[lewisl9029]

Competition for developer tooling products is _fierce_, possibly more so than any other industry, precisely because we really seem to love spending our free time building slightly different versions of the tools we use that suit our preferences better, sometimes before we even try to Google if that slightly different version already exists.

Again, I'm totally guilty of this myself, since Reflame started as a side project initially to scratch my own itch, and I can't claim to have done an exhaustive search on the problem space before I started.

This results in a vicious cycle where every product, however innovative it might be at its inception, gets quickly commoditized by dozens of similar products immediately following any signs of traction, so they end up having to shift to competing on price eventually.

Combined with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691132 means any product that isn't available for free then eventually rots into obscurity due to the unfair distribution advantage of "free" in this market. Thus they are forced to offer a free version themselves and the cycle continues.