[mushufasa]

I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku.

At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out.

What's yours?

[mushufasa]

To wit, I ask because:

1. key to a buying decision: I see the documentation for Eject and it looks good, though like any product you'll only able to support it over time if it makes business sense for you

2. I'm interested in this challenge generally cross-industry for companies that sell 'get off the ground' services to startups, on a high margin usage-based model. It's a business model with a constant sword of Damocles, because if your customers do well they would have to leave.

AFAIK the only real solutions

- technical lock-in, either by making it concretely hard or "soft" hard (introduce a whole training regime for employees based on your systems with idiosyncratic concepts and terminologies, so the human skills aren't transferrable)

- build out a kitchen sink featureset including niche products specific to enterprises (a lot of GRC stuff), so they'll keep paying you high margins at scale (this is AWS's journey.)

- invest/take equity in your customers (this is only a partial solution but if they leave at least you'll capture some upside. See: Peak6/Apex & Robinhood)

- capping your fees to a flat upper rate (this will destroy your own expected customer LTV though you keep the customer)

- lock-in long multiyear contracts (this is also a partial solution)

- become an IP troll (e.g. oracle badgering it's legacy customers)

- deliver revenue or addressable markets to your customers that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get (no iOS developers choose it *because of* Xcode or Swift; it's the marketplace)

[jusrhee]

I'd like to reframe this a bit (Porter co-founder btw). The way we see it, the core value of many PaaS solutions is the reduction of DevOps overhead by allowing teams to focus engineering resources on product and not generic infra maintenance tasks.

Most of our existing users are companies that are already using Porter in their own AWS/GCP/Azure because they want to reduce time spent on cloud management as they continue to grow. Companies like Heroku exclusively provide this service in a hosted cloud environment where they also resell the underlying infrastructure to you (similar to Porter Cloud), but we want to be flexible in delivering the same value on any cloud provider.

If we're doing our job, we will continue to automate enough generic DevOps work where Porter is delivering value even as you scale in your own cloud. We have a good number of late-stage startups (and even some public companies) that have DevOps teams in place using us precisely this way to handle core parts of their infra and application lifecycle management.

Porter Cloud is intended as a way to "get off the ground," but our staying value lies in continuing to reduce the same DevOps overhead even once you're running in your own cloud account

[theturtletalks]

They charge for managing the kubernetes instance that’s running on your infrastructure. What’s cool is that you can stop using Porter once everything on AWS/Azure/GCP is set-up and you’re not locked in. You just have to manage the cluster yourself.

[sungrokshim]

yup exactly. we also offer volume discounts on Porter as you scale so the cost grows logarithmically as opposed to exponentially. Our philosophy is that we should win on merit not inertia. If the customer doesn't continue to see value, you can offboard and start managing devops on your own.

[mushufasa]

I meant: what's the business model for Eject specifically? Why make it easy for customers to leave (aside from pre-empting buying-decision concerns)

[presentation]

Isn’t it that they expect it increases the likelihood people would choose to use Porter in the first place? The problem being that the biggest clients are probably the most valuable and having this makes them more likely to churn.

[mst]

Unless I've misunderstood entirely, Eject can move you from Porter Cloud to "you bring the cloud account but some/most things are still managed through your Porter setup."