Hey HN, Deta CEO here. Glad to see Deta on HN!
Hapy to answer any question (although a bit sick today, so apology for the short and duplicated answers).
Because many of you are wondering about our business model: we're working on Deta Space, which helps devs publish & monetize their web apps with no ops, and we take a small cut. Deta Space is still in the early pilot stage.
I’m curios: If you have funding that gives you multiple years of runway (as stated earlier ITT), why didn’t you raise the contribution to EUR 25k and turn the UG (Haftungsbeschränkt) into a fully limited liability company (GmbH)? Wouldn’t that be one of the first moves when funding is in, to give the founders peace of mind regarding personal liability concerns?
UG is like GmbH with a difference that, afair, 25% or 30% of the profit has to be put aside towards GmbH conversion. Also, you’d do the conversion typically at the end of fiscal year.
For investors putting serious money in, what’s the difference if they can recover €5k or €25k? Stammkapital is the maximum liability for both UG and GmbH.
I remember Meteor as a framework first. Deta is a platform and allows devs to build apps using their favorite frameworks (mostly) and then deploy & monetize them without any ops.
I trust you heard "no ops" before but Deta uses a new approach that allows us to scale millions of apps to billions of users efficiently. Take a look at our pilot here: https://deta.space/
The market is actually pretty small for super focussed with PaaS with a specialized business model. Trust me, been there, done that. You have to not only communicate why your PaaS is better than others out there in the market but Also de-mystify why they should adopt your pricing model too.
My argument is that most of the small business and startups struggle to make revenue from get go. Asking for revshare, when it is day-0/day-1 kind of situation can hit the startups, small business, individuals really hard.
To me the your model looks very close to a royalty structure. Which I do not think many orgs and serious startups would like.
Another argument is that, Major cloud providers give away a lot of credits for various services. It can go upto $100k. I would even argue that you don't need devops or specialized team from you are a small org, startup and your operations are small.
Anyways, Looks like a fun project. I actually think the Micro, Base and Drive looks very promising and I wouldn't mind paying based on usage. I think, It can be a fun place to host apps for indie hackers. Would love to list Deta Cloud on Awesome Paas[1] list.
When I read
"free"
"free, no credit card"
"free, forever"
"free, unlimited"
I tend to stop processing what is on the page since I get this acute
feeling of being taken for a ride, and whatever is hiding somewhere
in all that marketing babble is going to rear its ugly head at some
inconvenient time.
The first thing I look for on a new product site is if this looks at all
interesting. I am willing to put some effort into that.
If I decide that this might be interesting I go looking for the
"Pricing" page.
If I cant find it, I move on real quick.
If it says "Call talk to our salespeople"
I move on real quick.
If says "free", "free", "free"
I wonder what's the catch
and that is something I dont spend a lot of time
trying to figure it out.
If there is a pricing page, it seems up front, honest,
realistic I will invest a lot more time into figuring
out how it could be used.
Please just put a pricing page up and make it is easy to find.
How that will work? If someone is using display advertising, how the cut can be calculated? Or do you force to have your script included in header that delegates such requests?
Further, someone taking PayPal or other payment processing, will you be hooking yourself in middle by having your own SDK for monitization I suppose?
Might work or might not, basically the apps that make significant amount of money don't won't to give away 5% of their revenue.
Imagine an app making one million USD a month would end up paying 50,000 USD as cut. But pretty sure, if they host it themselves, the bill would be far below something like 5000 USD or so. Equation becomes obvious and they would tend to migrate.
Apps published on Deta Space will use our own payment solution; we will process the payment and send the dev their cut. For now, Ad-supported apps will not be published on Space. Space apps are reviewed manually.
We will offer either a simple purchase/subscription mechanism & our own SDK (for more complex use cases).
Offering a 0-ops & 0-liability experience for any dev globally is pretty attractive. There's more to this that I cant talk about yet unfortunately.
Cloud and developer setups are super sticky. If they have technical lock-in, then that switching cost is not just server vs revshare, but server + devops team + time spinning wheels on infra not focused on product + unknown glitches of a new environment vs revshare.
Essentially, the same business model as heroku -- free and affordable to start, but $$$$ at a medium scale. It will work until the business becomes an enterprise, which it seems Deta Cloud is adamant about not serving.
This looks neat and all but Delta Space (the "production" version of this) has zero pricing info that I can find and I've scoured their site and docs, even tried going to /pricing, /plans, etc nothing.
In the comments the CEO keeps talking about "we're working on Deta Space, which helps devs publish & monetize their web apps with no ops, and we take a small cut" but it's not clear at all what that "small cut" is and if it comes from payment processing or some other fee.
Hi, Deta Space is very new and a lot is still is happening behind the scenes. We're mostly running a closed alpha with some devs from our community. Once we launch Space in beta/GA, we will be announcing more about "the cut". It's likely to be <15% (no infra cost, etc).
