Clojurians Log v2

I can’t really put any effort into learning a library that is not FOSS, doing so would be like asking for a rug pull.

You got a bit of a catch-22 going on with this license: • Entrepreneurial devs cannot build their new business ideas with Electric because our revenue is zero. A non FOSS license is a non-starter. • Existing businesses that actually have a revenue already got their own tools, thus they do not need Electric.

Also the “200k revenue” grace period for bootstrappers is precarious, that is less than a single SDE salary after two years. You are likely thinking that all businesses are SaaS tools too, many businesses have tiny margins at large revenues and their UI is just a tiny aspect of their company.

Looks a lot like “Once we see revenue, we will charge you as much as possible”, good luck finding customers.

Also a FOSS tool would never rely on a non-FOSS foundation. FYI: > 1. Visual tool builders and FOSS library makers: come collaborate with us so we can together demonstrate compelling results that are far beyond the abstraction ceiling of today.

Just do the math: A single dev making 100k per year is making about 6k net income per month (and a solo dev bootstrapping a business is already rare enough). You would be asking this dev to surrender an entire month of income just to use Electric on their project.

That is like asking for every user of your tool to spend 4 weeks every year working for you 😄

So unless you find the top tier of Clojure shops and sell them on your tool… the rest of us are passionate about Clojure because we like it, not because it makes us money (to make money we pick Java or C#). We are either employees at a company the picks the tools for us (not going to pick Electric), or freelancers and entrepreneurs with the ability to pick our own tools, and also with really tight margins (also not going to pick paid tools when free ones do as good a job or better).

So, clearly I am not your audience, as such, you can take everything with a grain of salt, because it seems that your audience is the one that has VC money. Therefore this is an Enterprise product (evidenced by the focus on Enterprise lincense), like Oracle DB and others of its ilk (the kind of software that “phones home” and deals with lawyers if someone is not paying the fee).

Oh thanks for understanding, and likewise, it is understandable to prioritize project survival. I am just offering my “data-point” as a solo developer that is constantly building on new tech and looking to build my own business, I do not rely on any business connections that would grant me a large contract, so I am literally starting from revenue 0 and trying to get to my first hundred dollar MRR. I might also be very naive in that, I don’t know how many devs actually start a business from zero, without any connections to a large contract; this is just my data point: building many projects that net zero revenue, build them on highly productive tech so that I can output many projects to see if any one of them do any good, and I host everything on a cheap k8s instance so that I don’t have to pay for each individual project to some cloud provider.

Godspeed blob-wave

Hi, you are essentially correct about the catch-22, and you're 100% right, Electric is not a good business, it is a pretty poor business for all the reasons you list. Nonetheless it is a business, and this business is what allows the project to continue to exist. Without this there is no project. I am deeply saddened that it means so many people won't be able to take advantage of our technology in its current state 😞 but unfortunately we have had to make our peace with that so that we can continue to exist

Your market analysis is spot on as well - there are about 15 companies that matter in our current market, which is very bad for us 🙂

Anyway the google doc at the top of this thread explains what we're actually trying to do to get out of this trap, we do believe this situation is temporary

we only actually have an enterprise license right now, we haven't spent the lawyer money yet to write a EULA for individuals

Could there be a more gradual adoption path with two versions, a reduced version that only does differential datasync, and a full version that also distributes computation across client/server boundaries? The first one would be much more approachable, perhaps even open source, and is also a foot in the door for the full version at a higher premium?

We are 100.0000% focused on project survival, everything else is secondary until our core development costs are completely derisked. We are not far from that milestone

Understood. All the best to you all!