[lacker]

The difference is, Meteor won't have the volume of Digital Ocean or AWS, so they can't run on low margins. They need a high-margin pricing model in order to survive. The danger here is that high-margin pricing provides a high incentive for the largest customers to move to AWS, so they'll have to be sure to provide enough value to keep the big folks.

[chm]

I think the difference in number of users is partly due to the asking price. I wouldn't use DO if they charged 50$ a month for a VPS to use for mocking up apps. For my use case, 5$-10$ a month is the most I want to pay in such early stages of development.

500$ a month is cheap when you have revenues. But when bootstrapping an app, it's simply out of the question.