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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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.

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