What's perhaps more questionable than putting certain services behind a paywall - which I can understand - is the pricing. Indigo is almost €20 more expensive per year than phpStorm (€59/yr).
I had hoped this would be reasonably priced, but there is no world in which $84/yr for something that does little more than allow you to skip the Homebrew commands for installing the services, is a reasonable value.
The only other difference between Indigo and Homebrew-installed Nginx/PHP/MySQL/Redis is that Homebrew services are always running in the background, whereas with Indigo, they shut down when the app shuts down.
But with the M-series chips being as good as they are and the relatively few resources those services take, that's not a huge concern.
Add that to the fact that Indigo doesn't have a framework for us to be able to add custom services, such as Imagick or ElasticSearch, I'm sure you can understand my complete bafflement at the current price.
That being said, I also understand it's better to sell one license at $84 than 10 licenses at $8.40 since one customer requires less support than 10 customers. That one customer is just not going to be me.
Edited to add: To compare Indigo pricing to some of the other tools I use, in order of cost (lowest-highest):
- Querious (MySQL database tool): $49 initial purchase price, $25 to add another year of updates. Does not stop functioning if I don't immediately renew.
- Sublime Text (text editor): $99 per 3 years, then $80 per 3 years. Grants a perpetual fallback license for the latest version available when updates expire.
- phpStorm (IDE): €99 per year, then €79 per year, then €59 per year onwards. Grants a perpetual fallback license, so a subscription is not necessary.
- Tower (Git management tool): €79/year subscription. However, a developer interacts with a Git GUI infinitely more frequently than they would interact with Indigo stacks.
- Orbit (time tracking tool): €87.99/year subscription. However, a good time-tracking tool is essential for freelancers and cannot be replicated with simple CLI commands.
As you can see, Indigo would be the third most expensive tool I pay for, and in my opinion, the value added by literally all of the tools on this list is much greater than the value added by Indigo.
You can't even say that using Indigo to manage your Nginx server is that much easier than using the Homebrew version, because of how much you need to muck about with the template files to get URL rewrites working for new sub-folders of your document root.
Tower, the Git management tool, does not require you to randomly dig into Git config files to manage literally any part of the commit & push experience to any given repository.
I would love to support Indigo and its development going forward, but this pricing is not in line with reality.
Second edit: Randomly when refreshing the pricing page, the price changed from €89 to $84, so I've edited the post to reflect this, as well as reworded certain other parts.