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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

I remember the team had the idea of charging for the software but now I am seeing that they raised VC money. There is no question that this sort of company can be big (See Vercel) but I'm wondering why this decision was made?

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They used to openly albeit implicitly mock open source software projects taking big VC money, by saying things along the lines of “we have a radical business model where we just charge people to use our product.” Noble, perhaps, and probably a good way to kickstart community good will, but the VC money is undoubtedly a much faster way to scale the fiscal size of the company!

> saying things along the lines of “we have a radical business model where we just charge people to use our product.”

In the world of web frameworks (or maybe software libraries in general, especially those that deal with the web), I don't think it's wrong to call charging the users radical, while not totally unseen.

That's what we call hypocrisy to summarize

Is the idea that if you build the framework you can build the ideal platform for the framework with a nice warm customer base and collect that sweet recurring revenue. Way more upside than selling licenses.

Sounds like timescale, metabase, and posthog.

because this sort of company can be big

Remix, like other such attempts, will need to get into the hosting business. Give out a good framework to ensure lock-in, then sell the infrastructure/runtime to deliver the app built on your framework. Then sell add-ons like $5/mo for authentication, $10/mo for I18N, etc.

Yes this is what they discussed in their live stream this week. The blueprint is clear, execution is no guarantee, but seems like a no-brainer if they want to work on this full time and really want it to be a widely used javascript framework, and if someone is going to give them money to try. Personally I think it brings a lot to the table and I loved the programming model (SSR, loading data on server, common platform primitives etc) compared to Next.js prioritizing SSG. I think they have a good team and a good shot at gaining market share.

The execution challenge for Remix is how to navigate the tension where FOSS and commercial forces pull them in opposite directions. So far, they've been stressing "interoperability", "no lock-in", "run it anywhere", etc. To live up to this goal, they'll need to maximize how portable Remix is, which will minimize the value of their specialized runtime service. Meanwhile, players like Vercel always positioned their products+services as a natural pairing, where the best stuff is inside the walled garden.

If this sort of company is vercel, sure. But right now remix has no obvious monetization strategy. It seems obvious they'll announce a SaaS solution eventually but it's not clear what the value add will be.

Yes and Michael, one of the co-founders, already mentioned doing this in his introductory live stream this week. I did mean can be, and certainly this is why they went this route, but no it isn't a guarantee. But even as simply a "javascript framework", selling licenses and being closed source was a good way to bootstrap, but open source and taking money that someone wants to give you is probably the only way to be viable longer term and get traction and commitment from users.

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