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Comments
Soo expensive. Never ever. You talk about simplicity of your product but it's simply too expensive (the only simplicity I see in that). Also, I don't see much more value in this simplicity than in solusvm.
10 nodes with 512GB RAM and 32 Cores each would make $61.440 on software expenses for a year. Why not develop a panel yourself for this price and be safe of price hikes.
Haha $1 per GB RAM per month is actually more than my operating costs (incl. IP). Would have to increase my products price by at least 110%. This was more ridiculous than the cPanels price increase.
I'm out and actually quite certain that I won't get the pleasure to have a server of one of the providers here which is managed by cloud.net. Disappointing but customers will be happy because no change is in the pipeline.
Tldr; Great product. Wrong market place (providers and end users alike).
wow - calm down cowboy. If you do not like it then do not buy it
It's as easy as that. 
You do not like SaaS, you do not like OnApp, you do not like cloud.net and you do not like our pricing. We get it, chill
This is still very much a closed beta - point here is to take feedback on both products and pricing. SO many of you have already setup clouds and tried it out, qutie a few of you have written to me personally with input. I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks!
And input on pricing is also pretty clear - thanks for that as well! We will take another look, but as @Francisco said, we do have a business to run...
Even if pricing does not end up in a place where LET can work with us, we have been getting valuable 1:1 feedback on the product and the new SaaS strategy. So I am happy either way.
We do have some large customers that hang out here at LET that are paying the core-based OnApp pricing, perhaps we will get even more trying out this new model. Let's see
Either way @MikePT - I've been totally transparent throughout this thread, not trying to pull a 'stunt' on anyone.
Thanks for your feedback and good luck in your future ventures
I've been an avid follower of yours and your products, FYI, and I wish you the best luck as well Ditlev!
I was so excited, until I read "SaaS".
After cPanel and his stupid pricing policy, we got SolusIO, and now Cloud.net.
Arf... I'm so disappointed. The only real "alternative" which seems modern and attractive is @fleio...
But, for some companies, OpenStack seems to be complex to manage.
WebPros isn't offering a reliable and attractive, OnApp too, so only @virtualizor and @fleio are remaining.
LET providers, want something cheap, attractive, and even if we don't have a lot of complex features!
Things will never be cheap enough, good enough, robust enough, easy enough, exclusive enough, fast enough, drama inducing enough for the LET crowd. No sense marketing to people full of nonsense.
Actually @DataGizmos I know this is the impression one is left with after going through this thread. Though, there is a large less vocal minority (or perhaps even majority) that have given me really valuable feedback and good ideas to how to make this work for the 'hosting' end of the scene. It will never work for a $1/mo/vm offering, but I am confident we can find a way to make cloud.net attractive to a lot of LET providers.
D
LET providers don't need Load-Balancer, autoscaling, VXLAN/VPC, CDN? or this kind of features. We're not talking about marketing here.
We're not a LET provider, not even close, but it's still very expensive indeed for us.
I'm not entering my card, anyone got screenshots of the panel?
LET providers only ask for simple and reliable software to manage nodes. Divide them into chunks and sell. That's it. SolusVM had that formula until original dev exit the market.
This offer is like a joke in LET market. Billed for RAM. Prepay. Rudimentary features. No.
there are a bunch of videos here: https://cloud.net/guides/
D
Thanks
@ditlev
So my feedback to you on this is that the panel looks nice, updated version of OnApp. I'm sure it runs beautifully and that all features work given your track history in the industry but I share the same reservations as other people in this thread. A $50 per month account fee is pretty standard I'd say, for a good panel people will pay that. The problem is $1 per GB of memory, most nodes these days are being deployed with a lot of memory, 128-256GB I'd say and it can become really expensive very fast at a per GB rate ($128-$256 per node).
You seem to have missed the mark a bit, this is definitely for the upper class market but not TOO expensive like $5k/m OnApp. This needs to be priced accordingly, say $50 per node per month tops, regardless of resources. Maybe even do less pricing for nodes with less resources if you want but I'd be capping it at a certain amount so it is feasible for low-end use, which is what you have been preaching in this thread since the start, offering a product to the low-end market which OnApp has forgotten about for years.
