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This is important to us, and was a factor in our decision to go to IBM (which is a little counter intuitive, given IBM's history). Our entire sales model is predicated on people being able to start easily, and grow if they need to. Price, self service-ness, and the content we produce are all important in this model.

The thing about lone wolf developers, and side projects, and one off things people hack together over the weekend is that they sometimes "flip" and become big customers. That's when we win, and we monitor our funnel like crazy and continuously see that it's working. Interestingly, some of the bad customer experiences you see in this thread are the direct result of this model. We aren't very good at handling one offs, or doing things by hand, or consulting, because we focus so much on repeatable, self service offerings — which have to work for small applications.

IBM is interested in three things from us. The technology is good, the team is great, and the way we sell to customers is something they have told us they firmly believe is the future of selling tools to developers. There's a really, really good chance that you'll see other parts of IBM acting like us (and building things for you) before you see us becoming all enterprisey.

We'll keep the name Compose (because it's fabulous!), we'll keep the cheap Postgres option, and we'll do our best to keep that true for years and years.

For what it's worth, I greatly appreciate your comment.

Will this change the platforms you target?

I'd love to see your services running on Google Cloud Platform, for example, so that they could be used with co-located customer services.

We'll target more. We should have a good GCE option soon.

Good to hear, a managed PostgreSQL service is the one big thing missing on GCE for me.

Check out www.elephantsql.com, we provide managed PostgreSQL on GCE, AWS, Azure and Softlayer

Yeah aware of ElephantSQL but the concern is lack of SLA and lack of big company backing. If you guys disappear, what happens to my databases since they run on your subscription, not mine. Hence why having an IBM backed Postgres on Azure is attractive - even though big companies can be frivolous, there's a comfort in knowing they're less likely to go out of business.

+1, except would awesome to see this on Microsoft Azure. The current SQL database as a service offering on Azure is expensive with mediocre performance. A highly available Postgres as a Service offering backed by a big co like IBM would be most welcome on Azure.

I'm sorry, but you may think this is the way it goes, but I suspect you'll find it isn't so. My prediction is that you will be booted as CEO within a year, not because you aren't awesome but because you are a big part of Compose and IBM will go directions you won't like.

Hope I'm wrong, but I can't see how this will be anything but disastrous. Your key company abilities were you controlled your own destiny to a degree, and you could react quickly. Now you are part of a larger group within IBM, I doubt this will be possible.

I do wish you the best though, and that my dire prediction is completely wrong. I've just seen what happens when a smaller company is bought by a massive one.

Well I can't be CEO of IBM! Not this year, at least.

I've seen utterly awful acquisitions, and good acquisitions. You're right that there's a lot we can't control, and we could be ground up by the big corp machinations, but I do actually think IBM has a big interest in not screwing us up. We shall see.

If it helps any, from my prior observations in situations like this, you'll know things are going bad when IBM starts "recommending" their personnel for management positions in mid-level and above.

That's "the canary dying in the mine" to watch for IMHO.

A relevant counter-example: the group bringing Compose into IBM is run by the former leadership team at Cloudant (including yours truly). We're incredibly excited to have mrkurt & co. on board; Compose does a great job of filling out the Bluemix services portfolio and gives us a solid platform for launching new offerings going forward.

We had many of those fears when we (Vivisimo now Watson Explorer) were acquired. I'm a consultant on the implementations side. It's been almost 3 years. The C levels did leave but most of the founders and original employees still work for IBM even after the mandatory period. Basically, my job is still the same with a little bit of extra bureaucracy that comes with companies of that size.

Our client base seems to be growing much quicker now after getting fully integrated. It seems like people may be buying our technology almost by accident (packaged deals, etc) and now realizing they have it and want to actually use it. That's something that seems unique to these huge tech firms. Before we had to sell each person.

IBM actually "cares about the little guy" to an incredible degree these days. The last few years have seen a major shift in buying trends in the enterprise that puts developers in a position of significant influence. We know that if those individual devs have a chance to experiment with technologies as hobbyists and have a positive experience they'll be much more likely to recommend them for the next internal corporate project. Bluemix is the best example of our commitment to this space and the Compose services are a natural complement to that PaaS environment.

