Your product looks neat but I think you're a few years too late, for most folks the Kubernetes platform is kind of a done deal. Couple of questions:
- Who is your target customer?
- How does it compare to OpenShift?
- Can you bring your own Kubernetes provider?
- You have nothing on your page that would make me trust you enough to give you the level of access you need to deploy. Are you pursuing any kind of partnerships with AWS or security audits?
I've built several massive-scale k8s systems for prior companies, all scaled using the underlying built-in primitives without extreme cost. Where do you get the improvement metrics from? For instance: "5x faster deployments"
> we currently price Nucleus around $35k/license, or about 10% of what it would cost you to build and maintain this yourself.
My suggestion is to price this at 20% of what it would cost a customer to run it independently. Perhaps you can make it to 10% for a limited time, but make it clear that the price will go up.
Why? Because:
1) You will need the price to go up.
2) You are positioning your product in a different (better?) way.
Note that things like Amazon RDS, etc, are at about 20-25% premium on top of the tools/softwares that they automate.
Your service is currently not as mature as RDS or others, and therefore it might be right to temporarily price it at 10%, but telling customers that it will eventually go up to 20%.
Looks interesting but at 35k per license I am not sure who you are targeting with this. Why would anyone use this compared to an okteto, a porter or a qovery? They are all priced in the sub 1k$ for essentially the same thing as far as I can tell.
PaaS .. it's a thing. Try it out before k8
Would really love some kind of pricing clarity. "Free Forever" with hard caps and "Custom" with negotiable caps doesn't really suit my needs, and I don't have any idea at all what to expect in terms of pricing "after free but before scale"
I'm confused, if someone is already using something like GKE or EKS, what do you do? Presuming people are using cloud build/code pipeline with their setups.
Giving admin access to a production AWS account is kinda scary, have you thought about curating the permissions to make them less permissive?
Congratulations on the launch! It looks neat. I wonder if you're deploying your own k8s on AWS or using AWS EKS. There is value in both, the former being able to move across cloud providers that don't have managed k8s (ie OpenShift, Cloud 66, ...) and the latter improving the DX on k8s (Convox, etc)
> At the bottom layer, we build and manage pre-configured Kubernetes clusters in your AWS accounts
Are you considering supporting other cloud providers? I'd personally always choose GCP for UX reasons, and I know there are many who choose Azure for MS reasons, or Alibaba for price/language/location reasons. I understand starting with AWS, just wondering if that's set in stone or if others are on the roadmap.
> We’ve never been big fans of the complicated pricing that most SaaS companies have so we sell Nucleus as a single annual license where you get everything. In full transparency, we currently price Nucleus around $35k/license, or about 10% of what it would cost you to build and maintain this yourself.
Having come from a startup with ~10-12 eng, in the middle of your target market, using K8S, and building tooling around it, this is substantially more than I think we'd have spent on it. Our Datadog bill for comparison was about half that per year, and our cloud bill was only ~6x that.
Our tooling for K8S was a few thousand lines of Terraform config, a few hundred line Python script, and some GitHub Actions. We spent a fair bit of engineering time on these, but not quite _that_ much. I would imagine Nucleus would have been a much nicer experience, but in reality would only have saved us ~20% of an engineer.
Maybe we weren't the target market! Just my thoughts though. Nice one with having one flat fee, I like that.