Comment by Macha

I think in Docker's case, in their original plan this free unlimited hosting was probably sustainable in a freemium model where businesses paid for Docker Enterprise and Docker.com was about marketing and user acquisition, similar to open source on GitHub.com being marketing and user acquisition for paid accounts/Github Enterprise.

Its not an unreasonable strategy to provide generous free hosting if you derive some other business benefit from it (YouTube being another example).

But Docker Inc. found their moat was not that deep and other projects from the big cloud providers killed the market they saw for Docker Enterprise and they sold it off.

So now they just have docker.com and Docker CE - which even that has alternatives now with other runtimes existing. So they need to make docker.com a profitable business on its own or find something else to do which changes the equation significantly.