MongoDB Atlas's business model seems very, very odd to me. The prices for hosted Mongo are so high that I really find myself asking who is paying for this and what the target market is. In particular I wonder how they can possibly be losing money when charging such insane markups unless they have virtually no customers.

For a dedicated database that has 32 GB of RAM, 8 virtualised CPUs, and only 160GB of storage you will pay $2 an hour! That's $17,520 a year for a database with the same level of compute and far less storage than my laptop.

I realise a big part of their target market is firms who are convinced they either can't hire skilled sysadmins or are convinced their time is worth more than the US President but at $17,520/yr for a tiny database it only takes two or three of those before you could, in fact, hire a full time sysadmin in a cheap location. And there's no way that maintaining these things would require an FTE, it's not even close to being a full time job. So how do the economics of this work out? Can anyone explain to me?

My best guess is that Atlas customers are companies that are totally price insensitive and have some sort of "everything must be cloud managed without exception" rule imposed from the top down. As Mongo is licensed such that only they can run a hosted service, such customers would find themselves forced by internal policy into paying whatever price Atlas charges. This would also explain their very low services revenue. But I don't know that, it's just a guess.