Cloudcraft – Architect and budget cloud infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Cloudcraft – Architect and budget cloud infrastructure

cloudcraft.co

38 pointsaussieguy123421 comments

Cloudcraft is used by a tons of AWS consultants. I think that's the disconnect seeing a lot of comments here, people spending less than $ thousands/year on AWS just aren't their target customers. Meanwhile, Cloudcraft is minting money.

If it wasn't $50/month, they'd have made tons of money from me without using it. But I had it for a few months and simply canceled. You can't have a service for $49 when a whole server is $5 nowadays and GitHub is $7/month. Plus, when you can do it with code like with this [0] too, why use a GUI/WUI?

[0]: https://diagrams.mingrammer.com/

If they reduce price to $10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue, as there are some variable costs, to reach same profit they'll need even more customers. Most of these new customers wouldn't be power users so they'll have a diverse set of expectations / requirements from the software.

Not sure about the no. $50 but it may be a conscious and valid choice.

> If they reduce price to $10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue

This assertion could only start to make any sense if you believe that the law of supply and demand doesn't exist, and that economies of scale don't apply.

Meanwhile, I am a paying customer of cloud providers eventhough I don't use them just because they are affordable. This service expects that people like me spend 600€/year when I can have the same exact service somewhere else for 60€/year.

Well the assertion is just a mathematical fact, there is a disagreement on the demand curve.

Maybe the company isn’t targeting anyone who is a paying customer of cloud providers, and is targeting full time cloud architects who need more than the other products offerings.

> Well the assertion is just a mathematical fact,

It really isn't. You're somehow assuming that the law of supply and demand doesn't exist. As the premise is blatantly wrong then this mistake renders all subsequent assertions mute.

> Maybe the company isn’t targeting anyone

Irrelevant. The initial assertion was that higher prices somehow had no inpact in demand and thus revenue would be proportional. This assertion is blatantly wrong. The fact is that lower prices increase demand, and increased demand enables economies of scale, which lead to higher revenue. Conversely, higher prices lower demand, etc etc. Market segmentation is tangential to this point.

> It really isn't.

The assertion was "$10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue"

Revenue = Price * Quantity Sold.

Let x = Quantity Sold, and y = revenue

$50 * x = y

$10 = $50/5

$50/5 * x = y/5

$10 * 5x = y

OP stated a fact, and you said it was incorrect. I'm just trying to say the disagreement is actually about how elastic the price is (i.e. a change of x% in price results in a y% change in the number of customers).

Trust me, they don't care that you're gone. If you aren't willing to pay $50 / month, you're not their target customer.

What a weird comment. I mean, it adds nothing to the discussion and intentionally sidesteps the core of any service: it's business model.

If you refuse to even discuss the pricing model of a service, why bother wasting your time posting anything at all?

I think it adds a fair bit to the discussion. The business model must be aimed at larger cloud users who’s savings will outweigh $50/mo

Those cloud users can have the same benefit by spending a fraction of the price. That's the point. The question you're trying to ask is whether the added value being promised justifies a price tag that's 10x higher than the ones offered by established services.

The long tail of AWS customers is pretty rocky and is a revenue risk as well. Why deal with folks that can come and go so quickly when stable, sustainable revenue is what matters more for a growing company? Most AWS consultants and devopsy / SRE types IME are hired around the lower to mid 5 figure monthly spend mark depending upon growth to warrant their cost and at that point $50 / mo is hardly even mentioned. Heck, even hiring a consultant instead of hiring engineers with experience in the first place is a bit of an old school thing and implies legacy or not a start-up kind of businesses (lift and shifts, that is).

Draw.io does everything I need for free, and is about 80% "good enough" in terms of output quality. I would love to use this tool for the aesthetic benefits, but would struggle to justify even $10 for the sake of ~1 diagram per month.

I really enjoy using this product for creating architecture diagrams! I would never use it to creat budgets though. I hope it expands to other clouds and frameworks and then I would pay for it over lucidchart.

I've enjoyed playing around with this product, but I wish there was a tier between free and pro that added infinite drawing without such a steep price. I'm not really interested in the sync stuff, but would happily pay a little to add infinite grid to the features otherwise included in the free tier.

I actually love this tool, but i wish it supported google cloud also.

I used this once and couldn’t believe there was no way to make it not 3-D. At least not that I could figure out.

At the top right (near the "export" button) is a toggle to go between 3D and 2D.

This needs to be able to read my terraform statefiles

Hashicorp’s hosted Terraform service has cost estimation built in nowadays and you can setup Sentinel rules to keep people from deploying infrastructure changes that are beyond a certain cost ceiling (or below)

Thank you for telling me about that, I didn't know. However, I'm most interested in a product able to bridge my statefiles into coherent visual representations of state, either within a single statefile or more importantly across several. The cost aspect seems a secondary concern.

tl;dr: Creating dynamic visual layouts from terraform state would be worth >= 50USD/mo to me.

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