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Comment by mrinterweb | Hacker News Reader

Since Bun is VC backed, what is the monetization plan? One of the things I consider with new tech is "how likely will this tech still be actively developed in N years." Bun will need to make money somehow or funding will be pulled.

I see bun's licensing is MIT, and that is fantastic. So that does give me some hope it won't die should the business go under. I hope the business succeeds, but I'm curious should I adopt bun, what might the upsell be down the road.

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Business plan is outlined on https://oven.sh/:

Oven will provide incredibly fast serverless hosting & continuous integration for backend & frontend JavaScript apps — and it will be powered by Bun.

It will support popular frontend frameworks like Next.js, Vite, SvelteKit, SolidStart and many more — along with backend frameworks like Express, Fastify, NestJS and more.

The plan is to run our own servers on the edge in datacenters around the world. Oven will leverage end-to-end integration of the entire JavaScript stack (down to the hardware) to make new things possible.

Considering there are dozens of mainstream serverless hosting providers out there already, with more popping up every day and pricing going down to ~free, I can't really see this being a viable business model anymore.

I mean, it can if they do it better than everyone else and eat their lunch

DX is the key differentiator IMO.

So it’s competing with vercel?

Since it's a bundler, I guess something like "bun deploy" to make money from hosting JS apps. It's a common strategy, getting mass developer adoption first, then soft-pushing for their private hosting of applications.

There was a rad HMR devserver called Pundle. It was instant-fast, but it was also maintained by one guy in a poor country.

Trying to keep up with one guy's side project caused me so much pain that I moved everything to Rollup and never looked back.

VC funded and random side project clearly have different concerns, but the ultimate risk with either is "if the creator can't support me, then what"

I guess they'll follow NextJS/Vercel or Deno/Deploy book or even License change shouldn't be out of question. Advertise everything as "open source", get free bug reports, contribution, marketing and adoption. Push everything into their commercial offering.

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