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Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering.. You said, build MVP on a budget... But your licensing costs are insanely high (200k pounds)...

Isn't that contradictive? (or was that the licensing costs before the current situation?)

That's not our cost, the 200k pounds are the cost pling mentioned for their case, 200k and MVP are indeed contradictory terms. We are actually participating on bizpark so we have some credits to use on the platform for free. Of course we try to keep our costs as low as possible.

What I'm saying is that your product is a fit for the platform when it is an MVP. When you grow, you're locked into an expensive platform. In the short term there is no option of escape because the cost to port it becomes increasingly more expensive.

Then before you know it, you're at that 200k.

I've seen it happen at so many companies:

"We'll build it on the MS stack because they gave us a great deal on MSDN or we used the PAP to get cheap licenses." ... after a few years ... "We got screwed by SQL 2012 and had to buy £50k of SQL licenses because the terminology between cores and CPUs changed on a whim and it's the ass-end of the SQL 2005 so we've got to make a big jump."

I'm not saying it's an invalid approach (hell I make my living out of keeping these sorts of cogs spinning) but it's not a great foundation to run a startup on. Unpredictable costs or sudden price-jacking after a partial buyout really sours the shit out of the deal. Especially when you ask for a budget you can't get from your new investors who now are worried that their short term return is going out of the window on your platform and software license costs.

that's why we try to use the Azure IaaS and avoid microsoft specific technologies. In any case as we grow we'll have to also move to other enviroments because of the nature of our product so we need to be flexible on that. But I totally agree with you that you need to be carefull on how much locked you get on a specific environment that you dont have total control over it.

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