After the Broadcom Rug Pull: Why I Built Open-Source Helm Charts That Use Upstream Images and Ship With S3 Backup

If you're running Bitnami Helm charts, you already know the situation. Broadcom acquired VMware, pulled Bitnami images behind a $5-6k/month paywall , and the community that built itself around those charts got left holding stale images and broken CI pipelines. Some teams pinned to bitnamilegacy . Some forked charts and are now maintaining them forever. Some migrated to operators like CloudNativePG or Strimzi. Many are still stuck, wondering when something will break. I'd been building Helm charts before the Broadcom situation, but what happened crystallized the problem: the ecosystem was too dependent on one vendor's charts, one vendor's images, and one vendor's goodwill. So I built HelmForge — 23 MIT-licensed Helm charts that use official upstream container images and ship with built-in S3-compatible backup . No proprietary images. No custom entrypoints. No licensing surprises. Why Bitnami Was Hard to Replace The thread I keep seeing on Reddit is some version of: "Where do I find Helm