Today I am pleased to announce our initial release of our hosted SFSQL offering.
A major concern from the HN Beta feedback we received was our longevity. Being a hosted database solution I can see why. We took that to heart and re-engineered our offering. We de-risked it by minimizing the amount of infrastructure under our management, fly.io manages customer's dedicated SFSQL endpoints, Aiven.io manages customer's dedicated databases across 5 clouds, our serverless offering is a managed AWS Aurora Serverless cluster, our in-house databases is managed by Planetscale.com, and Stripe handles subscriptions. The cost of these services are mostly on demand, bringing our monthly fixed cost to a very manageable level.
I highly recommend all these services.
We are boot strapping SFSQL for now. Our business model, how we make money, is simple. Our prices are higher than our costs. Just like all businesses, margins matter and because we incur the costs of these service and pass them on, our margins take a hit. We envision being more of an add-on to these service providers and others like them eventually. Our margins would increase and the total cost to our customers would decrease. In this model our pricing is purely value based.
"Data, Fluid as Code" is what we settled on after countless iterations. I believe it captures the "why" question, "why did we build this". SFSQL originally started out as an Object store for a online dev. environment we built in 2000. It has evolved over time. Its schemaless properties where added as we had a need to better handle user provided data structures and refactoring associated with many of our client projects.
Eric, the technical co-founder and creator of SFSQL, answered the "How" question in our HN beta post. For more in depth info on what's going on behind the scenes Eric is available via email support@schemafreesql.com, he is not available to respond here.
The demo apps were all built by me. Eric would like it known that he is not responsible for those codes bases, which are all available on GitHub. I built these apps while testing out SFSQL and seeing if we play nice with the various serverless platforms. Client solutions we have built with SFSQL are not available for public display so we went with these demo apps I built. The apps show how easy it is to hook up a back-end to a web app with SFSQL even by a non programmer like myself.
I hope you check out SFSQL. Try it for free, no sign-up required, and please leave us feedback https://schemafreesql.com/givefeedback_HN.html
