Warp Blog

> I can all but guarantee that you're using, daily, some tool that is free. Why aren't you paying $5 a day for it?

Because nobody has been crafty enough to capitalize on that market, or is unable to provide a sufficiently convincing alternative that would attract people to it.

For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/

It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

Sometimes free tools also become paid, see Docker Desktop (for business) or something like Lens: both are proof that, it feeling like a rug pull aside, many people will pay for what even was formerly a free tool.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have developers that can't capitalize on their software and the projects aren't sustainable: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

On a more positive note, this is why Open collective, GitHub Sponsors and other crowd funding solutions are nice, since now you can throw money towards whatever projects you support and think deserve to exist.

> You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.

Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts…

Hi HN,

I’m Aloke, one of the co-creators of commands.dev (https://www.commands.dev/) and an engineer at Warp (https://www.warp.dev/).

Commands.dev is a curated, open-source collection of popular terminal commands that lets you quickly search for hard-to-remember terminal commands by title, tag, and description. Each of these pages are also indexed by Google to provide a consistent, well-formatted alternative to the variety of sources these commands turn up now, like StackOverflow.

As an engineer who uses the terminal frequently, I often have trouble remembering the exact command I want to execute if it’s not easily searchable within my terminal. Some commands that I run infrequently don’t match up with the underlying task they perform, which makes it even harder to find. For example, to undo my last git commit, I have to search for “git reset”, which I never remember because I’m always thinking “undo”ing my last commit instead of “reset”ing.

We built commands.dev so that there would be a centralized place to quickly find and search commands based on their name, description, or category. If you are a Warp user, these commands are also integrated directly into Warp as a feature we call Workflows (https://docs.warp.dev/features/workflows) so that you can quickly search and execute them directly from the terminal.

These commands are open-source (https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows) and we would love contributions to make commands.dev even more useful. So far, we’ve…

> For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/

> It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

...

> Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/

But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.

It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.

I mean, $5/day to save my employer (not me) 5m/day is a good deal for my employer. I, however, don't get the value of that 5m[1].

[1] Which is why I pay for the IDEA IDE in my personal capacity even though I won't use it at work. Because if they save 5m/day, I get that time saved. Luckily my current (and last three or four) employers had no hesitation in purchasing software we wanted, so I never had to use it at work.

> I sense many feel their business model is better suited to subscriptions

Self-plug, but sometimes the developer just straight up needs income for a basic living. My terminal emulator [0] is in Early Access, meaning fans throw me $5/mo. Each month they get a new version and the binary is 100% offline (theirs to own.)

I sincerely want to respect the customer's wallet/privacy, yet I don't know what else to do while staying indie: my direct competitors either have VC funding [1] or the author's a wealthy retired CEO [2].

However, once I reach a 1.0 stable release I'll switch to a one-off payment system. I'm also not against a Business Source License when the time comes.

[0] https://terminal.click

[1] https://warp.dev

[2] https://ghostty.org

Warp founder here. Great question.

I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)

But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.

The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.

Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.

> Sure you can't point it to a Jira ticket and get a PR

You absolutely can. This is exactly what SWE-Bench[0] measures, and I've been amazed at how quickly AIs have been climbing those ladders. I personally have been using Warp [1] a lot recently and in quite a lot of low-medium difficulty cases it can one-shot a decent PR. For most of my work I still find that I need to pair with it to get sufficiently good results (and that's why I still prefer it to something cloud-based like Codex [2], but otherwise it's quite good too), and I expect the situation to flip over the coming couple of years.

[0] https://www.swebench.com/

[1] https://www.warp.dev/

[2] https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/