Codebender is closing down
codebender.cc
codebender.cc
Nice, thank you! Please consider dumping everything under a free license at the end so that it does not just vanish.
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And some cloud snark I cannot resist making:
Work anywhere, your code is always there
Free of charge, forever!
Don't trust other people/companies for being always there, forever!
The drilldown is roughly:
* $5K Amazon + mLab hosting
* $3K extra services (intercom, mailchimp, dropbox, gmail, slack etc)
* $1K accounting/payroll overhead
* $1K all office expenses
* $15K salaries
people underestimate the cost of compilations for 10,000 people. We have ~150,000 compilations per month ;)
Security restrictions on the browser might be an issue, but i think you should be able to store the binary output in the local storage and upload it to the server.
So I guess most of it is on paying developers and maybe some office space. 25,000 won't go a long way, even taking in to account cheaper salaries in Greece.
Edit: Their team page says they have 6 employees, so 25,000 probably doesn't go a long way.
I wish the team all the best. I didn't expect that the site would cost ~$25K/month to keep up. That is a huge cost to be borne out of their own pockets, or from the modest investment money they had.
I wish more startups would charge for their product, instead of offering a $#*!@!# free tier that then proceeds to kill them more often than not. Yeah, yeah, "growth hacking", blah blah.
It's not that users don't want to pay, it's that startups turn down money so they can roll the dice for hypergrowth and acquisition.
People naturally overvalue physical goods and their cost to make, while under-valuing virtual goods (you're willing to pay for a $10 coffee with a 95% profit margin than a $5 Monthly subscription)
In the Maker movement, people gladly buy an Arduino with a 75% markup (the final cost is 3-4X the cost of making it), but they wouldn't pay for an IDE, or a library etc.
It's also true that there are many things aiming for your hard-earned money so people are reluctant to go ahead.
And then of course, there's the competition. With the Arduino IDE (and now Arduino Create) being available for free given Arduino's business model (make money from H/W), Makers aren't incentivized to pay, in fact they (naturally?) expect other things to be free as well
One of those is $10, the other costs infinity dollars.
There's a large, and IMO underappreciated, amount of friction involved in subscription payment plans, given how often people are trying to get customers to sign up for them.
I'd buy a $50 tool more or less on impulse. A $10 or even $5/mo subscription is something I'd need to think over, not even because of the cost, but because I know it's something I'm going to have to deal with later on -- it means another place that I need to remember to update my credit card number whenever it gets changed, another thing that I might have to deal with the hassle of canceling later... overall, beyond the potential for the costs to add up over time, it's the construction of an ongoing relationship when all I wanted as a consumer was a sort of "one night stand".
Lots of vendors are looking for commitment from their customers, and I think a lot of potential customers are getting tired of it. Subscription business models are attractive for obvious reasons on the vendor side, but I wonder how many drive-by customers they pass up.
I don't know codebenders, so I'm out on a limb here with respect to their business. But for any business in this market, you need to figure out a way to be some kind of Kickstarter, not just major their lives a bit easier. Enable something they couldn't do before you came along. Help them turn their hobby into a business, or at least make it a zero-sum game by making a tiny profit off what they're doing. Even that isn't a guarantee but it'll put you a little closer to the goal.
I'm not sure this is true. Makers will pay money for other tools and materials (some of which are quite expensive) without any expectation that they'll make that money back.
How many of their existing 10,000 monthly active users would be happy to pay for the service?
Last bubble there was a stereotypical internet gnomes underpants model of becoming tech billionaires. Its the same thing today:
"I want you to pay me to be your middleman"
"OK then what will the UX be?"
"It'll be like I'm not even here... well, best case anyway"
....
"Profit!"
Its getting to be a hard sell in the market. Nobody ever woke up and said "My HVAC system is too simple and too predictable, I need to get Google into the flowchart somehow".
Edited to add another way to look at the problem is at high cost its now possible for people without "the knack" to use an IDE. Now... why would people without "the knack" need an IDE? "A soldering iron so simple my mom could use it" "Cool but my mom doesn't want to use a soldering iron" "... crickets ..."
This appears to be a perfect example.
From their pricing: Completely Free - Unlimited public sketches, free of charge, for ever! Only pay if you want to keep your projects private.