Yeah, it's really easy to trivialize SaaS costs if you don't run a SaaS (almost as easy as underestimating the size of a million-line code base by looking at the file size of part of its compiled output).stam wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 12:11 pmAnd yet:richmond62 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 8:33 amRead it and, erm, cough:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/ ... on_policy/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/ ... on_policy/
A terabyte here and a terabyte there and pretty soon you're talking about real storage costs.
Fortunately for GitHub, although there's no indication it's ever been profitable or will be any time soon, profitability doesn't matter much with publicly-traded companies in today's speculation-driven markets .
Born into a series of ever-larger piles of private investment (Andreesen Horowitz followed by Sequoia Capital, possibly others), in 2018 Microsoft paid nearly 30 times annualized recurring revenue to acquire it.
GitLab isn't immune to the allure of speculation money either. Their NASDAQ launch last year pulled in twice what MS paid for GitHub. Though the hiccup from the recent storage concern brought a dip, their adjusted policy you linked to rebounded their price.
Now that the speculation phase of both unprofitable companies has reached the pinnacle of modern legal Ponzi schemes we call the stock market (link to the O'Reilly article again because it's really worth reading), what will they do to raise perceived value going forward?
Gitlab's gambit is based on lower comparative overhead. Being open source, they have a multiple of the developers GitHub can afford payroll for.
Under Microsoft, GitHub has been experimenting with new premium options, like the intriguingly legally-ambiguous CoPilot "AI" software.
Bringing this around to LiveCode app development:
For those of us still living in what O'Reilly calls the "operational economy", keeping tabs on freemium overhead remains useful.
It's tempting to consider freemium if only because roughly 95% of mobile apps are free to download .
But consider the size of the companies behind those apps. On average people use only about 30 apps a month, while the app stores offer about two million apps each. Most of the money in the app space goes to a relative handful of very large companies, well capitalized to afford millions of lookie-loos eating up ever more system resources.
A brief summary of pros cons of freemium models is here.
And free trials can be a good alternative, still expensive but at least the cost-per-prospect is contained.