I can’t say what will people actually pay for, because CTOs and engineers are penny pinchers, they will go through a lot of pain to pay $0. They are the worst customers. IMO most allegedly B2B Y Combinator offerings are really B2C in disguise, selling productivity apps and pretty interfaces to 22 year olds with busy schedules of Bumble swiping who happen to work as developers and PMs at big enterprises. Because the senior people I know with the real budgets, they look at a thing and think “I’d program this with my headcount to save a 5% fee.” This is coming from someone who does charge a royalty only because it is customary in my business to do so.
People who spend money love their pricing “formatted” a certain way. CTOs love it to be formatted as “free” with a bunch of trickle priced exorbitant usage gotchas (Snowflake). They don’t love prices formatted as royalties. Time will tell of course.
Anyway, most use cases don’t even make sense, they are deep in the negative for ROI. Most enterprises cannot do software R&D like LLM model training or even serving. The biggest success story in town uses Kubernetes. I’m not sure if there’s space for 10 more control planes to run on top of your control planes, they add a lot of complexity for little gain.
A bunch of Kubernetes manifests to fine tune LLaMA 2 on a dataset hosted in blob storage on DGX machines is a commodity. People think it’s sensitive, there’s a bonanza for people who can author that YAML, it’s inevitable that someone will release a proper multi node training job with vanilla resources. Yet here we are, with a dozen “free” trickle priced weird CRD control plane-esque products obscuring this.
