Thanks for the feedback. I think there are many different types of magic. In my (biased) opinion I think the code generation we do is much more on the side of "

Thanks for the feedback. I think there are many different types of magic. In my (biased) opinion I think the code generation we do is much more on the side of "how to do this is obvious but annoying" rather than on the "I don't know what's happening" side. As for platform vs framework, my realization is that the traditional separation of frameworks/libraries from infrastructure means that it's almost impossible to improve many parts of the developer experience. The annoying parts of building backends and distributed systems come from the integration between the two. Setting up databases, secrets, and so on all require bridging that gap. Another big area that we're investing in is providing insights about how your application works at runtime, in production, directly at your fingertips when you're writing code. That's also not something you can do without integrating across that gap. As you pointed out in the edit, you can absolutely use Encore with your own cloud. We're working on making the deployment options much more flexible, but it's very much not another "let's make an infrastructure tool and then charge a premium on top of your cloud bill to manage it for you". Our business model is much more about aligning the incentives with the developers. We want to provide the best developer experience out there, and by charging for that as opposed to for infrastructure, we'll happily invest time to reduce our users' and customers' cloud bills, rather than just selling them more servers they don't really need.