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Docker pricing changes hike mid-tier costs

Docker adds features but raises Pro and Team prices and adds consumption-based Docker Hub pricing for container image pulls and storage.

Beth Pariseau
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Published: 12 Sep 2024

Docker pricing changes this week mean users will get access to more features, including cloud and security products that were previously separate. But Pro and Team subscribers will pay more, as will some users of its Docker Hub container registry.

As of Nov. 15, Docker's three paid subscription plans -- Pro, Team and Business -- will include more minutes per month on Docker's Build Cloud service, Docker Scout container security analysis, and Testcontainers minutes based on the December 2023 acquisition of AtomicJar. Testcontainers are disposable containers with dependencies defined as code that developers can use to test apps locally.

With these changes, Business subscriptions will stay priced at $24 per month. Pro will cost 80% more, going from $5 per user month to $9 per month, and Team will about cost 67% more, going from $9 to $15 per user month, according to Docker's website. The free Docker Personal plan will no longer include Build Cloud minutes, will support Scout for one rather than three repositories and will be limited to one private Docker Hub container registry repository with 2 GB of storage. The Pro subscription will also include support for two repository scans with Scout as opposed to the previous three.

All plans will include a newly capped limit of container image pulls and storage on Docker Hub, a massive container registry Docker maintains where container images are pulled and stored by developers.

"To ensure that Docker Hub remains sustainable and continues to grow as the world's largest container registry, we're introducing consumption-based pricing for image pulls and storage," wrote Giri Sreenivas, chief product officer at Docker, in a company blog post. "This update also includes enhanced usage monitoring tools, making it easier for customers to understand and manage usage."

Sreenivas estimated just 3% of the largest commercial consumers of Docker Hub will be affected by the new pricing. Personal accounts will get an increase, from 33 included Docker Hub image pulls per hour to 40. Pro will have 25,000 included Docker Hub pulls per month, and Team 100,000 and Business 1 million. Neither the blog post nor website specified pricing for container image storage on Docker Hub.

"For many of our Docker Team and Docker Business customers with Service Accounts, the new higher image pull limits will eliminate previously incurred fees," he wrote.

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.

"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.

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