Screaming in the Cloud - How Grokability Built a Profitable Open Source Business with Jeremy Price

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Most open source companies do the same thing. They take investor money, lock their best features behind paywalls, sell the company, and disappoint everyone. Grokability did something different.Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability talks with Corey Quinn about how they built a business that makes enough money without chasing endless growth. From why they use simple technology to how they run thousands of separate installations for customers, Jeremy explains what happens when you care more about making a good product than explosive growth.Show Highlights: (00:51) Welcoming Jeremy Price from Grokability(03:34) How Snipe-IT Started With a Bet(05:30) Paying for Software Can Change Everything(07:40) When AWS Competes With Open Source(10:10) Boring Businesses Make Money(15:30) Balancing Hosting Needs and Product Quality(18:00) Pricing That Avoids Big Customer Problems(21:06) Better Than a Google Sheet(27:02) The Psychology of Buying(29:33) Where to Find Jeremy and GrokabilityLinks: https://jermops.com/about/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygprice/https://snipeitapp.com/companySponsored by: duckbillhq.com

When you have those sorts of whale clients, suddenly they have lots of leverage over your direction, right? And suddenly you're going to step in line when they say, hey, here's this feature request, which, again, might not make sense for 99.5.9s of our clients, but they want it. And so, well, we like our business, so we better actually make it happen for them. You know, it's, again, that sort of freedom that we have with not being beholden to VCs. We're also not beholden any particular customer. We certainly take those requests in consideration. I think we even say, you know, prioritized, you know, feature requests and that sort of stuff. But it still goes through the does this make sense for the product filter?

And if it doesn't make sense for a product, we say, hey, we're sorry, but that just doesn't align with how the direction we want to go. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest has been circling me and I've been circling me. and I've been circling him since long before any of you had heard of me. Don't you miss those naive days of innocence? Jeremy Price is the VP of Technology and Grockability. Jeremy, thank you for talking with me.

Thank you for having me, good sir. It's been too long. This episode is sponsored by my own company, Duck Bill. Having trouble with your AWS bill, perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them. Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going. going on in the wide world of A.W.S. Well, that's where Duck Bill comes in to help. Remember, you can't duck the Duck Bill Bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner, is absolutely not our motto. To learn more, visit DuckbillHQ.com.

It really has. You used to live in the city, and then we had no excuse for never talking to each other accepted conferences, and now you live out of the city, and we have better excuses for not talking to each other accepted conferences, except for the part where we don't really go to conferences quite like we used to. It feels like peak conference time was a ZERP phenomenon. Yeah, especially in, I think, our sort of realm, you know, the peak DevOps conference meetup times were in those teen years. Well, the 20 teens, not our teen years. And it was very quickly getting into Deverell talking to Deverell, and it was, this is clear it wasn't going to be sustainable, but man, do I miss the days of being able to get on stage five times a month and just indulge my

ongoing love affair with a sound of my own voice. Now I have to do that in a podcast. Yeah, and it's all yours, so you don't have to ask anybody for permission. You would think that. Yeah, yeah, we all have people. We have to be held accountable to at some level. So, Grogability's always been an interesting company. I have been keeping an eye on it from the periphery. I hate what you do, which is open source asset management. I don't like asset management. I, if I can't find something close at hand, well, it clearly has fallen into a well, I'll buy a new one. But that cuts against my entire life philosophy of always buying new toys with an excuse. But I like the open source model.

I like the fact that you have been hosting this for customers who don't want to run infrastructure themselves. And have done this going from just a few folks to 10 person company now. And your bootstrap, which is a fancy disparaging term that we use in San Francisco. Francisco for old-timey business model that makes more money than it spends like grandma used to make. And it's kind of a breath of fresh air. Well, thanks. Yeah. No, we are delighted by it. The whole thing started when my CEO slash founder slash chief developer or head developer was working as a CTO at an ad firm in New York. And they did an office move and lost a whole lot equipment and they had no idea

where to even start looking for it and they figured out it was you know several did they check their trunk I think it was other people's trunks that were the issue but they had no idea who to even go ask and she was given zero budget to fix that

and apparently all of the free stuff out there wasn't particularly good and so she said well I'll do what I always do I'll go write my own solution and did and put it out in the internet and apparently some people thought it was kind of cool and said I started contributing to it. And years later, on a dare, she put up a PayPal link on the website and said, hey, if you don't want to run this yourself, we'll run it for you.

