Comment by adamcharnock
6 hours ago
Hello! I think this is a fair question, and improving the communication on the website is something that is steadily climbing up our priority list.
We're not really that kind of product company; we're more of a services company. What we do is deploy Kubernetes clusters onto bare metal servers. That's the core technical offering. However, everything beyond that is somewhat per-client. Some clients need a lot of compute. Some clients need a custom object storage cluster. Some clients need a lot of high-speed internal networking. Which is why we prefer to have a call to figure out specifically what your needs are. But I can also see how this isn't necessarily satisfying if you're used to just grabbing the API docs and having a look around.
What we will do is take your company's software stack and migrate it off AWS/Azure/Google and deploy it onto our new infrastructure. We will then become (or work with) your DevOps team to supporting you. This can be anything from containerising workloads to diagnosing performance issues to deploying a new multi-region Postgres cluster. Whatever you need done on your hardware that we feel we can reasonably support. We are the ones on-call should NATS fall over at 4am.
Your team also has full access to the Kubernetes cluster to deploy to as you wish.
I think the pricing page is the most concrete thing on our website, and it is entirely accurate. If you were to phone us and say, "I want that exact hardware," we would do it for you. But the real value we also offer is in the DevOps support we provide, actually doing the migration up-front (at our own cost), and being there working with your team every week.
This makes total sense to me. I'm thinking through the flow that would lead me to be a customer of yours.
In my current job, I think we're honestly a bit past the phase where I would want to take on a migration to a service like yours. We already have a good team of infrastructure folks running our cloud infrastructure, and we have accepted the lock-in of various AWS managed services. So the high-touch devops support doesn't sound that useful to me (we already have people who are good at this), and replacing all the locked-in components seems unlikely to have good ROI. I think we'd be more likely to go straight to #3 if we decided to take that on to save money.
But I'll probably be a founder or early employee at a new startup again someday, and I'm intrigued by your offering from that perspective. But it seems pretty clear to me that I shouldn't call you up on day 1, because I'm going to be nowhere near $5k a month, and I want to move faster than calling someone up to talk about my needs. I want to self-serve a small amount of usage, and cloud services seem really great for that. But this is how they get you! Once you've started with a particular cloud service, it's always easiest to take on more lock-in.
At some point between these two situations, though, I can see where your offering would be great. But the decision point isn't all that clear to me. In my experience, by the time you start looking at your AWS bill and thinking "crap, that seems pretty expensive", you have better things to do than an infrastructure migration, and you have taken on some lock-in.
I do like the idea of high-touch services to solve the breaking-the-lock-in challenge! I'll certainly keep this in mind next time I find myself in this middle ground where the cloud starts feeling more expensive than it's worth, but we don't want to go straight to #3.