Deta Cloud – Developer-friendly cloud platform

Hey HN, Deta CEO here. Glad to see Deta on HN! Hapy to answer any question (although a bit sick today, so apology for the short and duplicated answers).

Because many of you are wondering about our business model: we're working on Deta Space, which helps devs publish & monetize their web apps with no ops, and we take a small cut. Deta Space is still in the early pilot stage.

Learn more about Space here: https://www.deta.sh/space & here https://deta.space/.

Have a great day!

The market is actually pretty small for super focussed with PaaS with a specialized business model. Trust me, been there, done that. You have to not only communicate why your PaaS is better than others out there in the market but Also de-mystify why they should adopt your pricing model too.

My argument is that most of the small business and startups struggle to make revenue from get go. Asking for revshare, when it is day-0/day-1 kind of situation can hit the startups, small business, individuals really hard.

To me the your model looks very close to a royalty structure. Which I do not think many orgs and serious startups would like.

Another argument is that, Major cloud providers give away a lot of credits for various services. It can go upto $100k. I would even argue that you don't need devops or specialized team from you are a small org, startup and your operations are small.

Anyways, Looks like a fun project. I actually think the Micro, Base and Drive looks very promising and I wouldn't mind paying based on usage. I think, It can be a fun place to host apps for indie hackers. Would love to list Deta Cloud on Awesome Paas[1] list.

[1] https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas

When I read "free" "free, no credit card" "free, forever" "free, unlimited"

I tend to stop processing what is on the page since I get this acute feeling of being taken for a ride, and whatever is hiding somewhere in all that marketing babble is going to rear its ugly head at some inconvenient time.

The first thing I look for on a new product site is if this looks at all interesting. I am willing to put some effort into that.

If I decide that this might be interesting I go looking for the "Pricing" page.

If I cant find it, I move on real quick.

If it says "Call talk to our salespeople" I move on real quick.

If says "free", "free", "free" I wonder what's the catch and that is something I dont spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.

If there is a pricing page, it seems up front, honest, realistic I will invest a lot more time into figuring out how it could be used.

Please just put a pricing page up and make it is easy to find.

"We'll take cut."

How that will work? If someone is using display advertising, how the cut can be calculated? Or do you force to have your script included in header that delegates such requests?

Further, someone taking PayPal or other payment processing, will you be hooking yourself in middle by having your own SDK for monitization I suppose?

Might work or might not, basically the apps that make significant amount of money don't won't to give away 5% of their revenue.

Imagine an app making one million USD a month would end up paying 50,000 USD as cut. But pretty sure, if they host it themselves, the bill would be far below something like 5000 USD or so. Equation becomes obvious and they would tend to migrate.

This looks neat and all but Delta Space (the "production" version of this) has zero pricing info that I can find and I've scoured their site and docs, even tried going to /pricing, /plans, etc nothing.

In the comments the CEO keeps talking about "we're working on Deta Space, which helps devs publish & monetize their web apps with no ops, and we take a small cut" but it's not clear at all what that "small cut" is and if it comes from payment processing or some other fee.

Can we please get some info on pricing for Space?

Having lived a similar path (Uffizzi was initially a Heroku-like PaaS before we pivoted) I’ll offer some lessons learned that I wish I could have had a crystal ball to see. -First I’ll reference Peter Thiel’s 10x rule - is your product or experience much, much better than the alternatives? -The market is pretty saturated with free and low cost options for hosting. Heroku being the 1st and most ubiquitous and then Digital Ocean launching their PaaS in 2020. I’m sure there’s others. I’ll concede that Render seems to have gotten some traction despite some significant odds against doing so. -We got $100k in credits from GCP -You’ll likely have trouble attracting serious start-ups or businesses because they will worry that you won’t be here in 1 year or even 3 years. If you don’t attract businesses you’ll have a hard time getting to monetization.

Your monetization plan is unique and I love anything that simplifies the Dev experience. Best of luck to you.

I host https://applesilicongames.com on deta, deploys are almost instant, for similar apps I used firebase in the past but I prefer python to javascript

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What's the catch?

There is no free lunch, I would assume the plan is to either first take over the market and then introduce pro plans and make the free plans have usage limits due to "abuse".

Or the plan is to sell user data or something shady like that.

There is no way a company can offer a free unlimited cloud service, it is to ripe for abuse.

Have used it for a small work project. I love the simplicity. I haven't found a cloud provider that has this limited scope/battery included feel.

I love services like digital Ocean. But everything is designed to deploy and scale "the right way". For projects with small scope this really fits the bill.

Improvement: add something like nodemon -e "deta deploy" I end up reruning that command alot.

Something like "deta -w ./my-awesome-project"

The comments remind me of the inflection point with any opensource/ startup company dev: "great product, id love to use it, but can I trust it?"

Aside: this reminds me of anvil.app but different. This has that same omg it comes with a sql db editor interface (not very fancy but it works)

Most of the docs mention Python and Node.js micro-frameworks, but the Deta Base SDK has example code also for Go. Is it possible to deploy (self-contained) binaries compiled from Go on Deta? On Deta Space?

How does it pay it's bills?

there is no pricing info and difficult to understand the business model if not by reading through the comments on here.

wow I love how simple it seems to do database and file storage... definitely taking a look this weekend!

love the UI/UX, very snappy and simple; good work!

Deltacloud[1][2] was a library which abstracted differences of various cloud provider APIs, maintained from 2009 till about 2015. Btw I you need something like that today, there is libcloud[3], which is actively maintained library with a similar goal.

[1] https://deltacloud.apache.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltacloud [3] https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/