Hey everyone! We’ve been working on this for the past few months and would love your feedback. :) You can use Manifold to buy and manage services like LogDNA, Mailgun, JawsDB, Bonsai, Scout, RedisGreen, and Memcachier. We’re starting small and adding services slowly but eventually we’d like to add many more services and a more integrated developer experience (e.g. a CLI). We are in a very early stage, so we hope it can be of some use to you.
We’d love any questions, advice, or thoughts you have on the direction we’re taking. One thing we’re really passionate about is making the sum greater than the parts with our services, and we’d really be curious about whether adding specific types of services or building integrations feels more useful in accomplishing this. Thanks!
Wow. I'm a bit surprised this isn't on the front page already.
This is such a cool service.
I've had the pleasure of knowing Peter (and a decent amount of his team) through their work @ Heroku over the years, and have always been a huge fan of their work. I had dinner with Peter and team a couple of weeks ago, and was 100% psyched to learn that manifold was going to be launching soon.
The problem they're trying to solve is that purchasing / managing subscription services for developers is tricky.
If you've ever used a platform like Heroku, it's extremely convenient to manage additional developer services because you can easily provision / upgrade / downgrade / remove them using a consistent interface (billing included). But the problem here is that you're bound to Heroku specifically.
I've often wanted to have a similar place to purchase all my services for apps (and companies) and have them bound to an independent identity: that way I can carry them with me wherever I might need them, and for whatever projects I might have.
The other important part of this here (which is where I hope Manifold will be particularly useful) is helping me (a developer) figure out what services to use.
The problem I have now is that when I work on applications, I'll need to provision Redis. So if I'm on Amazon I might use ElastiCache, or RedisGreen, or some other provider, but being able to sort through them, compare them, see reviews / rankings, etc., is all really important.
Anyhow: I'm really excited! Congrats on the launch!
Makes a lot of sense to just have everything managed and billed under one umbrella. What aspects do you see as the main benefits of the service? Do you have any services you are particularly interested in bringing on board?
I think _today_ the primary benefits are having a single identity and source of payment, essentially to simplify cloud service management. (though the value there will grow as we add more services) In the longer term, I'd love to figure out ways to help our partners complement/sell each other. Being able to have datastores automatically connect to your logging/monitoring, or having a really great CLI experience to connect and deploy pieces and bits in complementary ways.
As far as services go, we're pretty mixed of opinion right now. I think we have a great story for Ruby developers and think it would be great if we could cater to Node next. James on our team would like Go or Rust, Matt on our team would like to go serverless or maybe even GraphQL-related services (but he's a bit of a futurist).
I think it's going to be a balance of figuring out the right mix of services (i.e. do we target really specific developer communities and add the services that they are interested in) and building out our developer experience (e.g., a CLI tool, integrations with particular clouds, etc).
I think it's easy for us to say we'll do both, but since we're a small team I think it'll be a mix of selectively bringing in really well-loved services and figuring out what our customers want (if anything) from an integration perspective.
We’d love any questions, advice, or thoughts you have on the direction we’re taking. One thing we’re really passionate about is making the sum greater than the parts with our services, and we’d really be curious about whether adding specific types of services or building integrations feels more useful in accomplishing this. Thanks!