I totally agree on the "IT empowerment" perspective, but unfortunately the price model of these tools makes it hard for many IT departments to introduce them, a

I totally agree on the "IT empowerment" perspective, but unfortunately the price model of these tools makes it hard for many IT departments to introduce them, at least in established corporate environments, for internal use. Startup and public facing stuff is different of course but my experience is medium enterprise internal IT.. Per end user rather than per developer means they're far too expensive to introduce as a general IT toolbox item, they need to be part of a major strategic project where the $5-30/month per staff user has a hope of being justified. But that also often takes it outside the "IT Dept", which is often just "infrastructure and pc fleet" support, not development ( at least, that's my experience ). IT might do internal scripting and some service interface tooling, but business tooling and software is rarer, that's usually either dev teams or ERP teams. The ERP teams will already using ERP platform tooling, so that further narrows the market. I don't have a good solution for this, but it's always been the hurdle I've tripped on working for medium size enterprises. There would seem to be an opportunity for "open source platform, commercial training and support" here, but vendors seem to gravitate to per user head and cloud only for more immediate revenue and easier support., but again many enterprises still have huge internal only IT landscape's, because cloud is still expensive and the value often isn't seen in relatively static envs. It's possible this niche has been filled now too, it's been a while since I looked... Possibly they can be introduced on a "just those who need it" basis, but honestly that's just so bloody tiring for internal tools, not to mention demotivating as you can no longer build tools for "everyone or anyone", it's back to specific narrow business cases, not IT empowerment, but narrow business case also means your usually competing with cots tools or consultants.