Cloud Hosting Economics

It's almost certainly about hosting costs, not user facing value.

You're paying for someone elses profit monthly with the cloud.It has to cost more.

Most likely they want cloud cloud providers (Google, AWS, and MS) to pay for selling this as a service.

"Tech companies don't charge based on marginal cost. They charge based on marginal cost" ??

Companies like slicehost make their money on the customers that do not use their servers.

If you're not giving them revenue but are using their network and compute, isn't this working as intended?

Makes economic sense for cloud providers that is. For users, developers, content creators, and all others, not so much.

Likely because profit-per-user falls off a cliff very rapidly under $10, due to increased support and admin costs and ballooning storage requirement. They would rather make $12.50 from 1 user than $0.50 from 25 users. Other players have different requirements (most of the value they get is into keeping people locked in their ecosystems).

What's the profit motive? Even at $6 a pop the server expenses have to be recouped.

There are no paid repo's, all repo's are free. The costs are very limited (low single digit thousands). We pay for it with money we get from on-premises subscribers. We think this will be like email, the storage costs can be offset with other income. Instead of advertising we're thinking about offering a marketplace (similar to what Heroku does). But that is a long term plan, for the next few years we're focussed on growing it.