Cloudant (YC S08) Launches Its NoSQL Cloud Database Platform

This seems like the right way to work on hard problem. Super smart team builds a product, gets early customers to use it on large datasets while they polish, tune, and iterate over a period of time leading up to launch.

Interesting pricing model too. It's more costly than some of the other hosted database services, but they also provide a reasonable free version so people can experiment with it. Good luck guys.

I had an early beta account because I wrote two articles in January on using Heroku with external data services. Their system is very slick. Before anyone complains about paying, for example, $39/month for a 8 GB plan, they only charge for the latest version of each document, and not for replicated copies.

I am a big fan of sometimes using 3rd party services instead of paying the admin and infrastructure costs, so services like Cloudant, MongoHQ, etc. make a lot of sense for some applications.