Makes sense to me.

Most of the companies that spend $$$$ with them can't use public registries for production/production-adjacent workloads due to regulations and, secondarily a desire to mitigate supply chain risk.

Artifactory is a drop-in replacement for every kind of repository they'll need to work with, and it has a nice UI. They also support "pass-through" repositories that mirror the public repositories with the customization options these customers like to have. It also has image/artifact scanning, which cybersecurity teams love to use in their remediation reporting.

It's also relatively easy to spin up and scale. I don't work there, but I had to use Artifactory for a demo I built, and getting it up and running took very little time, even without AI assistance.

Yeah I mean I understand the demand. My previous company used Artifactory. I just don't understand why nobody has made a free option. It's so simple it seems like it would be a no brainer open source project.

Like, nobody really pays for web servers - there are too many good free options. They're far more complex than Artifactory.

I guess it's just that it's a product that only really appeals to private companies?