Nitric doesn't wrap the state management for Pulumi, we actually encourage integrating directly with Pulumi's own cloud offerings to manage your infrastructure state.
https://nitric.io/docs/reference/pulumiNote this only applies to our OOTB providers which use Pulumi as our deployment engine of choice.
When you take away our providers Nitric becomes a communication layer between your application and any deployment engine that implements the Nitric deployment API: https://nitric.io/docs/reference/providers/custom/building-c...
This allows collecting a Bill of Materials of cloud concepts (e.g. APIs, topics, buckets, queues, policies etc.) and providing them however you like with code. This could be templating IaC, directly executing IaC, rolling your own solution or anything in between.
As for how we make money, currently we're doing consulting and dog-fooding our own tooling while working with existing teams struggling with more traditional deployment setups to make them more productive, their feedback is used to make own product even better :).