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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

A few takes:

- Website is riddled with grammatical inconsistencies and errors. I can tell you're not a native English speaker, and you may want to revisit some of the copy.

- As @ourcat mentioned, there are way too many pricing options, not to mention the tiny tabs at the top (which yield even more pricing options). It's just confusing/overwhelming.

- You really need to make a case here for why someone would choose you over Firebase. I'd personally never use you because Firebase is free while I'm building out the MVP (usually a side project). It always irks me when passion projects or pre-MVP "startups" are hemorrhaging money (even if it's just 10 bucks a month).

- I don't think "vendor lock-in" is a pain point for these kinds of products. A pain point I do know about is migrating to a more robust data layer if the project takes off (post-MVP phase). I don't really see how this very real pain point is easier to mitigate on your SaaS rather than Firebase.

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Disclaimer: I'm founder of DarkLang, a sorta competitor.

While I personally agree that self-hosting is a nightmare, the biggest complaint we've heard about Dark has been related to vendor lock-in. I think this is a pretty good selling point for StaticBackend, for a few reasons: 1) what if you get too big for the hosting? 2) what if the company goes go out of business! 3) what if the company determines that hosting you is against the T&C (see the Parler thing this week, for example, although I completely agree with AWS' decision there).

I don't think self-hosting is really a good idea if you can avoid it, but a lot of people are soothed by the idea that they could, if they really needed to.

thanks, this give me some confidence.

I think differently regarding self-hosting though. By the fact that StaticBackend is a Go web server, it's a standalone Linux binary and can be hosted very easily on x64 Linux server.

But I'll see when the first customer will choose that option. I'll be ready to help them deploy for sure.

> I don't think self-hosting is really a good idea if you can avoid it, but a lot of people are soothed by the idea that they could, if they really needed to.

Ability to self host often also means ability to switch hosted providers. And things like being able to run local copies or instances in CI too.

thanks for the feedback:

- grammar: thanks, I'm not a native English that's correct, I'll try harder.

- pricing: My thought is that offering only 3 tier would be way too big of a leap from tier to tier.

- Firebase: I do have a fully disconected and local development server that helps during building phase. It's free, but I can see your point.

- vendo lock-in: My main objective is exactly that, to have an easy way to self-host and even get the source code once a product reach scale. Something that not much BaaS offer.

>grammar: thanks, I'm not a native English that's correct, I'll try harder.

Why not just hire an editor or copy writer. Nothing wrong with focusing on your core goals and outsourcing some of the tasks you don't need to focus on right now.

yes, absolutely

'It always irks me when passion projects or pre-MVP "startups" are hemorrhaging money (even if it's just 10 bucks a month)'

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