Hi there! Founder here, slightly gobsmacked to see this top of HN. Do feel free to ask me any questions about the platform :)
We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials
We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials
I'm really not a fan of Python client side. Or RAD. Or closed source services.
And I'm hugely impressed by the potential of your product.
Good luck.
I never though I would say that one day. But don't listen to people asking you to open sourcing it now. You can always do it once you are profitable. But right now, you need money to get this going. And if your product does what you say it does, people will be happy to pay.
Although not to be locked up on the long run. You will need to address that one day. One day.
I want to second that, entirely.
Don't do it until you are comfortable.
My only suggestion is if you are closing the product for any reason, then open source the core as much as possible.
I just had a video demo tutorial with your colleague @daviesian. He is such an intelligent and effective communicator. I learned a lot about your platform in a short 30-minute screen sharing.
In the crowded world of PaaS, human factors might have equal (if not more) importance than the technology magic. From my experience with Ian, I do see the bright future of your platform. You have a great team that people will trust.
Keep up the good work!
My question is about scaling - what are some large apps on this platform and how big do you think these apps can get in terms of db size and qps?
Our infrastructure is all on AWS and designed to scale horizontally, so we're pretty confident we can handle whatever traffic you throw at your app. (Ask about our dedicated-resource hosting plans!)
As for examples, it's a bit Catch-22. Our smaller customers, you haven't heard of; and our largest ones, we can't talk about in public. And a lot of it is internal/intranet stuff anyway.
One customer has kindly allowed us to talk a bit about their app - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589020
You might be interested in my talk from PyCon US this summer, where I talked about the compiler, and how we turn blocking Python code into non-blocking Javascript code:
Being a penny pinching student, do you guys offer any discounts for students?
Or are you worried about clones?
I'd also discourage a patreon- or kickstarter-style offering for a B2B product, because it signals very clearly that you're not playing with the big fish.
As for signaling, one would not have to use those providers if they felt it did not fit their brand, and could roll their own platform. But if signaling that you want to "play with the big fish" is what one wants, most companies hire sales team who go out and play golf with prospects. Having an open source product and using other forms of funding certainly does not preclude doing that. (Though being a small bootstrapped business might make it more difficult).
While charging for use might seem like a good business model, I think an awful lot of potential customers will just never use it because of it. You may be able to find a model where you charge for the front-end page designer or something, but open source everything needed to run the site so that being locked in to a product you have to pay for and can't modify is less of a concern.
Right now we're taking it all as it comes, but we never want to lose our focus on accessibility: It's way too hard to build web apps with today's traditional tools, and we want to make it easier for everyone.