Thanks for your feedback. It's early days, but we have much more to come and we will pursue the SaaS strategy aggresively. Your price input is in line with others, and there will be changes. It's too early to go into details, but the final public beta launch will not be with the prices listed on the website today.
Thanks again for taking a look at it, albeit only on videos. Feel free to ping me more feedback directly at [email protected]
Just on that last note, OnApp pricing has been pretty much the same for the last +10 years. We have incrased the minimum monthly fee, but the unit price has been fixed around $10/core for years and years.
D
Congrats on the new offering. A few ideas here.
1) This is a great product, for certain markets. I think this is for instance something I could see me recommending and getting a lot of startup to mid sized (non-hosting) companies I deal with onto as a very affordable solution to their cloud scale needs. It hits that market on features, price, scalability and reliability while also bridging a hard to fill scenario, cloud-to-prem. That is a killer function.
2) I really have to commend the price for the offering. That said, I think you have missed your product market fit specifically with the LET provider crowd. Not just by a little, but by a lot. I would suggest this great product will never overcome the arguments we see presented here. The margin argument just cant be shifted to meet at a point that is profitable in this segment in the context of per gb ram licensing model. Well at least not at $1/GB/Mo
3) You have something here! I want you to keep your chin up
you have created something awesome. It is not trivial AT ALL. However, you have a different customer persona that is wildly lucrative to target. YOU ARE NOW LIKE DIGITAL OCEAN/VULTR but with killer features they either dont offer or are just starting to offer.
4) You have to own that the initial reveal/demonstration of this product is sub-par. You should not have gone live with the "credit card demo or bust" appeal to convey the product offering. There is 0 argument you can make that you could not have created a very effective way to demonstrate the ui/prices/features/nodes/differentiators WITHOUT giving people access to spin up live instances or access live functionality.
Pricing examples done right
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
https://www.linode.com/pricing/
https://www.vultr.com/products/
Features examples done right
https://www.linode.com/products/dedicated-cpu/
https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
I am a GPM by trade, not a hosting company. I lurk here for info on a few specific platforms I use. If an APM brought me this and asked to launch it, I would say NO and go over exactly why and keep an eye on them. This is the level of what has happened here. You need to remediate what is going on in your marketing/product departments and ask why this happened like this. As a business owner, unless you are the unreasonable sort who forces top down thinking on everything, you should be concerned at the basic miss on the product market fit. If you are the aforementioned personality type, well.....
You missed the several times videos were mentioned so that people could get a demo without credit card? Preventing abuse is a very valid point to require credit cards. Whenever I hear people whine about credit card requirements like that, I think "shitty customer, do.not.want".
Defensive much? No I did not miss the videos. I also saw the videos on your (Do you work with/for them?) website initially when I got the email and clicked over. Are you trying to tell me some screenshare videos are the same as the well developed, well implemented, very informative examples I gave?
You are mistaken also in assuming I said people should have not have to give a credit card to gain access to live features. I said nothing of the sort. Please read with more clarity before castigating someone as a "shitty customer" based on your poor reading comprehension. Also what company do you work for/own so I can stay away from you in the future?
On my website? What? You certainly didn't acknowledge the videos and completely ignored it. It's a direct response to your "advice". You're arguing against actual hands on use and hands off. Jesus Christ. Shitty customer confirmed.
Are you stupid? "You should not have gone live with the "credit card demo or bust" appeal to convey the product offering." Instead, he needs to spend a bunch of resources creating a useless demo with no long-term value, that's fucking stupid. I think you clearly have reading comprehension issues.
Before you said something about my website and now asking who I work for. Reading comprehension problem confirmed. FYI, not in hosting industry.
@TimboJones
Wow. You are hostile. I take it you dont work for them, that is good for them.
I would imagine you are unemployable with an temper like that. Hey but man up and let me know what website or product you own that I should avoid.
"to convey the product offering." um you dont understand or have very poor comprehension of what these words mean.
