[bsimpson]

You've sponsored some very cool, state of the art tools. I've had friends work at Observable. I want you to succeed.

I tried to get our team to use Observable Notebooks a few years back. The researchers I work with are more comfortable in Python. Clearly that's one of the things you're trying to solve in this release. The other half of that uphill battle was discomfort posting code externally. In some ways you've also mitigated that in this release, but I wonder how sustainable it is.

Small teams eat for free by virtue of being small. Large organizations with trepidation or bureaucracy about using SaaS hosting will self host. That leaves the people in the middle: big enough to need to pay, but small enough to not have institutional problems with external hosting. Moreover, if the Observable bill ever gets much higher than the equivalent on Firebase et. al., the medium guys can self-host too.

How do you anticipate the paid side of the new business to work out? What's the hook (beyond thinking you guys are cool and trying to keep you in business) that gets someone to pay for Observable?