Repl.it's current business model appears to be giving cloud services away for free, attracting lots of users, and using their high user counts to get more venture capital funding to spend on giving away cloud services for free.
Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them cloud services for free.
See, e.g., Koding, who went through this exact cycle a few years ago: they started out getting tons of users by giving away cloud servers for free so people could learn programming, then they tried to monetize by building out IDE features and cloud filesystems and orchestration, and pretty much no one bought them.
I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing
If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups.
Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.
Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them cloud services for free.
See, e.g., Koding, who went through this exact cycle a few years ago: they started out getting tons of users by giving away cloud servers for free so people could learn programming, then they tried to monetize by building out IDE features and cloud filesystems and orchestration, and pretty much no one bought them.