Raspberry Pi is going public on Friday. Its biggest fans are dreading it

When Raspberry Pi launched, in 2012, it was a tech tinkerer’s dream come true.



With a price of just $35, the credit card-sized computer was an inexpensive way for students to learn new programming languages , but it quickly became a platform for all kinds of creative tech projects . Within months, people had turned their Pis into retro game consoles, digital signage controllers, connected camera modules, robot command centers, and more .



Some of those hobbyists now fear for what Raspberry Pi will transform into next. On Friday, June 14, Raspberry Pi is expected to make an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange. With the IPO, the Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi Ltd. will no longer be a subsidiary of the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, but a publicly-traded company valued at nearly $700 million , according to Bloomberg.



Reactions have been predictably wary. “Perhaps the end of RPi as we know it,” reads a post on Reddit . “Well, that was a good run,” reads the top comment in Ars Technica’s coverage of the IPO announcement from January. “With all the best intentions and all the will in the world, these things never end well for the consumer,” says a comment on Raspberry Pi’s official forums .



The gloomy response is partly fueled by vibes—the general feeling that an IPO begets a growth at all costs mentality and an inevitable shift toward maximizing shareholder returns. But with Raspberry Pi in particular, there’s a specific fear that the company’s growing interest in commercialization will lead it further astray from its hobbyist roots.



A tale of two customer bases



Raspberry Pi’s May 15 “ Expected Intention to Float ” announcement, as the document is called in London, makes clear that the company knows that the real money isn’t in catering to nerdy hobby projects.



Of the 7.4 million single-board computers and modules that Raspberry Pi sold last year, 72% went to industrial and embedded customers, which use the tiny computers as the brains for digital signage, robotics, and other Internet of Things applications. The company says that the total addressable market for this side of the business was $16.3 billion in 2023, versus $4.9 billion for other areas, including education and hobby.



The company’s intention to float also mentions a bigger focus on direct-to-business sales, an expanded custom products business, and new product variants that it can sell at higher prices.



None of this should be too surprising to anyone who’s tried to buy a Raspberry Pi at retail over the past few years. Pandemic supply chain shortages and a work-from-home boom made Raspberry Pis nearly impossible to find at normal prices until the back half of last year . Most of the units Raspberry Pi produced during that time were reserved for business customers, as Jeff Geerling reported in mid-2022 .



Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi’s cofounder, told Geerling last year that prioritizing commercial customers was the “single hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my business career,” but described it as a moral necessity. Those commercial customers, he said, are primarily small businesses, which would cease to exist if they couldn’t access Raspberry Pi hardware.



Upton has also argued that Raspberry Pi won’t lose sight of hobbyists post-IPO. The company’s intention to float document refers to enthusiast and education customers as “the ‘heart’ of the Raspberry Pi movement,” and it says that customers can still expect new Raspberry Pi models every three to four years, along with new product variants [we mentioned this already above. do we mean new variants that don’t come at an increased price?] and more first-party accessories. As if to underscore that point, last week the company released a $70 add-on board for running AI applications on a Pi 5.



“What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us,” Upton told Ars Technica in January . “Certainly, while I’m involved in it, I can’t imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important.”



How Raspberry Pi is building a ‘moat’



That’s not to say nothing will change. At the very least, the IPO will shift Raspberry Pi’s corporate structure, so that it’s no longer primarily owned by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation.



The Foundation was formed in 2008, with a mission to make coding more accessible for kids of all backgrounds. Raspberry Pi Ltd. has acted as the non-profit’s commercial subsidiary, developing and marketing Raspberry Pi’s actual hardware, and a percentage of its profits have provided most of the Foundation’s funding.



With the IPO, the Foundation will sell up to 10% of its shares, and it will use that windfall to establish an endowment, so that it’s no longer dependent on Raspberry Pi’s commercial success to sustain itself. The Foundation will remain a large shareholder alongside existing major investors Sony and ARM, but it will no longer be the company’s majority owner.



Whether any of this will amount to a tangible impact on Raspberry Pi users is still hard to gauge. While catering to individual users won’t be the company’s top priority, it also hasn’t been for the past few years now.



Even so, Raspberry Pi doesn’t face any existential threats on the hobbyist front. While other inexpensive single-board computers exist—among them the Orange Pi and Odroid —Raspberry Pi still has a strong software support track record, including a polished Linux-based operating system for lightweight desktop computing . It also still has an enthusiastic community that builds and documents new projects. All of which means that if you’re an inexperienced maker who wants to build a network-level ad blocker or cheap home media server, Raspberry Pi will be the safest choice.



That point does not seem lost on the company. “Raspberry Pi hardware products are supported by extensive collateral, in the form of software and documentation,” the company’s intention to float document says. “This collateral is a key component of Raspberry Pi’s moat against ‘workalike’ hardware products offered by competitors.” The company plans to make even more substantial investments in software, “deepening this moat over time.”



Perhaps that’s what has Raspberry Pi fans so wary. We’ve seen plenty of tech companies promise not to be evil, only to watch them build platforms powerful enough to blunt the impact of their bad behavior down the road. Those who view Raspberry Pi as a scrappy tech upstart hope it won’t follow the same playbook.