I think they never should have focussed on Self driving tech so early on in their journey. They should have won the market share globally first and then maybe focus on any kind of RnD. Business lesson is how laser sharp focus is the key
I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?
Many people have already listed out some good solutions for bandwidth issue. For your passive consumption issue I would highly recommend cutting yourself off from mainstream social apps like instagram, snapchat and facebook. Human minds have limited capacity to focus and be attentive to particular area and using these apps usually overload the daily threshold limit of cognitive load we can take. I have personally renounced all of mainstream social media apps and am very conscious of what I consume on daily basis ( I prefer very few news articles which are relevant to me ). Other than that I depend upon books or long form in depth content for a topic I need to learn about. This gives your brain bandwidth to think and construct original thoughts which are the very foundation producing or building anything.
The question is why should I even pay you $1 cent for a service for which existing underlying APIs are already extremely good( android or iOS location API and Google Maps API )
Businesses for whom location tracking is critical process component and not a good to have such as logistic companies or lets say food/medicine delivery companies who also already have an app deployed with their end agents, the additional cost for them to get location tracking and reporting integrated in their mobile apps is trivial and also there is no technical moat as is there in lets say messaging or SMS APIs ( like Twilio). Either I don't understand your customer set, or problem you are solving is simply not big enough. You are trying to do to location tracking what twilio did to messaging, but reality is location tracking as a service doesn't make a very solid business case here. But best of luck :)
Pricing looks way too expensive to me even for small to medium scale usage. And if my business cross the medium scale , then why wouldn't i really build it inhouse. Seem like a classic case of product looking for problem.
I tried deploying a django app on EBS and node app through code star. The whole experience was really simple. It adds a whole new level of abstraction on deploying and maintaining apps on production level. Though similar solutions exist in market such as pythonanywhere and heroku, but all of this from AWS is just simply phenomenal. I 100% agree that code commit is just amazon trying to push through one of its products. But i don't think that really is the intent of codestar. They want to provide one opinionated workflow for your entire development lifecycle, which works incredibly well for teams of all size. And plus I wouldn't really worry about the lock in situation, thats a good problem to have if you reach a stage where you need to think about these issues and given aws's and overall amazon's stance on pricing I personally don't worry about it at all. Had this service been provided by microsoft I wouldnt have gone for it because of their history of over pricing and creating artificial lock ins.
I had tried configuring EBS prior with one of my apps, but the quirks of setting it up had always left me quite frustrated. But this is actually a game changer. I am sure aws will add more templates for different stacks and add more options of extensions - right now only extension is jira. Overall I see codestar evolving into the central core of developing, maintaining and deploying web apps for companies of all sizes.