Evolution of a SaaS Business Model
I'm a big fan of Momento
Facebook built Cassandra when they outgrew MySQL/Memcached
Twitter built Pelikan when they outgrew Memcache/Redis
Momento turned Pelikan/ValKey into a SaaS startup
They offered a generous free tier for indie devs, as described in this blog post from Dec 2024 titled "A Platform for Everyone"
I used Momento in my projects, as upstash-that-could-scale-infinitely-better
In the age of AI, Momento have become AI native, with enterprise-only product offerings
There is no longer any need for any software company to dedicate resources to providing a hobbyist tier. This caters to indie devs building weekend projects, who might later become advocates within organizations.
Part of the hooman developer's value used to be as an internal trusted expert for tech decisions. This has been hollowed out by AI.
The DevRel role is already dead. Sell to CTOs and purchasing managers, or sell to agents. Nothing in between.
Agent-first API design and token-efficient docs endpoints provide better ROI than DevEx, DevRel, conference booths, swag, support, responding to social media mentions.
That being said, I still appreciate instructing agents to build with superbly elegant APIs. But these will increasingly be free and open source projects, not products.