"spend a bunch of resources creating a useless demo with no long-term value" Oh Dear. Pricing pages and features pages are useless? Those are the second and third most visited pages on a website before a customer converts usually. Bunch or resources? You can make one in under a week.
I wont respond again, you have no product sense, marketing understanding and are likely just a troll trying to derail this topic.
I just signed up for the trial/invite. Initially it said I could deploy it to my own infrastructure, but after logging in that is nowhere to be seen.
Nice featureset. Best wishes wish your product. No idea wtf is going on in this thread with people biting each others' heads off.
So now the pricing will change. We need to know the final pricing so we can even judge if it's a right fit and worth the testing. I am still insisting on this. If I didn't like you, contrary to what you have said, I wouldn't insist further.
I actually spent some time exploring the trial. Time is money.
Count me in for $20/month minimum for any provider who starts selling services off of it.
I miss my OnApp Federation access - and easy access to spin up VMs on @Clouvider, and like 50 other providers.
... you might just have to deal with a few DNS amplification attacks when I forget to lock things down on occasion. Sorry Dom!
Thank you!
Yes, this could obviously be a real easy way to deploy private clouds to someone in need for an instant nice and easy platform to be setup. Though, we have hope it can be so much more
I agree, that our current pricing will not work for a lot of LET, it will work for some though. However, we are coming out with new plans that hopefully with help those at scale.
Thanks for your support - we are in no way demotivated by the feedback. Though, we are humble and try to incorborate the ideas we get from LET and everyone else the best way we can.
I do not think we will go directly at DO/Vultr, we love the MSP/CSP/hoster market, this is where we've operated for the last +10 years (and some of us almost 3x that in previous lives).
This is almost a religious discussion
CC or no CC for free trials. There is an ACTUAL cost for us to provide a trial. Fyi, it's like $7 or so. We do need some level of commitment from the user. A CC is one way of doing that. Also, as we do not limit the functionality of the trial at all, the users will have access to spinning up federated infrastructure from partners and other OnApp customers. That is a very popular feature and with pricing starting at $4/VM it's a way for the cloud.net customers to compete with DO/Vultr/etc and still have 20% margin, however we can not let free users in to that platform without having a CC in place.
Yup - all good setups.
Your input is really appreciated. And I would agree with you if LET was the ONLY market we have in mind for cloud.net. That's not the case at all.
Also, this is a closed-invite-only beta launch and the whole point was to get feedback on product/price - and from that perspective it's been a super succesful process.
Thanks again!
D
This is quite strange, your are expecting the person to bring in at least 200-500 in next month already, but not willing to spend a few bucks to host the VM for more than one week...
Not the best however.
In one week of trial IMHO there will be no one extensively using all of this federated ACCESS. Only if it's spam network or someone who knows how to configure OnApp in less then a day.
I watched the videos, it's quite nice that you built a new product and it's easier to create a cloud when all of the hardware is configured, but everything else is same. And still one week is way to small period to understand if you go with OnApp or competitor.
All of this discussion makes me think like an excuse that the development team didn't put in all of those restriction and LET are supposed to be BETA users for a raw product.
I believe this very valuable feedback and will make adjustments to the final product. Good luck!
We expect less than 10% of our testers to convert to a paying customer, and we do not expect them to pay us '200-500 in the next month already'.
What would a better way be? Happy to get your input
You can configure OnApp in just about 5-8 minutes using cloud.net. There is pretty much zero config to do. If you want to use your own hypervisors it may take you 20-30 mins. I did it myself in less than 30 mins ... including ordering two servers from OVH.
Thanks, glad you like it. I agree that you may need more than a week to see if this is right for you - but I am guessing a week should be sufficient to see if you're willing to spend $50 for a month more.
LET are absolutely helping us getting feedback for the BETA. And I thank you for it.
Yes, it was - thanks again for your feedback.
30 minutes to create a cloud using your own hardware? Far too long, time is money around here!
Zing!
I have much respect for OnApp, they we're once a big player with us small fish. While your prices are too high for me, wishing you luck upon your return.
Please consider a budget derivative of OnApp that would have LET level of prices.