While $40 per node might sound high, I think it is reasonable. I've worked on several products that are priced per node/server.
Per-node a difficult proposition -- the price of "per server" of something varies wildly, for example a t1.micro is roughly $9.50 a month, while a m4.4xlarge is $738. $40 on 9.50 seems extreme, but $40 on $738, and Atlas is only a 5% of the cost of your server.
But when your target customer is using high end instances, because they are creating more value for their company that way, a 5% upcharge for better management, can be justified. Mostly its because the team of ops/software engineers supporting production environment are going to cost more than the infrastructure anyways.
Additionally, any large deal (>1000 nodes) is gonna get negotiated anyways, so public pricing is kinda a wash.
That sounds more like Github's Enterprise product, which used to be a cliff of a few thousand bucks to fall off, where private Bitbucket is a $1/user/month. Maybe Github's pricing is less unusual now.
Per-node a difficult proposition -- the price of "per server" of something varies wildly, for example a t1.micro is roughly $9.50 a month, while a m4.4xlarge is $738. $40 on 9.50 seems extreme, but $40 on $738, and Atlas is only a 5% of the cost of your server.
But when your target customer is using high end instances, because they are creating more value for their company that way, a 5% upcharge for better management, can be justified. Mostly its because the team of ops/software engineers supporting production environment are going to cost more than the infrastructure anyways.
Additionally, any large deal (>1000 nodes) is gonna get negotiated anyways, so public pricing is kinda a wash.