I’m writing this at 2 AM, surrounded by architecture diagrams and migration plans. Like thousands of other engineers worldwide, I’ve spent the past week auditing every Kubernetes deployment, every Helm chart, every CI/CD pipeline in our infrastructure. The reason? Bitnami is pulling the rug out from under us.

The announcement landed in our inboxes like a bomb. After 18 years of providing free, production-ready container images to millions of developers worldwide, Bitnami was effectively ending its free tier. On August 28, 2025, the repository would process over 4 billion downloads annually. It would transform into something unrecognizable. The change is a premium service starting at $72,000 per year, according to AWS Marketplace listings and Arrow Electronics pricing sheets.

Based on the trust we had with system we had services running depending on Bitnami images. PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, WordPress-the backbone of the platform. The migration estimate? months of work. The choice? Pay Broadcom’s ransom.

The announcement triggered immediate outrage across GitHub issues #83267 and #35164 on the Bitnami repositories, with thousands of comments from frustrated developers. “This is the npm left-pad incident but worse,” one developer wrote on Hacker News. “At least that was an accident. This is intentional.”

But the real story isn’t just about Bitnami or the scramble it’s causing for people like me. It’s about how Broadcom CEO Hock Tan built a trillion-dollar empire by mastering software shakedowns. A massive pile of debt from the VMware acquisition is forcing Broadcom to squeeze every penny from assets we once considered sacred.

The Man Who Kills Free Tiers

Hock Tan doesn’t do interviews about his strategy. He doesn’t need to. His pattern is so consistent that VMware employees were updating their résumés before the ink dried on the $69 billion acquisition deal, as reported by The Register and Channel Futures throughout 2023.

The pattern is clear from Broadcom’s public earnings calls and SEC filings. When Broadcom acquired CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in 2018 (as documented in their November 5, 2018 press release), thousands of jobs were cut within months. When they bought Symantec’s enterprise division for $10.7 billion in 2019 (announced August 8, 2019), the same playbook emerged: slash costs, raise prices, focus on enterprise.

The numbers back this up. When Tan took over Avago Technologies in 2006, it was worth $3 billion. Today, after rechristening it Broadcom and executing acquisition after acquisition, it’s worth over $1 trillion as of December 2024, according to Bloomberg. His personal compensation in 2023? $161.8 million, making him America’s third-highest-paid CEO, per SEC proxy filings.

His formula never varies. Buy a company with sticky enterprise customers. Fire thousands of employees—VMware alone lost 2,900 employees by December 2023, according to CRN and The Register. Kill the free tiers and small-business offerings. Jack up prices by 200%, 500%, sometimes 1,000%. Then use the cash to fund the next acquisition.

In Broadcom’s December 12, 2024 earnings call, Tan was explicit: “We expect revenue from AI to be $12 billion for fiscal year 2024” and that Broadcom focuses on major strategic accounts. The Q3 2024 earnings transcript shows Tan stating that 87% of VMware’s top 10,000 customers had already been transitioned to subscription models.

After the money trail

To understand why Bitnami users are getting screwed, you need to follow the money back to May 26, 2022, when Tan announced the VMware deal in a press release titled “Broadcom to Acquire VMware for Approximately $61 Billion in Cash and Stock.” The price tag was staggering: $61 billion in cash and stock, plus assuming $8 billion of VMware’s existing debt.

Wall Street banks lined up to supply financing. According to Broadcom’s SEC 8-K filing from May 26, 2022, a consortium of banks provided $32 billion in committed debt financing. By August 17, 2023, Bloomberg reported that Broadcom had secured $28.4 billion in new term loans to replace the bridge financing. By July 8, 2024, they were issuing $5 billion in bonds just to keep refinancing the debt, according to another Bloomberg report.

The pressure is immense. In their investor presentations, Broadcom promised to uphold its dividend policy of returning 50% of free cash flow to shareholders while rapidly deleveraging. That’s a nearly impossible mathematical equation unless you drastically increase cash generation.

Enter the price hikes.

The VMware bloodbath, A preview of coming attractions

Within weeks of the acquisition closing on November 22, 2023 (as announced in Broadcom’s press release), VMware customers started receiving renewal quotes that made them physically ill.

According to The Register’s January 30, 2024 article, a British university that had been paying £40,000 annually was quoted £500,000—a 1,250% increase. AT&T filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court claiming its costs would increase by over 1,000%, according to court documents reported by CRN. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The two parties requested the court grant them until Dec. 13, 2024 to finalize their agreement.

The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) won a legal judgment in July 2024, as reported by Network World, after facing an 85% increase from €2.1 million to €4 million for critical infrastructure software. The Dutch court ruled that Broadcom must continue support during their migration period.

Computer Weekly reported in January 2024 that organizations were seeing increases ranging from 300% to 1,200%, with some customers forced to buy bundled products they didn’t need. A CloudBolt Software survey published in June 2024 found that 73% of VMware customers experienced significant disruption from the changes.

