Docker inexpensive but hard to replace
Joe Zeng, software engineer at Statsig, on using Docker
This shows Docker has become a low cost toll booth on a workflow that is painful to replace once a team is shipping lots of containers. At Statsig, Docker spend stayed small even as image count grew, which matters because the product sits in the daily loop of building images, pulling them from Docker Hub, and running them locally before code goes to AKS. That makes reliability and familiarity more important than squeezing out a modest software bill.
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The practical switching cost is narrower than the emotional one. Statsig said moving off Docker Hub would mostly mean changing registry URLs and API keys, and only became worth considering above roughly $1,000 per month. That implies the hard dependency is less the registry alone, and more the broader developer habit around Docker in day to day work.
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Docker rebuilt its business around exactly this pattern. It stopped selling ops heavy orchestration products, charged developers and development managers instead, and kept pricing low enough to fit on a company card. Today, Team is $16 monthly per user and Business is $24, with paid Desktop use required for larger companies outside the free tier limits.
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Podman is a real substitute at the engine layer, especially on Linux, because it is daemonless and supports rootless containers. But that only saves money if a team is willing to rework familiar desktop, registry, and support workflows. For a company already standardized on Docker and growing smoothly, that trade usually does not clear the bar.
The next step is not mass churn to free container tools. It is Docker widening the amount of paid value wrapped around the same container workflow, through team controls, security checks, and cloud build services. As long as seat prices stay small relative to engineer cost, more teams will treat Docker like basic development plumbing and pay rather than rebuild the stack.