ProGet lives in a niche… within a niche… perhaps within yet another niche.

It’s not a consumer product that everyone “needs” like a smartphone. It’s a highly specialized B2B tool for organizations that care about package management, software supply chains, internal repositories, and OSS security/governance.

Our biggest direct competitors in this space are Sonatype Nexus and JFrog Artifactory. At the core, our products solve the same boring problems: fast, reliable package storage and retrieval, plus OSS security and governance around those packages.

Sonatype and JFrog are growth-focused companies fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in investor financing. Inedo, on the other hand, operates as a small business. And yet, of the three, Inedo is by far the most stable choice for organizations small and large.

How could that possibly be?

I think it comes down to incentives, and in this article I’ll explain how our paths started in similar places, how they separated, and why that difference matters so much to our users today.

Our Culture and Values

Inedo didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a passion to build software tools.

In retrospect, that’s a terrible way to start a business. But somehow, we managed to make it work. More than 20 years later, we’re still here, and we’re still passionate about building software products.

That’s what drives us.

In 2018, Inedo took a detour. We started down the same road as so many other software vendors. We shifted our focus toward growth, took on investors, started to scale, and then… the pandemic hit.

That changed everything, both practically and personally.

Becoming a “Big Business” no longer appealed to me. Neither did the “Big Exit” that would have come with selling Inedo. It’s hard to articulate, but focusing on investor goals and scaling milestones instead of customers’ needs and great products didn’t make me happy. It also didn’t drive most of the team I liked working with.

I wanted to return to operating a small business: being hands-on with our products, working closely with the team, and listening directly to users. But this time, we had more wisdom, more experience, and the principles of Chōwa to guide us.

Back to Small Business Basics

Starting in 2021, we returned to a small business mindset. After becoming self-funded again and independent from investor capital, we recommitted to being user-focused instead of growth-focused.

We then ditched those large, bet-the-company strategies to focus on smaller, lower-risk projects. Some would succeed. Some would fail. That’s okay. The point was to keep learning, keep improving, and avoid putting the company, our employees, and our users in a position where everything depended on one big gamble.

Profit and growth are great success markers, but they’re just numbers. And they’re relative, so who’s to say if 3%, 30%, or 300% are worth celebrating?

At Inedo, we see growth as more of a weather vane. It’s fine if it happens, and it usually means we’re doing something right.

It’s also okay if we don’t grow. When that happens, it may be a sign that we’re doing something wrong. It’s on us to figure out what that “something” is and what, if anything, we need to address.

The important part is this: growth is not the point of the business. Customers are. Users are. The product is. The team is. The long-term stability of the company is.

Their Paths: Investment & Growth

Sonatype and JFrog started much like we did, with a passion to build software.

Sonatype’s roots are deeply tied to the open source world. They were the team that built Maven and set out to launch commercial tools to augment their open source project. Artifactory lived in the same world and offered an alternative Maven repository.

For years, Sonatype and JFrog went head-to-head as smaller, more product-driven companies. They had to listen to customers. They had to build great products. They had to compete not only with each other, but with emerging tools like ProGet.

And then they went down the investment path.

That doesn’t mean everyone involved suddenly stopped caring about users. I don’t believe that. There are smart, thoughtful, hard-working people at both companies.

But incentives matter.

When a company becomes investor-backed at that scale, the business changes. Growth becomes the organizing principle. The question is no longer just, “How do we build the best product for our users?” It becomes, “How do we tell a bigger platform story to justify the next valuation?”

That shift may be perfectly rational from the boardroom. But it looks very different from the customer’s side. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it, Enshittification.

Sonatype Nexus: The Enshittification of Predictability

Nexus Repository started out as a predictable, self-hosted repository manager with both free and paid editions.

And then they suddenly introduced hard API/usage limits in their free edition, which effectively bricked the tool for many users that relied on it. And then they doubled-down and further reduced them a year later. Then, they migrated their OSS Index API to Sonatype Guide, now with a paid credit limit.

To make matters worse, they even rolled out usage-based licensing on their paid editions. Think about that for a moment. I couldn’t think of a more user-hostile action if I tried. They brought the worst aspect of cloud hosting (unpredictable costs) to software that users host on their own infrastructure.

That is not product strategy. That is investor strategy.

Their goal has nothing to do with serving users better, or even maximize long-term revenue. The goal is to improve the story: free users are converting, monetization is increasing, and the company is “capturing value” from people who were previously using too much without paying. Sprinkle in a few slides about “cloud” and “AI” and you’ve got the perfect pitch deck for the next round of investors.

That’s the enshittification of predictability.

Sonatype Nexus didn’t fail technically. It failed relationally. It told users: you can rely on this until we decide you’ve relied on it too much.