That is such a perfect infrastructure way of thinking because it's not, it's just a PHP app. It's not that hard to run it yourself. Who the hell would pay us to do that? Well, almost nobody. The difference between absolutely nobody and almost nobody, as it turns out, can launch it entire company. Yeah, yeah. Within the first week, she had lost the bet because three people had signed up and suddenly she figured out, he needed to figure out how to host a thing. Several years later, her CTO and husband was working for me and she stole him from me. And then I cursed

at her and she looked at me and said, you're next and six months later. And now almost five years, hence, I came on to Grecability and took over infrastructure and architecture of the hosting platform. still runs the making of the software side of it. Yeah, it's nice to be, like sort of the dream, like building SaaS that works. I mean, I would absolutely, if I were running infrastructure or asset management stuff, I would absolutely pay for something like this, even if I wanted to host it myself, which for something back office like this that isn't critical path, I don't know that I necessarily would, but even if I did host it myself, there's something to be said by,

for changing the nature of your relationship with the software, going from user to customer. By the act of giving you a dollar, I have now triggered an alchemy where suddenly you have to, you're sort of beholden to me on some level. You don't have to build every feature I ask for, but you're inherently going to take them more seriously. Yes, we find that, and I think ironically, the people who pay us, the people who are actually entitled to our time and our services are the most polite and the more understanding. And the more understanding than a lot of our opens, and don't get me wrong, we have a lot of wonderful open source users and contributors and whatnot. But yes, we've found that the overwhelming majority of people feeling really, really entitled to their feature or our time or our, you know, debugging are the people who are not in fact paying us.

And the people who are paying us tend to be really, really nice about it. And I think that's a broader trend in open source, but it's been fascinating to see up close. and personal. It's, it's hard in that a lot of folks who fall down this well of doing, I'm going to build a open source company, do it by, all right, I'm going to build a thing, I'm going to take a bunch of VC money, which inherently means that there's an expected return ratio that is not easy to hit. And there was an era where folks did this and assumed that, well, we wrote the software. Clearly, we are the best folks to operationalize that and run it. And AWS said, here, hold my tea, I'm going to want it back. We don't give you free any.

thing. And suddenly they're, hey, that's not fair. I disagree. I think that people want on some level the upside of open source with none of the downsides. You have demonstrated that it is possible to make a healthy, sustainable business by doing exactly this. You know, one of those conversations that we have occasionally is what happens if somebody comes along and can do this way better than us? And, you know, maybe that happens. That's the risk we take. I mean, AGPL, they are absolutely, you know, welcome to do that. But, you know, we are, to your point, we are not beholden to VCs and, you know, expected returns and all that sort of thing.

We are fans of slow, steady growth that lets us, you know, do what we want to do. You know, we don't, you know, fortunately, we're a bunch of folks who aren't particularly set on, you know, lambos and yachts and whatnot. And so, you know, do we need a hockey stick? no, you know, we, uh, we are able to pay ourselves and our employees pretty well. The things keep going up. And that's really what we want. You know, we, uh, we, we do seem to have the concept of enough, which is sort of lacking in a lot of, um, businesses these days. So I have to ask because it seems like everything can give the, the obvious answer to this.

In the five years you've been there, how, if any, has the product that Grockability makes in shitified? I don't think that it has. You know, again, without having a board or VCs going, oh, hey, you need to jump on this latest trend. Otherwise, we're going to miss out, right? You know, we get to take a really deliberate and sober look at, well, okay, there is this neat new tech that's out there. That can do some really neat things. Does it make sense for us? Does it make sense in our product?

And we do this with everything from, you know, crypto to AI to, you know, fancy new things when our developers go to, you know, a conference and see the new whizbang features coming out in the framework that we use. And they come back and go, hey, what about this thing? We're like, well, that's cool. But, you know, is it actually going to be around in three years? And we've converted over this thing. And, hey, new whizbang, what you call it?

