Skip Is Now Free and Open Source

Skip is great and I hope this works for them, and indeed the paid and closed source nature was a sticking point for me, but also I fear for their future — I've seen so many OSS funding horror stories.

The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge

The ARR of Claude Code, Cursor and JetBrains offer some counter-examples (yes, I understand the first two have had VC subsidization). RAD Game Tools was acquired by Epic. In the space of libraries, as one example, PSPDFKit was sold and rebranded as Nutrient.io

But developer tools? Those have historically required the patronage of massive tech companies in order to fund their ongoing development, support, and infrastructure costs.

Evan Czaplicki's StrangeLoop talk (The Economics of Programming Languages) has more details about different models for funding PLs. Not all PLs fall under "massive tech company patronage."

Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool. What if the company goes under? Gets acquired and shut down? What happens to their apps? We get it.

I think if you are talking about this, then it means that the value prop of your project was not compelling enough to ameliorate this fear for the size of customer you are talking to.

For small potential customers, you were already giving away the product for free. ("While free apps and indie developers below a revenue threshold were exempt"). Naively, I would've thought that it is precisely small iOS dev shops which would pay for a tool like this, because it's cheaper to use the tool than to hire additional Kotlin developers (assuming "expand to Android" was one of their top priorities).