Thank you! The previous Dart backend attempts were predating Flutter, so the conditions are very different now. Serverpod is also a funded company, and not a side or hobby project like earlier Dart servers.
The main plan is to provide hosting for Serverpod. It's still an open-source project, so you can always host it yourself or on the cloud platform of your choice.
I have not seen any niche companies having success with that business model
Our own surveys show, that enterprise users want to host on a platform of their choice. They are not too eager to switch providers and are more unlikely to use your software if it doesn’t run on AWS
Knowing that, if you want to capture enterprise users, you should offer a managed version of your product on AWS or GCP
The original creator of Flutter actually left Google rather recently and is in the process of building a Dart server project as his next thing. It’s not even at alpha stage yet however it’s VERY new https://github.com/shorebirdtech
Working for Google is awesome in many ways and the people at the Flutter team at the time I worked there were nothing less than outstanding.
For me personally, working at Google wasn't my first choice as I ended up there when the startup I worked at before was acquired. I just felt done with the whole Silicon Valley thing and ended up moving back to Sweden. If I'd pick one big company to work for, it would probably be Google.