Like, what value does it actually bring to us or the product? our customers. And if our customers aren't banging down the door asking for the thing, then why the heck would we build it? Like, you know, we like our software and we think we do a good job at it. But we also know that we're not saving the world with it and we're not, you know, doing visionary thought leadery work, right? We're making something that is a utility that serves a purpose and solve a need for customers. Oh, what you built is boring as hell. And I love boring businesses because what do they do? They make money. right right and there are and it isn't massively overheated like i'm going to be the best

a i coding company and now we're going out of business because i took a day off to take a nap finally and we got outperformed by the 17 competitors in our building yeah well you know boring company and um you know we've i don't think we gave the talk of or we've given versions of this talk of you know choose boring tech i think that particular title was somebody else um but you know some of my friends who are still in, you know, Silicon Valley startup plan, you know, how's working for a Ph.P shop going? It's like, what my CEO likes to say is, hey, you know, you call somebody who's still in the code's employed. Yeah. Also, like, you know, the term I like as well as legacy code. Yeah, what does legacy mean? It's a condescending engineering term for it

makes money. Yeah. And here's the thing, you know, we may use boring tech. There are still interesting problems to solve, and we get to focus on them without, you know, a new objective every month because, you know, somebody saw an ad in an airline magazine or some VC said, hey, I'm going to dunk on Slack because I can. At some point, Slack was basically feature complete and awesome. And then, honestly, what they should have done is given amazing severance packages, their entire product team, and called it a week. And instead, they just kept iterating and making the product incrementally worse with every new release. And it's awful because you have to relearn where things are in the interface.

I just got back from a week and a half away, and sure enough, things have moved around again. And it's just obnoxious. So my question for you that I see this in a bunch of open source, quote-unquote, companies out there, have you ever, as a company and as an open-source project, rejected feature enhancements that folks have pulled requested on the grounds of it competes with your paid offering? No. Because there are legitimate times to do that. I want to be clear.

I know it sounds like I'm loading this up to beat the crap out of you. The answer is yes. But there are good reasons to do that with transparency. Absolutely. No. And for some companies in some places, that makes sense. So our paid offering is our open source offering. We're just the ones running it.

We don't feature gate. The things that we have service tiers on are things that cost us more money to host. You want to handle more requests because you, you're a huge shop and you have big API integrations, cool, we'll sell you a dedicated instance. But we don't care how many users you get. Yeah. Automatic backups, for example, are not available.

If you look at your pricing chart here, if you look at your feature matrix here, it's the automatic backups, for example, are not necessarily there. Neither automated upgrades. Well, if yourself hosting it, that's a one-line cron job. Good luck with it, but that does not a backup make.

It's easy to look at that and think, oh, you're just, you're obfuscating it and making it very hard, do a restore on it. Nothing can be further from the truth. No, that's just something, you have to do that we do for you. But that is not something that you get as a product of a default install. It's absolutely available.

Like there's a backup command. There's a backup push button. We do all of that for you and the rotation and all those other things. So, you know, it is just a matter of these things are not something that happen with the default install script, but they're absolutely available. I think we've actually had the reverse. And speaking of the incitification. part. We have a very serious tension between things that will make it easier for us to run

that have no utility for anyone else. And Allison, our CEO, known as Snipey Head Online, is very, very, it is very hard to convince her to put something in the software where that is the case. You know, if I come and go, hey, you know, for letting users know that, you know, there's, you know, some storage limit or something, right? You know, we, I want to put in this thing. She's like, okay, but who the hell else is going to use that notification system for anything? This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, Duck Bill. Do you have a horrifying AWS bill? That can mean a lot of things, predicting what it's going to be, determining what it should be negotiating your next long-term contract with AWS, or just figuring out why it

increasingly resembles a phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is. To learn more, visit duckbillhq.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill bill, which my CEO reliably informs me is absolutely not our slogan. So much of the stuff I have built, like, this is where I found Jet AI coding assistants have been super useful for. It's a bunch of the glucose. that solve specific problems that are unique to my workflow and environment. People say, well, people's workloads are not as specific as you think, really. You mean that other people are using this hack-to-death newsletter publication system that also integrates into my podcasting system and recording stuff so that I have to basically

