Mac in St. Louis, took to X, formerly Twitter, shortly after the Docker pricing changes were publicized this week.

"[I was] happy paying a little to support Docker for convenience they provide. But $60 -> $108 is steep," Geerling wrote.

Not pleased @Docker is nearly doubling its subscription fee this year: https://t.co/TTidHfWAaG

Luckily alternatives are finally not as painful to adopt. Was happy paying a little to support Docker for convenience they provide. But $60 -> $108 is steep

— Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) September 12, 2024

"I still like Docker's overall integration the best, but this is a good point at which I'd be willing to switch," Geerling added in a follow-up reply to another user.

Geerling listed GitHub and GitLab as alternatives to Docker Hub as well as Podman Desktop as an alternative to Docker Desktop. Podman is an open source project included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions. Geerling is an individual contributor to Ansible, also owned by Red Hat.

Generally, however, Docker's pricing changes were not met with as strong a public response as a previous pricing update to Docker Desktop in 2021 and last year's deprecation of its Free Team subscription.

"Customers have remained surprisingly resilient in the face of other price change headlines this year," said Devin Dickerson, an analyst at Forrester Research. "[With] that, along with what appears at a glance to be a relatively smaller set of customers negatively impacted, I'm not seeing a strong reaction to the news just yet."

One analyst said the Docker Hub pricing changes seem targeted at accounts that might previously have abused the system.

"From my [point of] view, the limits on Docker Hub are self-protection from the few extreme users that use Docker Hub as their CDN or otherwise generate millions of monthly pulls," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.

Volk and other analysts said the addition of new features to the Pro and Team pricing plans would likely soften the impact of price increases.

"I was mainly excited about Testcontainer Cloud and Build Cloud now being part of the package that lets developers create environments locally or in the cloud, depending on their requirements," Volk said. "I've always been a big fan of Testcontainers, and mainstreaming their use by making them part of the 'package' is something I fully endorse."

Overall, "the value proposition is strong as long as [users] take advantage of at least some of [the newly included] stuff, like Scout, Testcontainers or Build Cloud," he said.

Increases of 67% and 80% for Team and Pro subscriptions "seem large on paper," said Larry Carvalho, an analyst at RobustCloud, a cloud advisory firm.

"However, the increase is a non-issue depending on the increase in developer productivity delivered through Docker," he said.

The median annual salary for a computer science graduate in the U.S. is $83,812, Carvalho said, citing to CareerExplorer.

"This Docker pricing increase is less than one-tenth of 1% of this income, so it will barely move the needle in the decision-making process," he said.

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.