This is Tan’s genius—if you can call it that. He doesn’t buy companies with innovative technology or growth potential. He buys companies whose products are so embedded in enterprise infrastructure that customers have no realistic alternative to paying whatever he demands.

Inside the Bitnami massacre

The Bitnami situation follows the VMware playbook perfectly. The phases are documented in their GitHub announcement (Issue #83267) and Broadcom’s press release from August 2024 introducing “Bitnami Secure Images.”

Phase One started quietly in December 2024, when Docker Hub rate limits were imposed—100 pulls per 6 hours for anonymous users, 200 for authenticated, as documented in the Bitnami FAQ. This was the test to see how many systems would break versus adapt.

Phase Two launches August 28, 2025, per the official announcement. The main Bitnami repository will be gutted. Thousands of versioned images—the specific versions developers rely on for production stability—will be moved to a “bitnamilegacy” repository with zero updates, zero support, and zero security patches.

Phase Three is where the money comes in. Bitnami Secure Images, the commercial replacement, is listed on AWS Marketplace at $6,000/month ($72,000 annually) for the full package, while Bitnami Premium through Arrow Electronics starts at $50,000 annually, according to their product pages.

Industry analysts from Forrester and Gartner have been tracking this strategy. Forrester’s November 2024 report noted that 20% of VMware customers are actively seeking alternatives, while Gartner saw VMware-related inquiries spike 275% year-over-year in the first half of 2024.

The numbers don’t lie

Broadcom’s Q4 2024 earnings call on December 12, 2024, was a masterclass in corporate doublespeak. According to the official transcript, Tan bragged about VMware’s transformation: costs slashed from $2.4 billion to $1.2 billion quarterly, margins skyrocketing from below 30% to 70%.

“We’ve successfully transitioned 87% of VMware’s top customers to our new subscription model,” he announced to analysts. What he didn’t say: those customers had no choice. It was subscribe or lose access to critical infrastructure.

The infrastructure software division’s revenue tells the story, per their 10-K filing: Pre-VMware: $7.6 billion annually. Post-VMware: $21.5 billion. That’s not growth—that’s extortion.

And it’s working. Broadcom’s stock (NASDAQ: AVGO) is up over 100% since the VMware acquisition announcement, according to market data.

The company crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold in December 2024, as reported by CNBC and Bloomberg.

The developer rebellion that isn’t happening

Visit any developer forum and you’ll find rage about the Bitnami changes. GitHub issues #83267 and #35164 have thousands of comments. Reddit’s r/kubernetes and r/devops are filled with migration discussions. Hacker News threads accumulate hundreds of comments each time the topic comes up.

But here’s the dirty secret: it doesn’t matter.

The numbers support this. Despite massive backlash over VMware changes, Broadcom reported in their Q4 2024 earnings that customer churn was “negligible.” A Forrester survey published in June 2024 found that while 50% of VMware customers were evaluating alternatives, less than 5% had actually started migrations.

The same will happen with Bitnami. Organizations will rage, evaluate alternatives, run proof-of-concepts with other solutions—then quietly pay the invoice.

The scheduled chaos

The most cynical part might be the “brownouts” Broadcom has scheduled, as announced in their GitHub issues. On specific dates—August 28-29, September 2-3, and September 17-18—random sets of 10 Bitnami images will be deliberately taken offline for 24 hours.

Broadcom explicitly stated in their announcement that these brownouts are designed to “raise awareness before the registry deletion.” Translation: we’re going to break your production systems on purpose to create panic.

I’ve been through enough outages to know what this means. When your e-commerce site goes down at 3 PM on a Tuesday because you can’t pull a Redis container, when your monitoring systems fail because Prometheus won’t start, when your entire CI/CD pipeline grinds to a halt—suddenly $72,000 doesn’t seem so bad.

The alternatives that aren’t

In theory, developers have options. Use official Docker images. Switch to Amazon’s ECR Public Gallery. Build your own images from scratch. The Bitnami source code remains available under Apache 2.0 license on GitHub—you could theoretically recreate everything yourself.

In practice? Organizations heavily rely on Bitnami images and Charts. Migration off Bitnami would take teams many months. It would require about a million in engineering time. That’s assuming nothing goes wrong. Assuming they don’t miss some critical dependency. Assuming their custom builds are as secure and reliable as Bitnami’s.

I’m working for small-sized tech company. The Bitnami Secure Images subscription would cost us $72,000 per year. The migration would cost many thousands of dollars and massive risk. The math is simple.

This is why Tan’s strategy works. He’s not selling software—he’s selling the absence of pain. And he’s very good at creating pain for those who don’t pay.

The broader industry reckoning

The Bitnami crisis is part of something bigger. Across the industry, the generous free tiers that built the modern internet are disappearing.

Docker introduced rate limits and paid subscriptions in 2020, as documented in their announcement. MongoDB changed its license to SSPL in October 2018 to prevent cloud providers from offering competing services. Redis Labs switched to Redis Source Available License in 2024. Elastic changed its license in 2021. HashiCorp adopted the Business Source License in 2023.