fire off a bunch of stuff that orchestrates it and I just push a button on my stream deck? Really? Where can I download that repo? Yeah, turns out it's not a thing. Right. And there is a whole lot that goes into running this system at, scale. We actually, we don't run a system. We run 6,000 individual installations of this system because it's not, we didn't build it to be a cloud service, right? We built it to be something that you download and you run. And that certainly creates some difficulties for us in how we have to host it, but it also creates a whole bunch of really natural security boundaries around it, which we really like. And so in a lot of ways, we're not even inclined to ever make it a single application cloud service. because it, well, again, it helps us keep us honest around what's going into the product,

make sure that what's going into the product makes sense for the product. You know, we, Alison, her husband slash TisiO, Brady and I, less so, you know, some of the younger folks at the company or the folks in less technical roles. But we all owe an awful lot of our careers to the open. source world. And so we have, you know, part of the reason that it is open source because we want to give back. Like we could totally go, hey, this is a great business and let's, you know, re-license the thing and close it off and do what so many companies have, you know, made horrific mistakes about doing. But we don't want to because we like that we can give back

to this community and be a part of that community. And as part of that, we don't want to and shouldify the products any more than absolutely necessary. I think the last thing that we did was we allowed a barometrics integration so that we could let people know, hey, you really need to pay us. Don't worry. It shut down. What's that? The barometrics died.

No, no. I logged into them. He sold it. I didn't realize, oh, yeah, I guess it does exist. That's right. The founder started it. Okay, I instantly can't load it, which tells me that it basically is using the same domain as the tracking beacon.

some of my DNS filter killed it, but still. Okay. It's just dead to me, problem solved. Right, right, yeah. Josh Pigford was the guy who did it. Yeah, he would engrave tweets on a woodburner onto pieces of wood. I have a few of my bangers

slopped around the office. Fantastic. But yeah, no, we use them for tracking and whatnot. We, you know, they're fine. No, it's fine. I just haven't used it. I forgot they were around, but it's stuff like that.

It's terrific. It's the ability to solve some of these back-end business problems. And it's, I like your pricing, it is, it caps out with the enterprise support and the biggest tier you've got. I think it's $7,500 a year, which is terrific, great. That also, what I like about that top tier pricing is it's very clear that you're not one of those disastrous businesses that has, well, one company is 80% of our revenue.

So it's basically like we're a division of them without the upside. And when you have those sorts of whale clients, suddenly they have lots of leverage over your direction, right? And suddenly you're going to jump, you know, step, step two, hop to jump two, you're going to step in line when they say, hey, here's this feature request, which again, might not make sense for 99.5-9s of our clients, but they want it. And so, well, we like our business, so we better actually make it happen for them. You know, it's, again, that sort of freedom that we have with not being beholden to VCs. We're also not beholden any particular customer. We certainly take those requests into consideration. I think we even say, you know,

prioritized, you know, feature requests and that sort of stuff, but it still goes through the, does this make sense for the product filter? And if it doesn't make sense for a product, we say, hey, we're sorry, but that just doesn't align with how the direction we want to go. Not that you're under active development or anything, but when I click the demo page, I got a pop, it's down for maintenance. The site is down for maintenance. We'll be back up ASAP, which is normally the rallying cry of things that are busted and don't work. But I clicked it again 30 seconds later and suddenly it works again. It's, oh, the website didn't lie to me.

What a concept. Yeah, you know, I feel bad for the folks that happened to hit that. So we, it is a almost entirely fully active demo of the site. There are certain things that, like, we don't allow you send emails because. Or create an API keys. I just tried. So, yeah. No free database for me today.

you can create users and you can create products and you can create you can do all of these things but there are other people logging into that same demo site and so a few times a day it just resets all of the databases because people are horrible and I think there was actually a product demo one time with a client whose name everybody listening to this would know and we took them into the demo site and somebody on the other end of the call went why is the first user in that ass blaster 301 or something like that. And we're like, oh, because the first 300 were taken. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, no. You know, we're confronted with that nonsense. You've got to be quick. Someone once asked the first time I brought out and I trotted out a, uh, my, a new slide

template for a talk that I, a designer had gotten me the day before. I was in such a rush. There were three ends in my Twitter username. And so first question in Q&A at using a conference was so why is there an extra N in your username at the bottom? Well, N plus one redundancy. obviously. Amazing. Did you go out and register that one real quick? Right? No, I fixed the slide deck.