JFrog Artifactory: The Enshittification of Stability

JFrog Artifactory followed a remarkably similar path. What started as a stable, self-hosted repository gradually became part of an investor-driven “cloud AI ops platform story”.

They shut down their community repositories (Bintray, GoCenter, ChartCenter). According to users, they killed off their free hosting tier with only 30 days’ notice. Their “Pro” tier was also dropped, forcing users to upgrade to a 10x costlier version.

But the bigger pattern is even more user-hostile.

What used to be a new feature developed as part of a normal, user-collaborative roadmap is now a confusing, investor-driven “product” that may or may not be a real product in any meaningful sense.

Maybe it exists as a SKU? Maybe it exists as a link on a dashboard? Maybe it exists as a marketing page, a roadmap promise, or a bundle of half-finished workflows around the core product? But from the user’s side, it does not feel like a separate, mature product solving a separate, mature problem.

These “products” are built as tools for investor storytelling. More products, more attach rates, more expansion revenue, and more ways to show that the platform is growing is exactly how you increase that stock price.

That’s the enshittification of stability.

Like Sonatype, JFrog did not fail technically. It failed as a product. It told users: we won’t improve our product, but you can talk to sales about platform adoption, enterprise expansion, cloud consumption, and account growth.

Our Path: Stability as a Feature

Things have been totally different at Inedo.

Because we’re shielded from the ups and downs of the market, we don’t need to impress analysts by chasing trends. We don’t need to turn every feature into a platform story. We don’t need to carve the product into a confusing menu of modules, add-ons, and sales conversations. We don’t need to pretend that every new technology trend is suddenly the future of software delivery.

And we definitely don’t need to make ProGet less stable just to make a growth chart look better.

Our leadership doesn’t need to waste time on earnings calls, shareholder reports, or investor updates. We just focus on our job: identifying problems in our boring technology space, listening to what our customers need, and building great software products for the people in our micro-niche.

That has led to drastically different results.

Inedo’s ProGet: The Stable Choice

ProGet licensing is simpler, more predictable, and easier to understand. Our free edition helps sell the paid edition, so we’re not going to give it up.

When we had to increase prices in 2024, we did it in a customer-focused way. We gave six months’ notice, published a detailed blog post, and applied the increase only to new customers. Existing customers were given the option to extend their current pricing for up to three years.

That is not how you maximize short-term revenue, but it is how you build trust.

We’ve also consistently offered a superior support experience. Unlike our competitors, we’re not going to open a “Global Capability Centre” in Hyderbad to reduce our support costs. We have a better cost-reduction strategy: improve the product so that less support is required.

And finally, the software speaks for itself.

ProGet compares favorably against Artifactory and against Sonatype. In fact, many new ProGet customers are dissatisfied former Sonatype and JFrog customers. We have the migration guides to prove it!

Our Future: Stable Innovation

As I mentioned earlier, “the niche within a niche within a niche” that ProGet, Artifactory, and Nexus live in is boring. I find it exhilarating, but I also realize our products are not at the forefront of technology.

We don’t lead the industry into bold new paradigms. We don’t redefine how software is created. We don’t need to be in every keynote, analyst report, or trend piece.

We support the people who do that work.

But unlike our competitors, we’re not masquerading as the next great enterprise technology platform. We’re not trying to convince investors, analysts, or the market that package repositories are suddenly the center of some bold new technological frontier.

That does not mean we avoid innovation. Far from it.

ProGet 2026 and PVRS is a great example of the kind of innovation we’re proud of: a practical improvement to vulnerability management that helps organizations move beyond theoretical severity scores and focus on what actually matters: whether a vulnerability poses real risk in their environment and what action should be taken.

That innovation won’t impress investors, but it is in service of our users.

Conclusion: Stability by Design

Aside from a short detour, our goal has always been to operate as a small business. We’ve remained profitable while enjoying steady, modest growth. And that’s what keeps us going.

Inedo has been in business for more than 20 years. We make great products, work closely with our customers, and improve those products every day. When there’s a problem, we have every incentive to respond quickly and effectively because the solution usually makes ProGet better for everyone else.

We’re not going anywhere. No one is shutting us down. No one is forcing us into a different market. No one is pressuring us to chase a trend, abandon a customer segment, or turn a simple product into a complicated platform story.

In fact, we love our jobs. That especially includes me, and I’m not about to retire any time soon.

But our jobs are not our lives, either. We believe in healthy, sustainable work. That means we intentionally avoid the high-risk, high-stress decisions that might produce high returns for investors but create uncertainty for customers.

That is the benefit of working with a stable, independent software vendor. Our incentives are aligned with yours. We want ProGet to be boring, reliable, useful, and better every year.

For our customers, and for us, that stability matters.