I understand this is all vague atm but everything is still WIP. We're not ready for prime-time yet.
(btw, this is not a "show hn", a kind person thought to share us here)
Having lived a similar path (Uffizzi was initially a Heroku-like PaaS before we pivoted) I’ll offer some lessons learned that I wish I could have had a crystal ball to see.
-First I’ll reference Peter Thiel’s 10x rule - is your product or experience much, much better than the alternatives?
-The market is pretty saturated with free and low cost options for hosting. Heroku being the 1st and most ubiquitous and then Digital Ocean launching their PaaS in 2020. I’m sure there’s others.
I’ll concede that Render seems to have gotten some traction despite some significant odds against doing so.
-We got $100k in credits from GCP
-You’ll likely have trouble attracting serious start-ups or businesses because they will worry that you won’t be here in 1 year or even 3 years. If you don’t attract businesses you’ll have a hard time getting to monetization.
Your monetization plan is unique and I love anything that simplifies the Dev experience. Best of luck to you.
I host https://applesilicongames.com on deta, deploys are almost instant, for similar apps I used firebase in the past but I prefer python to javascript
> You agree that Abstract Computing UG (haftungsbeschränkt), in its sole discretion, may use your trade names, trademarks, service marks, logos, domain names and other distinctive brand features in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings (including links to your website) for the purpose of advertising or publicizing your use of the Deta Services.
This is pretty common in a lot of ToS, if you use their stuff (especially for free) they want to be able to use you on their nascar page of logos, or in their pitch decks. I don't really see what's wrong with that?
Super excited about this space, but not sure how another player is going to make firecracker/docker/gvisor/whatever based VMs cheaper/free-er than big cloud providers. Would be nice to see more attempts at alternate runtimes like WASM/V8/etc
Deta Cloud (deta.sh) is a playground for independent devs, it's not a full-fledged cloud platform. For production scale and monetization, we're working on Deta Space: https://www.deta.sh/space & https://deta.space/
So what are the limitations for individual developers? Is the network throttled somehow? Or there is limited life time of application to prevent usage for production (for small projects anyway)?.
It seems like there should be more information and a clear explanation of the business model.
We're working on this atm and will be sharing soon. Have been running for a while without official limits with very little issues. (99% of our devs don't reach our planned limits).
Absolutely, while I'm very grateful for free services I can sometimes wind up avoiding using them because I'm concerned about my privacy or the longevity of a setup
I'd rather pay a modest subscription fee than have the rug suddenly pulled from under me due to funding issues
That's a valid concern. We're well funded, so you don't have to worry for a few years. The way we will monetize is through Deta Space. Deta Space helps devs scale & monetize their apps without ops and we take a small cut.
There is no free lunch, I would assume the plan is to either first take over the market and then introduce pro plans and make the free plans have usage limits due to "abuse".
Or the plan is to sell user data or something shady like that.
There is no way a company can offer a free unlimited cloud service, it is to ripe for abuse.
Deta Cloud (deta.sh) is a playground for independent devs, it's not a full-fledged cloud platform. For production scale and monetization, we're working on Deta Space: https://www.deta.sh/space & https://deta.space/
Deta Space is the way we will make money. We help devs monetize their apps and we take a small cut.
Space is still WIP and we will be announcing more soon. We don't sell data.
Have used it for a small work project. I love the simplicity. I haven't found a cloud provider that has this limited scope/battery included feel.
I love services like digital Ocean. But everything is designed to deploy and scale "the right way". For projects with small scope this really fits the bill.
Improvement: add something like nodemon -e "deta deploy" I end up reruning that command alot.
Something like "deta -w ./my-awesome-project"
The comments remind me of the inflection point with any opensource/ startup company dev: "great product, id love to use it, but can I trust it?"
Aside: this reminds me of anvil.app but different.
This has that same omg it comes with a sql db editor interface (not very fancy but it works)
Most of the docs mention Python and Node.js micro-frameworks, but the Deta Base SDK has example code also for Go. Is it possible to deploy (self-contained) binaries compiled from Go on Deta? On Deta Space?
Deltacloud[1][2] was a library which abstracted differences of various cloud provider APIs, maintained from 2009 till about 2015. Btw I you need something like that today, there is libcloud[3], which is actively maintained library with a similar goal.
Every single product launch on HN has someone pointing out some sort of naming collision. It gets old.
This product is named Deta Cloud, not Delta Cloud, and in addition to that Apache Deltacloud is retired. Today's namespace is so crowded that all posts like this have convinced me of is that it's impossible not to collide with something.
Because many of you are wondering about our business model: we're working on Deta Space, which helps devs publish & monetize their web apps with no ops, and we take a small cut. Deta Space is still in the early pilot stage.
Learn more about Space here: https://www.deta.sh/space & here https://deta.space/.
Have a great day!