It was easier. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, again, you know, demo site, same is what you're going to get. Same as what you're going to get if you download. We just take away the pain for you. I've used a bunch of real asset stuff back in my SMB days, you know, 20 years ago.

And this is better than those things. It feels like, oh, asset management database, you mean a shared Google sheet. And, yeah, that'll work until you want to do other things. This is one of those things where, oh, I'll just have clawed vibe code one for me over this weekend. And you know what? You can have clawed vibe code one for you. And then... Or you could just get clone and run it yourself if that's your bent.

Right. Well, and, you know, it's one of those things, you know, to your point, we're still under active development. And here we are, you know, I think 11 years in since the start of the product. I think it was about a year later that Allison started a company for it. But, you know, it turns out that there are a lot of weird use cases that very very use cases that very various companies have that various people have, and a whole lot of features and a lot of places do different things. I mean, I know that's – it should be obvious, but a lot of times it's not, right? It sounds like a very defined space, and it turns out there's just a zillion ways to do

asset management. It turns out. And we have our opinions about those, and, you know, we stick to the ones where it makes sense, but sometimes you just get enough people going, no, but actually we want to do this kind of thing that you don't understand, but that's just how we are. And I'm like, well, okay. And again, sometimes that leads to, well, that just doesn't make sense for how this product works. And we don't get those customers. That's unfortunate. But that's why there are other products out there. Just looking through your customer testimonials, like this place is like Triple H Group, a bunch of smaller companies, Microsoft. Like, okay, these are serious companies that are using this stuff.

Yeah, we have, we have a whole bunch of companies that have not given us permission to put their logos on the site yet, but we want to reach out to them. and do that because, yeah, no, there are a lot of companies that you would know who use our stuff, either our service or some of them run at themselves. Linus Tech Tips has called us out a few different times for, oh, yeah, we run snipet. We talk about earlier about engineering brain, but I have the exact same thing. Like, oh, what the hell good is having testimonials like that? But as soon as I put a few big company logos on the Duckbill site years ago,

the sales calls changed basically instantly from who are you people again and what do you do to do you think you can help us? It was suddenly a mark of credibility that completely got rid of a whole class of objection once it became clear that this was not our first rodeo and they would not be the only big company we'd ever worked with before. Right. Do we want to be the first people to take a risk on you? And if that's, if they don't have to be that, then suddenly to your point, it lends credibility. Yeah. And now, of course, if the big companies, you never get that. So every year at Phenops X, for example, we'll have a dinner. We'll host introduce some of our customers to each other. And it's fun because you can see the same process

go through where each company thinks they're sort of our only really big customer, but you know, insurance company, meet bank, meet airline. And suddenly they're realizing, oh, oh, these are, these are my people. There's, but without those logos, it sounds like, oh, yes, we have solved AWS bills for people who are spending hundreds of dollars a month. Right. Right. And, and, well, And, you know, we're not a, I mean, apparently in asset management stuff, asset management space were actually a decently known name. I didn't really exist in the asset management space before. So I knew about it because I knew Allison. But like, we have a whole subreddit and we get recommended on asset management places and this and that.

But, but yeah, if, you know, if you just come to our webpage, like I love our webpage. I think it's a lot of fun. but it doesn't exactly scream, you know, Enterprise Corporate when you've got a, you know, cartoon Mohawk lady on their front page your website. It's funny you mention that. We're in the middle of a website redesigned for Duck Bill where we are attenuating some of the branding over there

that I use a lot for last week in AWS because something we have found over the years has been that final stage when we wind up doing a deal, it's usually a bank shot off of someone in engineering, which is who I talk to in my podcast, newsletters, et cetera. I don't, there's not a lot of you listening to this. that work in procurement, for example. If that is you, and I'm wrong, please reach out.

