> every "simple" form API service ends up being an oil tanker's worth of extras for having to justify being a paper-thin middleware that charges $10-$100 per mo

> every "simple" form API service ends up being an oil tanker's worth of extras for having to justify being a paper-thin middleware that charges $10-$100 per month. There is IMHO no viable market for a simple and cheap endpoint to save arbitrary data somewhere. If you're competing for people with little technical skills and need a simple and "dumb" service, they are captive to you and you can charge more, albeit in exchange for a more polished experience. You also need extra for the support costs and marketing etc. Targeting savy technical users is a losing proposition as they can build it for cheap enough (or reuse part of some other service provider's infra for that purpose), so you need to either be dirt cheap and that's no sustainable business, or be enterprise grade.