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.
Learn more about Space here: https://www.deta.sh/space & here https://deta.space/.
Have a great day!
Iâm curios: If you have funding that gives you multiple years of runway (as stated earlier ITT), why didnât you raise the contribution to EUR 25k and turn the UG (Haftungsbeschränkt) into a fully limited liability company (GmbH)? Wouldnât that be one of the first moves when funding is in, to give the founders peace of mind regarding personal liability concerns?
What kind of concerns are you talking about here?
UG is like GmbH with a difference that, afair, 25% or 30% of the profit has to be put aside towards GmbH conversion. Also, youâd do the conversion typically at the end of fiscal year.
For investors putting serious money in, whatâs the difference if they can recover âŹ5k or âŹ25k? Stammkapital is the maximum liability for both UG and GmbH.
GmbH looks more serious though
There's more to this than one would think :)
The front page says "Unlimited storage" for the NoSQL solution; yet the terms mention a hard limit of 10 GB. Is there a typo?
That's for "file storage", aka Deta Drive. Deta Base, our NoSQL doesn't have a limit.
How credible is this, in the long term? Can i use it to build the next Dropbox with unlimited file storage and give it away for free to my users?
In the docs I see Go SDKs for Base and Drive, but doesn't look like deta-cli supports Go for Micros. Can we write services in Go?
We don't support Go on Micros yet. Not enough demand atm but we love Go and planning to support it once we have the capacity.
What do you think you can do to succeed where Meteor failed?
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.
"We'll take cut."
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.
Can we please get some info on pricing for Space?
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) Iâll offer some lessons learned that I wish I could have had a crystal ball to see. -First Iâll reference Peter Thielâs 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. Iâm sure thereâs others. Iâll concede that Render seems to have gotten some traction despite some significant odds against doing so. -We got $100k in credits from GCP -Youâll likely have trouble attracting serious start-ups or businesses because they will worry that you wonât be here in 1 year or even 3 years. If you donât attract businesses youâll 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?
This is for our "app marketplace" (WIP) which we use to promote the apps themselves. We also say look at these cool apps running on Deta.
More about our "marketplace": https://deta.space/ & https://www.deta.sh/space
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