Occasionally I wonder whether the mantra to "solve your own problems" when looking for startup ideas is making things harder for ourselves.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, the least we can do is help lift others to that level.
If you were to build a business by implementing other people's cloud based product, be it an OAuth provider, MapBox, Embedly, Mailgun, AWS, etc... the barrier to profitability has been raised significantly. The raw costs remain low, but the costs for even a low number of users is quite high.
Maybe this is just the natural order though. It's never really been possible for the author of a lib to be able to charge, let alone charge on a recurring basis, before.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, the least we can do is help lift others to that level.
If you were to build a business by implementing other people's cloud based product, be it an OAuth provider, MapBox, Embedly, Mailgun, AWS, etc... the barrier to profitability has been raised significantly. The raw costs remain low, but the costs for even a low number of users is quite high.
Maybe this is just the natural order though. It's never really been possible for the author of a lib to be able to charge, let alone charge on a recurring basis, before.