Cloudcraft is used by a tons of AWS consultants. I think that's the disconnect seeing a lot of comments here, people spending less than $ thousands/year on AWS just aren't their target customers. Meanwhile, Cloudcraft is minting money.
If it wasn't $50/month, they'd have made tons of money from me without using it. But I had it for a few months and simply canceled. You can't have a service for $49 when a whole server is $5 nowadays and GitHub is $7/month. Plus, when you can do it with code like with this [0] too, why use a GUI/WUI?
The long tail of AWS customers is pretty rocky and is a revenue risk as well. Why deal with folks that can come and go so quickly when stable, sustainable revenue is what matters more for a growing company? Most AWS consultants and devopsy / SRE types IME are hired around the lower to mid 5 figure monthly spend mark depending upon growth to warrant their cost and at that point $50 / mo is hardly even mentioned. Heck, even hiring a consultant instead of hiring engineers with experience in the first place is a bit of an old school thing and implies legacy or not a start-up kind of businesses (lift and shifts, that is).
Those cloud users can have the same benefit by spending a fraction of the price. That's the point. The question you're trying to ask is whether the added value being promised justifies a price tag that's 10x higher than the ones offered by established services.
If they reduce price to $10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue, as there are some variable costs, to reach same profit they'll need even more customers. Most of these new customers wouldn't be power users so they'll have a diverse set of expectations / requirements from the software.
Not sure about the no. $50 but it may be a conscious and valid choice.
> If they reduce price to $10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue
This assertion could only start to make any sense if you believe that the law of supply and demand doesn't exist, and that economies of scale don't apply.
Meanwhile, I am a paying customer of cloud providers eventhough I don't use them just because they are affordable. This service expects that people like me spend 600€/year when I can have the same exact service somewhere else for 60€/year.
Well the assertion is just a mathematical fact, there is a disagreement on the demand curve.
Maybe the company isn’t targeting anyone who is a paying customer of cloud providers, and is targeting full time cloud architects who need more than the other products offerings.
It really isn't. You're somehow assuming that the law of supply and demand doesn't exist. As the premise is blatantly wrong then this mistake renders all subsequent assertions mute.
> Maybe the company isn’t targeting anyone
Irrelevant. The initial assertion was that higher prices somehow had no inpact in demand and thus revenue would be proportional. This assertion is blatantly wrong. The fact is that lower prices increase demand, and increased demand enables economies of scale, which lead to higher revenue. Conversely, higher prices lower demand, etc etc. Market segmentation is tangential to this point.
The assertion was "$10/m they'll need 5x customers to reach same revenue"
Revenue = Price * Quantity Sold (i.e. customers in this context).
Let x = Quantity Sold, and y = revenue
$50 * x = y
$10 = $50/5
$50/5 * x = y/5
$10 * 5x = y
OP stated a fact, and you said it was incorrect. I'm just trying to say the disagreement is actually about how elastic the price is (i.e. a change of x% in price results in a y% change in the number of customers).
Draw.io does everything I need for free, and is about 80% "good enough" in terms of output quality. I would love to use this tool for the aesthetic benefits, but would struggle to justify even $10 for the sake of ~1 diagram per month.
I really enjoy using this product for creating architecture diagrams! I would never use it to creat budgets though. I hope it expands to other clouds and frameworks and then I would pay for it over lucidchart.
I've enjoyed playing around with this product, but I wish there was a tier between free and pro that added infinite drawing without such a steep price. I'm not really interested in the sync stuff, but would happily pay a little to add infinite grid to the features otherwise included in the free tier.
Hashicorp’s hosted Terraform service has cost estimation built in nowadays and you can setup Sentinel rules to keep people from deploying infrastructure changes that are beyond a certain cost ceiling (or below)
Thank you for telling me about that, I didn't know. However, I'm most interested in a product able to bridge my statefiles into coherent visual representations of state, either within a single statefile or more importantly across several. The cost aspect seems a secondary concern.
tl;dr: Creating dynamic visual layouts from terraform state would be worth >= 50USD/mo to me.
