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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK most of the Dart server projects have been abandoned so I'm weary to try new ones. Let's hope this one will stick, it looks cool.

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Thank you! The previous Dart backend attempts were predating Flutter, so the conditions are very different now. Serverpod is also a funded company, and not a side or hobby project like earlier Dart servers.

How will you make money?

The main plan is to provide hosting for Serverpod. It's still an open-source project, so you can always host it yourself or on the cloud platform of your choice.

I have not seen any niche companies having success with that business model

Our own surveys show, that enterprise users want to host on a platform of their choice. They are not too eager to switch providers and are more unlikely to use your software if it doesn’t run on AWS

Knowing that, if you want to capture enterprise users, you should offer a managed version of your product on AWS or GCP

Thank you! We are definitely exploring more avenues than just regular server hosting.

The Laravel framework makes money by its hosting business, Forge.

Forge only confirms my assumptions. From their website:

> Forge links to your account on one of our supported cloud providers

They help you deploy PHP applications to your AWS/DigitalOcean/Linode account

Vercel, Netlify etc are big ones in the webdev world.

Their revenues and market shares are laughable

Netlify revenue is approximately $20M, Vercel’s $25M

AWS revenue is $65B

A company does not need to reach Amazon size to be viable, despite what all the VCs try to hammer in your mind. A 20M revenue company is perfectly fine. So is a 2M one, or even a 200k one.

They're both in the VC phase and are getting more enterprise clients, so I wouldn't take their current revenues prima facie.

The original creator of Flutter actually left Google rather recently and is in the process of building a Dart server project as his next thing. It’s not even at alpha stage yet however it’s VERY new https://github.com/shorebirdtech

I know him, we used to work together at Google. :)

I hope you don't mind me asking this personal question:

I noticed you worked on Flutter at Google for roughly 1 year and then left. What was your motivation? Was there a problem in the Flutter organisation?

Working for Google is awesome in many ways and the people at the Flutter team at the time I worked there were nothing less than outstanding.

For me personally, working at Google wasn't my first choice as I ended up there when the startup I worked at before was acquired. I just felt done with the whole Silicon Valley thing and ended up moving back to Sweden. If I'd pick one big company to work for, it would probably be Google.

How is the VC scene in Sweden? Or is the company funded by American VCs but you just live in Sweden now?

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