> I'd guess that no companies with enough money to pay sufficiently more than $20K though thought either of those were the case?
It seems like an official hosted RethinkDB that included enterprise support could generate pretty nice MRR revenue and take business from Compose.io (IBM). Shoot, wish I'd known, $20K for the ip and assets was a steal. Probably would have been exponentially more to a buyer who wanted to turn it commercial though.
I don't know. Databases are a hard business (see Riak, FoundationDB). Costs money to add features and fix bugs (and really hard to find qualified folks that can do that) as well as hosting costs if you offer a service. We'll see what happens with some other entrants. I would read http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html regarding DBaaS, too.
I've read it. Completely agree about RethinkDB specifically, who raised VC capital on the order of $12M. A cloud hosted solution is a very tough business, with thin margins when you have dozens of employees, $15-$25k a month bay area rent, and very high overhead. The numbers don't add up and not the return investors are looking for.
Though, if you're bootstrapping with your own capital and grow it to something like $10K or $20K a month in MRR, that's a win. I'm all about bootstrapping SaaS companies and growing recurring revenue.
It seems like an official hosted RethinkDB that included enterprise support could generate pretty nice MRR revenue and take business from Compose.io (IBM). Shoot, wish I'd known, $20K for the ip and assets was a steal. Probably would have been exponentially more to a buyer who wanted to turn it commercial though.