Just get yourself a free Bluemix account, add the compose DB services when they become available (and they will), and if your usage is on that hobbyist level, you'll only pay what you're paying now. You don't even have to use Bluemix itself for runtime hosting, you can access most Bluemix services from your localhost or other app environments.

"pretend to sign up to our other services so it looks like IBM is attracting new business and you can continue to use this service for free"

IBM already has some "lone developer" friendly offerings in bluemix, so there is hope

Just so you know, AWS RDS has Postgres instances starting at $13/mo hourly, or as low as $9.25/mo if you pay up front for a 1 year reservation.

It's also eligible for their free tier, making a micro instance (more than enough for most personal projects) free for a year with a new account

I liked what Compose was doing and I was one of early adopters. And I also 100% agree with their move (congrats!!).

As bootstrapped founder, I can tell you that customers who pay less than $30/month are just trouble. These users can used as early adopters and promotes - but not to grow the business. After company gains attraction these users should be dumped.

This is unfortunate story but that is status of SaaS: this kinda explains that there is very little new B2C SaaS startup.

Actually my thinking that for SaaS any offering with price under $30/month should be free tier and I think IBM will give your tier for free.

Have you tried Bluemix? It's actually pretty awesome.

I hadn't heard of Bluemix prior to this thread. It does indeed look awesome; the free tiers are pretty impressive, and going beyond that is surprisingly affordable. Definitely a stark contrast from a lot of other PaaS providers (in particular, Heroku). I'll have to check it out for some of my own pet projects.

Bluemix has a big opportunity here as Heroku has been aggressively kicking out freeloaders lately. My company pays Heroku a lot of money in large part because the developers know how to work with it, but I won't use it for any of my personal play stuff anymore.

I'm not certain but I do not believe bluemix has a long-term free tier. It expires after a significant trial period from what I can tell. Is that not what people are upset at Heroku over?

there's free allowances https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/

Nope, Heroku had a free tier that wasn't a trial, all kinds of people were using it for toys and experiments, some of them evolved into Serious Business projects with real costs, but a lot of them just idled along using minimal resources, but then Heroku decided the free lunchers were no longer welcome and severely throttled the free tier so that most of them now had to pay $7/mo. This took effect earlier this month. This was right on the heels of discontinuing their old stack, and apps that were running on it weren't auto-migrated or anything, just killed. So there's a lot of disgruntled former Heroku users out there.

I'm not using it yet but Bluemix does appear to have a non-trial free tier, and it looks like they actually offer a fair bit more than Heroku did.

Bluemix is an installation of Cloud Foundry; you can also try it on Pivotal Web Services (I work for the company that hosts PWS).

https://run.pivotal.io/

this is totally true. IBM isn't really a technology company anymore. they're in the business of buying and selling smaller services companies.

also expect compose to be totally different after about a year (source: i've worked for a company that was aquired by IBM)

I don't know... IBM is really really big. Even if 20% of the company is technology-focused, that's still a huge number of people. They supply the finance and defense world with machines, operating systems, and compilers and they also provide support for them. They also have a research division that routinely publishes at all of the top conferences.

There's no question. A company builds some cloudy offerings with a few million and HN calls them a technology company. IBM's internal use alone is almost a billion a year of their technology. Then they sell billions to others. So, yeah, they're a technology company.

And anyone challenging them, their government connections, and patent portfolio better remember that.

IBM is both a technology company and a services company. They shifted their primary strategy to services when they saw it doing well while eg server markets weren't. Right now, they make billions selling mainframes, servers, and software licenses. They also hit 7nm in the lab recently while Intel struggles with lesser tech. Their R&D is several billion dollars a year ranging from product development to foundational science.

They're more of a technology company than most that make Hacker News. They also sell services. They also acquire proven implementations of new products and services. The combo is called a technology conglomerate & it's a proven model to make billions over decades.

IBM's Bluemix has generous free use tiers for deploying small scale apps.