InfluxData has 1.3 million open-source users but only 2,600 paying customers
Evan Kaplan · Rewriting Success: What InfluxDB 3.0 Teaches About Scaling—and Scrapping—Your Core Tech · May 8, 2025 · at 33:01
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, creator of InfluxDB. He discusses open-source monetization efficiency with host Matt Turck.
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“I argue that our first versions of one and two in open source were so good that you have 1.3 million users and only 2600 paying customers.”
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More from Evan Kaplan
Kaplan: Lakehouses will absorb adjacent tools like ETL and governance
“You know, from my historical perspective on the industry, I think lots of capability that sits outside those things will fall inside those things. Whether it's data governments, whether it's different ETL, whether it's different conversions, these things are g…”
Kaplan: Apache Iceberg is becoming the standard base table format
“And now it seems like Iceberg is certainly with Databricks buying Tabular. That'll be interesting, but Iceberg feels like the base format, although DeltaShare is also relevant.”
Kaplan: AI models will run on lakehouses, not time-series databases
“We don't think the intelligence get built on our platform. Like, I know that's a hard thing to say because everything's AI now. We believe that we're fundamentally mining the data and making it available so that the intelligence models, which are largely going…”
Kaplan: CIOs do not care about their company's time-series database
“It's not useful for me to have a meeting with the CIO. The CIO does not care about his time series database. I mean, he should maybe, but he doesn't.”
Amazon approached InfluxData for a partnership due to Timestream customer demand
“Last year we did a very unique deal with Amazon. Where they have Amazon's time stream, but their customers kept asking them for influx. And so they approached us.”
Kaplan: General-purpose databases fail when scaling to high-volume telemetry
“So yes, in some cases there are, for many use cases, you can use a general purpose database. People have built stuff on Postgres. People have built time series on Mongo. Like those are highly useful. But if you're ingesting huge amounts of data, you want the q…”