The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right or not.

I'll try to explain:

I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet.

But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free!

But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo.

I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away.

So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left?

My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo.

[Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.]

PS: Oh yeah, one other thing:

Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.