Docker Desktop is still free for personal use, open source projects and some other cases. Although if you use it at work, and your company has more than 250 users AND make more than $22 Million per year, you will be required to pay a small amount per user.

That is a fair move to a product that changed the world and didn’t take advantage (financially) of all this success. If you also work for a company that can pay for it, help them to keep providing their amazing service.

Anyways, if you just wanna keep using docker cli for your projects and doesn’t want all the fancy features that comes with Docker Desktop, here are some good news for you, you can still use docker free and thats totally legal by using Minikube.

Here is how to do the trick:

# Installing Docker CLI (Which is different than Docker Desktop)
brew install docker

# Installing KubeCTL (Just in case you want to play with Kubernetes as well)
brew install kubectl

# Installing Minikube
brew install minikube

# Running Minikube
minikube start --driver hyperkit
eval $(minikube -p minikube docker-env)

# Try running docker as you normally would do:
docker ps -a

Cheers, Rodolfo