Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adrienjt 2540 days ago
It's a hard sell. Another risk is that, after I've invested a lot in Dark, you increase your prices, and I can't switch because I'm dependent on your product. The switching cost would be rewriting my entire code base (my biggest investment).

I'd like to have the option to reuse my code to mitigate those risks. Two possibilities: a) If the Dark IDE and infrastructure were compatible with a common language, I could use "regular" build and deploy tools if I wanted (I'd weigh the pros and cons vs. your price increase), or b) if the Dark infrastructure had an open source API (not necessarily an open source implementation, but like what SQL is for databases, or the S3 API for object storage), I could implement my own alternative infrastructure or shop for one.

(a) seems difficult technically and (b) means risking commoditization on your end.

1 comments

> Another risk is that, after I've invested a lot in Dark, you increase your prices, and I can't switch because I'm dependent on your product. The switching cost would be rewriting my entire code base (my biggest investment).

This would also kill the company.

We are actually looking at ways to mitigate this risk, as we do agree that being locked in is a real risk. We also have to provide sustainability to the business, as Dark failing as a business isn't helpful for our customers either. We're thinking about this, but nothing concrete yet.