Item — HN Reader

I know this is disappointing, but what business model would be best here for ollama?

1. Donationware - Let's be real, tokens are expensive and if they ask for everyone to chip in voluntarily people wouldn't do that and Ollama would go bust quickly.

2. Subscriptions (bootstrapped and no VCs) again like 1. people would have to pay for the cloud service as a subscription to be sustainable (would you?) or go bust.

3. Ads - Ollama could put ads in the free version but to remove them the users can pay for a higher tier, a somewhat good compromise, except developers don't like ads and don't like pay for their tools unless their company does it for them. No users = Ollama goes bust.

4. VCs - This is the current model which is why they have a cloud product and it keeps the main product free (for now). Again, if they cannot make money or sell to another company Ollama goes bust.

5. Fully Open Source (and 100% free) with Linux Foundation funding - Ollama could also go this route, but this means they wouldn't be a business anymore for investors and rely on the Linux Foundation's sponsors (Google, IBM, etc) for funding the LF to stay sustainable. The cloud product may stay for enterprises.

Ollama has already taken money from investors so they need to produce a return for them so 5. isn't an option in the long term.

6. Acquisition by another company - Ollama could get acquired and the product wouldn't change* (until the acquirer jacks up prices or messes with the product) which ultimately kills it anyway as the community moves on.

I don't see any other way that Ollama can not be enshittified without making a quick buck.

You just need to avoid VC backed tools and pay for bootstrapped ones without any ties to investors.

Tokens are expensive, sure, but I don't even _want_ Ollama to run inference for me.

Ollama gives me, essentially, a wrapper for llama.cpp and convenient hosting where I can download models.

I'm happy to pay for the bandwidth, plus a premium to cover their running this service.

I'm furthermore happy to pay a small charge to cover the development that they've done and continue to do to make local-inference easy for me.

> I don't see any other way that Ollama can not be enshittified without making a quick buck.

Me neither. The mistake they did was getting outside investments, as now they're no longer in full control and eventually are gonna have to at least give the impression they give a shit about the investors, and it'll come at the cost of the users one way or another.

Please pay for your tools that are independently developed, we really need more community funding of projects so we can avoid this never-ending spiral of VC-fueled+killed tools.

They got the investments before the company was even ollama. They exist because their VC was ok with them pivoting to build the current product. It's likely it wouldn't exist without the funding.

I dunno, the founders could have also changed their frame of mind, and started the project without VC investments. AFAIK, the founding team worked at Docker before, a company that doesn't pay peanuts, so I'm sure they could have scraped together enough to bootstrap it initially.

But I understand the added zeros to the (maybe) future payout when you take VC funds is hard to ignore, I'm not blaming them for anything really.