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Nice to see! How do they plan to monetize? I either became blind or missed it somehow. The article does say how they DON'T plan on monetize: "Rest assured
by franciscop 6y ago
Nice to see! How do they plan to monetize? I either became blind or missed it somehow. The article does say how they DON'T plan on monetize:
"Rest assured that Deno will remain MIT licensed. For Deno to grow and be maximally useful, it must remain permissively free. We don’t believe the “open core” business model is right for a programming platform like Deno."
There are some hints though:
"If you watch our conference talks, you will find we've been hinting at commercial applications of this infrastructure for years. We are bullish about the technology stack we've built and intend to pursue those commercial applications ourselves. Our business will build on the open source project, not attempt to monetize it directly."
Does anyone have some insight into those? I haven't watch any Deno talk (maybe one actually?) so it feel a bit strange to make people watch technical talks to find hints of the monetization strategy.
PS, if I was a rich investor I'd throw money at this project even as a donation, so no complain at all, but I'm very curious on the monetization plan.
- xiaq 6y agoSounds to me that they will build some sort of hosted service or maybe PaaS based on the Deno runtime (like AppEngine or AWS lambda), but yeah it's pretty vague.
- DyingAdonis 6y agoLooks like CDN with Serverless edge functions. https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy
- throwaway99x99 6y ago> Sounds to me that they will build some sort of hosted service or maybe PaaS based on the Deno runtime (like AppEngine or AWS lambda) or like Joyent
- skrebbel 6y agoHow did Joyent manage to turn Nodejs into money though? I mean weren't they mostly selling unix services?
- colesantiago 6y agolooks like a crowded space. vc's will issue course correction very soon. looks like a repeat of docker.
- Freknf 6y agoIn other words, capitalise on the decreasing quality of software engineers by offering services to them at a high price because they don't have the ability to make any of these services themselves.
- sbarre 6y agoThis is a rather naive take I think.. There's a semi-joke that goes "all companies are software companies now" but there is a lot of truth to that.. It comes to down where a company wants to put its effort. Do you want to own/operate/maintain all your infrastructure and services (and all the challenges that come with retaining scarce talent that is capable of that work), requiring you to substantially invest in an area that is not core to your business? Or do you want to spend that money (and let's be real, less money too) to pay a trusted third party provider who will do a better job than you would anyways, because that's their area of expertise? Then you can focus your (likely limited) resources on delivering value to your business instead.
- brundolf 6y agoHeroku doesn't (yet) officially support Deno. That's the main reason I don't use Deno for my personal site. So I'd say there's a market there.
- not_knuth 6y agoGlad to see I'm not the only one having a hard time figuring out just how they intend to make money. My best guess was that they will offer a tailored Deno to companies that want to embed it (my comment about it is swimming somewhere here). Other than that, there is the following vague statement at the end of the post: > The Deno company hopes to enable the millions of web programmers out there to maximally leverage their craft in other domains.
- franciscop 6y agoAh I read that statement in the end like it'll enable front-end devs to also write back-end code, like Node.js but better (APIs follow more the browser than in Node.js), but I didn't think it'd be related to the monetization?
- timqian 6y agoI guess the "commercial applications" should be https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy
- srmarm 6y agoLooks like https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy will be a managed service - the implication seems to be that the default option will be to use their CDN to run code with an option to DIY if you prefer.
- paxys 6y agoI'll be very surprised if "quick and easy hosting" is still a viable business model, considering how crowded the space is by now.
- chrisco255 6y agoEh, Vercel pulled it off rather well with Next.js. Given that Guillermo Rauch is an investor in Deno, I wouldn't be surprised if they partnered in some way.
- sneak 6y agoQuick, easy, and cheap hosting will always be a viable model, for varying definitions of cheap.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoHow does this business model survive Amazon AWS making a blog post, "Here's a template to run your deno code on Lambda!"? They'll never beat AWS on costs in the long term. They can burn VC cash to stay afloat and try I guess.
- minxomat 6y agoThey compete much more with Cloudflare Workers, not Lambda. So much so that Deno Deploy is worker API compatible
- ignoramous 6y agoWorkers is now a much capable platform. It supports eventual KV storage, caching large files, longer runtimes (30m+), WebSockets, WASM-executables, and distributed mail-boxes àla Erlang. Lambda integrates with existing AWS services, whilst Cloudflare invents newer services to go along with the serverless-first paradigm. Different strategies but they do compete with each other.
- bob33212 6y agoAny of the big 10 tech companies wouldn't mind owning this if it becomes the standard way of developing back end JS. It gives them influence and the ability to lock out competitors.
- nerdponx 6y agoThis is probably a stupid question, but is AGPL/commercial dual-licensing a viable option for something like this? Instead of relying on goodwill donations & maybe assigning 1-2 devs from major corporations, just explicitly charge them money if they refuse to ship source code to end-users.
- dangoor 6y agoMany companies would just never touch an AGPL package, and while there are other languages out there with commercial licenses (e.g. Delphi), those are not nearly as mainstream as the open & freely available ones. Deno is competing against Node.js, which is MIT-licensed. Deno is arguably better, but it would have to be _so much better_ to get people to even give it a second look if it was commercial.
- threatofrain 6y agoUnfortunately Deno gave up on their most unique differentiator, the TS [runtime].
- lucacasonato 6y agoNo we didn't?! Where did you get this info from? Deno is made to work with TypeScript out of the box. The Deno Standard Library is written in TypeScript: https://deno.land/std https://deno.land/std. Most userland modules are TypeScript too.
- threatofrain 6y agoWasn't a TypeScript runtime the original Deno selling point? Didn't the project have to pivot away from that?
- Soremwar 6y agoThey had to remove it from the Deno build process so Deno internals didn't need a compiler. However TypeScript support remains untouched and receives constant updates
- luma 6y agoI know this isn't the SV-approach to things but maybe they intend to offer consulting services for those looking for some expertise with the ecosystem, bill hours, and retire in their 50s as millionaires instead of billionaires. This might be surprising, but not everyone is looking to be a unicorn.
- fasicle 6y agoThe article says they "raised 4.9 million dollars of seed capital" so I expect their investors will want a decent return over the next few years.