According to a 2024 report from RedMonk, over 40% of major open-source projects have changed their licenses or business models in the past five years. The trend is accelerating.

What Hock Tan’s success says about silicon valley

There’s something deeply disturbing about celebrating Tan’s success. Yes, he’s created tremendous shareholder value—Broadcom’s market cap exceeded $1 trillion in December 2024, according to Bloomberg. Yes, his execution is flawless—infrastructure software margins hit 70%, per Q4 earnings.

But at what cost?

According to various reports from The Register, CRN, and Channel Futures:

• Over 2,900 VMware employees laid off in the first wave alone
• Thousands of VMware partners terminated from the program
• Small businesses priced out of essential software
• Open source communities disrupted

The tragedy is that it works. Broadcom’s board loves him—they paid him $161.8 million in 2023 according to proxy statements. Wall Street loves him—the stock is up over 100% since the VMware deal announcement. He’s studied in business schools as a master of operational efficiency.

The clock is ticking

As I write this, developers worldwide are scrambling to prepare for August 28, 2025. We’re auditing our Kubernetes clusters for Bitnami dependencies. Writing migration plans. Begging management for budget to pay for Bitnami Secure Images.

I identified many services that need attention, some services had hidden images that use Bitnami containers. Each one requires testing, validation, potential rewriting. The time that engineers who should be building features, improving product, serving customers. Instead, they’re dealing with Broadcom’s manufactured crisis.

According to discussions on Reddit’s r/kubernetes and various DevOps forums, most organizations are in the same boat. The common estimate is 3-6 months of engineering time for a full migration, depending on the size of the deployment.

The future we’re building

The Bitnami story isn’t really about container images. It’s about what happens when the collaborative ideals of open source meet the extractive reality of modern capitalism.

For two decades, developers built an incredible ecosystem based on sharing and mutual benefit. Bitnami alone grew to over 4 billion downloads annually, according to their own statistics. But that era is ending. Not with a bang, but with a pricing page.

In its place, we’re getting a new model: enterprise software as hostage situation. Build your infrastructure on our platform. Integrate deeply. Depend completely. Then watch as we turn the screws, knowing you have no escape.

The announcement that started it all

Their August 2024 press release about Bitnami Secure Images, highlighting “enhanced security features” and “enterprise-grade support.”

No acknowledgment of the communities being disrupted. No recognition of the developers being priced out. No awareness of—or concern about—the damage being done.

Just corporate speak about “delivering value to stakeholders” and “focusing on enterprise customers.”

That tells you everything you need to know. In Hock Tan’s Broadcom, developers aren’t stakeholders. Small companies aren’t customers. Open source communities aren’t valued partners.

They’re just freeloaders whose time has run out.

As for me? I’ll be spending the next few months migrating our infrastructure, one service at a time. Because unlike Broadcom’s largest customers, we can’t afford $72,000 for container images. We’ll make it work—developers always do. But the trust is gone. The next time we choose a technology stack, “Is this owned by Broadcom?” will be the first question we ask.

Welcome to the new reality. Your free lunch didn’t just end. Broadcom is charging you for the dishes you already ate. We’re the ones doing the dishes.

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References and Sources

Official Announcements and Filings

• Broadcom Announces VMware Acquisition: Press Release, May 26, 2022
• Broadcom Completes VMware Acquisition: Press Release, November 22, 2023
• Broadcom Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript: December 12, 2024
• Broadcom SEC 10-K Filing: Fiscal Year 2024
• Bitnami Changes Announcement: GitHub Issue #83267, July 2024
• Bitnami Secure Images Launch: Broadcom Press Release, August 2024

Pricing and Financial Data

• Bitnami Secure Images Pricing: AWS Marketplace listing showing $6,000/month
• VMware Debt Financing: Bloomberg report on $28.4 billion term loans, August 17, 2023
• Broadcom Bond Issuance: Bloomberg report on $5 billion bonds, July 8, 2024
• CEO Compensation: SEC Proxy Statement showing $161.8 million for 2023

Customer Impact Reports

• Dutch Government Case: Network World, “Dutch court forces Broadcom to support VMware migration,” July 2024
• AT&T Lawsuit: CRN coverage of New York Supreme Court filing, August 2024
• UK University Price Increase: The Register, “VMware price rises of 1,250%,” January 30, 2024
• CloudBolt Survey: “73% of VMware customers report disruption,” June 2024

Industry Analysis

• Forrester Report: “20% of VMware customers seeking alternatives,” November 2024
• Gartner: “275% spike in VMware-related inquiries,” H1 2024
• RedMonk: “40% of open-source projects changed licensing models,” 2024 Report

Community Discussions

• GitHub Issues: bitnami/containers #83267, bitnami/charts #35164
• Reddit Threads: r/kubernetes, r/devops VMware/Bitnami migration discussions
• Hacker News: Multiple threads on Bitnami deprecation (IDs: 45048419, 44608856)