I get that they are saying the cloud offering is hard, but if they didn't have that, what was their business model? Were they relying on support and consulting fees? Consulting is hard to scale.

Cloud offering with build-in redundancy (herokudb, RDS, Redis Cloud) is what most app stakeholders are looking for. We want to try RethinkDb but we don't want to deal with servers.

If rethinkdb is good, i hope someone can resurrect this as a cloud service.