[Gormo]

Have you thought of building an affordable small-scale product for home labs and maybe SMBs? Even if that line didn't turn a profit, it could function as a loss leader in getting engineers and consultants familiar with Oxide, and an opportunity to experiment with (and ultimately evangelize) your tech stack without needing to already have an enterprise-scale use case.

[steveklabnik]

In general, we love the love we get from homelab folks, but the issue is that the current thesis of our designs is "take advantage of the scale of building at the full-rack level."

We really can't afford to do loss leaders before we have more of a business. It's already difficult enough to build a company like this, and that's with making money off of sales. I fully agree that in general, this idea completely makes sense, but you can only really employ it once you have a business to be able to absorb those losses. Right now, building and selling the current product takes up 110% of our time.

[Gormo]

I respect that, and I hope you get to that point! As a tech leader in a organization that currently falls short of the scale we'd need to justify Oxide products, I'm hoping that day comes soon.

We're getting to the point where people are building large clusters of Raspberry Pis and the like for hobbyist projects, so I hope that within a few years, the concept of "full-rack level" can encompass hardware with hundreds of nodes small and cheap enough to be packed into a "rack" that still fits under a desk and sells for a couple grand.

In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have to settle for exploring your code and listening to your podcast!