I would love to talk to you. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just want to talk. And so there's always a series of introductions during the enterprise sales process. And very often at the end, there's some C-level us to sign off on it that has never heard of anything that I've said or done.

And they go to the site, and back when it was a lot more like the last week in AWS sites, why is there a platypus? And why is he still angry? And it was a, like, are these people serious? and it took a bit of getting past that. So we're dialing it down now, probably years after we should have. But for what we do at the scale we operate at, that makes sense.

For what you do, the fact that you don't have any of these offerings that are two commas in the annual price every year, it's, okay, well, we don't think this is professional enough. Terrific, please keep walking. Service Meow would love to wind up working with you. It's like Service Now for Cats. Right. And, you know, I mean, I wouldn't mind some of those companies, you know, paying us that much. But again, we don't even have the offering for it because it just that's, that's, I think we're too reasonable about things at times. But again, you know, slow steady growth. But no, that's absolutely a thing. I mean, there's a famous story of some bank. I don't remember which bank got asked, you know, well, why did you go with, you know, Microsoft Cloud when, you know, Amazon was clearly superior. And they said, oh, well, because, you know, Amazon sent. you know, people in hoodies and, and, you know, Azure sent people in suits or something like

that, right? It's like, for better or for worse, the appearance matters and just like, like not actually relevant appearance, but to some people, boy, boy, that's relevant. It's, there's more psychology in the buying process that I ever would have to believe possible until, so when I started doing this myself, like I did have the advantage on subfolk in that before I entered tech properly, I did telesales, and then I did marketing and then actual enterprise sales. And I was never great at the process and the follow-up with a lot of these things. And I hated cold calling with a passion, which isn't really a thing anymore anyway. And then, but I always remembered that aspect and how hard that freaking job is. I know that talking smack

about salespeople is basically the engineering national pastime, but I have no patience or tolerance for it. It's like, excuse me, not for nothing, but you know those inflated salaries you get for basically slapping GitHub around up? Where do you believe that money comes from? Just just humor me here. Where exactly does that come from? Venture capitalists. Oh, right. Wrong company style. But to your point,

knowledge doesn't want to come from there, but to your point, right, like you hated cold calling. You know, like sales is a hard fucking job that I do not want to do. But for the people who do...

It turns out I do a lot of it now, but I don't do outbound at all. I wind up doing my shit posting performance like this. People hear about, oh, AWS bills. That sounds like a. expensive problem that suddenly we have, maybe he can help us. And the conversations I have when I do our sales engineering role for our actual salespeople is I just spend the entire time asking

questions because I want to learn how they see these things. There's a curiosity that drives all of it. I'm not pitching what we do. My job on that is to understand what their circumstance is, ask if they've tried a few things and suddenly when you demonstrate, you know what the hell you're talking about, that is sales. People tend to assume that sales or marketing. is, they paint with a broad brush that's informed by the worst examples you can ever find. Like, I remember that guy who sold me my used car, so I hate salespeople. Yeah, maybe that's not the same thing there, professor. No, no.

And I, you know, I also think that depends on the company, right? Some companies go after that sort of marketing tactics, sales tactic, et cetera, and but an awful lot don't. And an awful lot are just, you know, hardworking people trying to do a job and trying to make money for the company that they're in. And that's completely valid. Like, that's how our system works. Are all facets of our system great? No. But, like, I don't think that's uncommon.

But you do like food from time to time. I do like to eat. My dogs very much like treats. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you? To find me? Well, my LinkedIn isn't great. but it's a good start.

You can also find me at J-E-R-M-O-P-S on most of the social places, some of them I frequent more than others these days. If you are passionate about asset management, you want to learn more, come to snipeit app.com. I'm there, and I'm going to be there because it's a great place, and I'm proud of what we do and how we do it. And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Corey. Be well. Jeremy Price, VP of Technology, at Grockability. I am cloud economist Corey Quinn and this is screaming in the cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Or if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that will then get overwritten when we reset the database.