[danpalmer]

> At the bottom layer, we build and manage pre-configured Kubernetes clusters in your AWS accounts

Are you considering supporting other cloud providers? I'd personally always choose GCP for UX reasons, and I know there are many who choose Azure for MS reasons, or Alibaba for price/language/location reasons. I understand starting with AWS, just wondering if that's set in stone or if others are on the roadmap.

> We’ve never been big fans of the complicated pricing that most SaaS companies have so we sell Nucleus as a single annual license where you get everything. In full transparency, we currently price Nucleus around $35k/license, or about 10% of what it would cost you to build and maintain this yourself.

Having come from a startup with ~10-12 eng, in the middle of your target market, using K8S, and building tooling around it, this is substantially more than I think we'd have spent on it. Our Datadog bill for comparison was about half that per year, and our cloud bill was only ~6x that.

Our tooling for K8S was a few thousand lines of Terraform config, a few hundred line Python script, and some GitHub Actions. We spent a fair bit of engineering time on these, but not quite _that_ much. I would imagine Nucleus would have been a much nicer experience, but in reality would only have saved us ~20% of an engineer.

Maybe we weren't the target market! Just my thoughts though. Nice one with having one flat fee, I like that.

[nickzelei]

> Are you considering supporting other cloud providers? I'd personally always choose GCP for UX reasons, and I know there are many who choose Azure for MS reasons, or Alibaba for price/language/location reasons. I understand starting with AWS, just wondering if that's set in stone or if others are on the roadmap.

We are definitely considering other cloud providers. I'm currently working on adding GKE support. GCP's UX is top-notch in my own experience and is a breath of fresh air when compared to AWS. We've also found a lot of startups are choosing GCP over AWS these days. This at least has been the case for many prospects we've spoken to.

[simonebrunozzi]

I suggest the founders to focus ONLY on AWS, for the time being.

What's AWS market share? Analysts say 50%, and MS at 30-35%, and GCP at 10-15%. They're wrong. The target for this service is young startups, and in that segment, AWS is still at ~90% market share.

Ignore GCP and Azure for now. Focus on AWS.

Disclaimer: I was at AWS 2008-2014, and met with thousands of startups (I am not exaggerating). Since then I kept tabs on the market. I might be wrong, but I suspect I wouldn't be by much.

[evisdrenova]

Thanks for the feedback! We're still an early company and working through the right pricing - we have some customers who pay less than that and some who pay more. Goal is to get happy customers and being an early stage company we have flexibility on it (the flat pricing makes that much easier).

[danpalmer]

I always find pricing in terms of developer time saved to be a tough sell, because different companies have different opportunity costs, value the product differently, pay differently, and different engineers have different productivity. That's a lot of axes to reason about. Most tools boil down to this eventually, but some are obviously things you'd never build internally (for a given size of company), whereas some are incremental improvements over what you might already be doing. I think Nucleus is in the latter category for many which makes this harder.

Have you considered things like per-region, per-host, per-cluster, per-active developer etc?

[intelVISA]

It's a deliberately misleading metric overall imo as it frames the value prop on your developers rather than the product.

Plus, if the argument is to hold and we assume your 'bad' devs can't somehow reinvent K8s in a week and have to buy into this managed one -- surely they're going to waste an equal amount of hours learning and breaking it?

Lunacy!!

[evisdrenova]

We definitely have considered those axes to price against but so far haven't adopted them because we deploy nucleus into your account and its honestly felt a little strange to us to charge a company by region, host, cluster etc. when ultimately you're paying the infra bill.

Not to say that we won't change our packaging and pricing down the line (we certainly will) but for now we're trying to make it easy to adopt without having to think across so many pricing axes. But we've seen pricing questions a few times in this thread - so maybe it's worth evaluating sooner rather than later.