[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