The recent monetization strategy for Maven Central has been bizarre.

First it seemed like they want to encourage reducing usage (release sizes and file counts), which is fair. It would still be better focus on improving the default tooling to not producuce 10x checksum files with each artifact, and 6MB+ javadoc bundles that no-one reads, but that's a little beside the point.

Then they started requiring paid plans for _all_ publishers that are not purely community projects. Doesn't matter how open it is, if it's backed by a commercial company, they require a paid plan.

Now, in principle I don't mind paying for usage. But they promised self-serve signups before the limits are applied, which didn't happen - still no self-serve plans available. And the "contact us" pricing is too a large extent based on _popularity_ of the package. And not in a quantifiable way like "x GB downloaded", but rather "within the top 2% of usage" (by whatever hidden metric).

So if they lose half their publishers because they don't want to pay, it means I'll automatically be in a higher bracket next year, even if nothing changed on my side?

And the pricing ends up in a couple thousand $ per year, for something that would have been single-digit dollars when self-hosting on S3. When their main value add over that is that Maven Central is automatically present in user config.

The project will publish the artifacts in a private repository now, you need to register in order to get an access token