Octopart doesn’t care about you!
They were, as a startup, carried on their patrons backs to quite a success.
What do they do? Octopart is aggregating free data from various suppliers and electronics parts into a unified search engine. Super useful for bom’s, cad programs and parts inventory amongst other things.
So, what’s wrong with that?
Nothing really, it’s a good initiative.
The problem is, the are getting greedy. At start, hobbyist and non profit users could use their services for free, pretty much the same users who carried them to success.
Now they want close to 300 dollars a year from a hobbyist to use their services. In 10 years that’s 3000 dollars, probably more than the total revenue of a hobbyists total stock of parts. They are nowadays not you friends.
This way, they are spitting their patrons in their faces, the same people who carried them to a position where they could get some rewards for their efforts, which are great by the way.
I suggest that everybody stop using them and never talk about them again and always recommend other solutions before Octopart.
By doing this, they are killing their own business.
I predict that their out of business faster than a duck says “quack”, ‘cause we all hate greedy bastards. If, and I say only if, they’re not changing their business model.