They have continued since last year when they went into public beta to provide a mediocre service (Downtimes, way more than publicly blogged about, issues left unaddressed, spotty support service, etc.).
Don't get me wrong, their support is stellar. Often I could get help with an issue and have it resolved in minutes (if it was something nodejitsu could control-if it was a 3rd party like a database or their logging system with loggly, good luck getting anywhere with that). Unfortunately, they don't have support round the clock and its not scalable either. During there most recent outage They had several support agents on their IRC channel frantically trying to calm tens to hundreds of users down. Many of which were businesses.
I will venture to even say this is Nodejitsu's last chance before they sink or float. Speaking to a few employees there I have gathered information that their largest user base are individual plan users, and that they make $3000-$7000 a month from all total sales.
I thought how could this be? They have 25,000 developers deploying to nodejitsu. I was told that many of the users in the system were left over from beta and test accounts, half of which were just "invalid users"? I asked how many were active, when asked if there were 2000-3000 active developers currently on their system, "that sounds about right".
So to put things into perspective there is around 2-3k developers bringing in an optimistic $7k, the math doesn't fit well of course. So putting aside the fact they've had many employees since 2009, we see that Nodejitsu is gambling that their user base will stick with them and essentially pony up and pay 3-5x more then they currently were. At a very extremely optimistic rate we could extrapolate that nodejitsu could potentially make $35k from this action. This could ensure 4-6 employees get paid well, maybe more if they outsource to contractors.
Realistically, a drastic change like this in a business model this late into the game generally sees 30% retention rate. Given that other PaaS like Heroku, Azure, AWS, etc are now supporting web sockets through nginx and other means, and addressing many of the issues that made them sub-par to nodejitsu, the novelty of nodejitsu filling a niche is wearing thin. Extrapolating this at best case only results in $10.5k per month, this can only support a few employees, if that. Where are they getting this kinda money to employ 15 people let alone 20-25 employed last summer? Well from their funding of course http://www.crunchbase.com/company/nodejitsu . $750k in funding is a nice chunk of change to get back in 2011. At an extremely optimistic rate that could support 15 employees for a year each getting average $50k.
An interesting development happened in the last quarter of 2012 when I noticed nearly half of the employee base was removed from their site. This coincided with Marak's departure from nodejitsu, officially nodejitsu said leadership grew to be at odds, but what it really looks like was he was driven out against his will and so was every other founder except Charlie Robbins. Money to blame? Maybe. Inexperience(http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlierobbins)? Most likely. Unofficially, "10 or so employees left in the same month to pursue other careers".
Granted, Nodejitsu's business plan can't just rely solely on individual plan users can it? Word is on the grapevine nodejitsu has got some feelers out with walmart, bloomberg, and/or a partnership with Microsoft for there enterprise clients, but apparently nobody knows anything about them or is keeping mum. (though I thought Eran Hammer - hapi creator - was smarter than that, though as I said it is just a rumor) What am I going to do? I've stuck with nodejitsu for a while now, I believe what they originally set out for was a good idea, to be the best node.js platform and give back to the OS community, and that they've certainly tried hard. But it seems they've really fallen short and now they are asking me to pay 5x what I used to pay. I already moved my business projects off of nodejitsu several months ago due to their numerous outages/ 3rd-party/partner outages. I had hoped that things would change so I've kept my pet projects and dev work on nodejitsu helping keep the idea alive, but the outages and downtimes have not gotten better. Being forced into this "business plan" mentality goes against everything I've experienced with my apps on nodejitsu, nodejitsu is no longer a solo developer friendly platform, unless you got tons cash to spare. I'm not sure if I should feel insulted, I know most likely that me, along with other hackers, entrepreneurs, and students helped make nodejitsu what it is today, and they are turning their back on us by forcing us to comply with the new prices in 15 days or else.
What makes it even more ridiculous is that as I outlined above, this change even on best case scenario will not even support their current staff (unless these employees are paid extremely sub-par). This whole blog post is just a last ditch effort to get nodejitsu on a pricing model that might actually support a few employees. It focuses blame on insufficient research(assumptions) then shifts the blame to businesses running on individual plans as if they were harmful to nodejitsu. I'm not running my business on nodejitsu individual plans, why should I be punished too? Its clear that my contribution and the 2-3k other developers just like me aren't making for a sustainable business, but its helping, but come on, increasing my bill 5x? Nodejitsu is just trying to drive me away along with every other hacker, tinkerer, student. And its working. I will be moving to heroku for most of the dev projects I have, I may take some time to check out http://saewitz.com/node-dot-js-websocket-hosting-roundup/ if i have some time.
So what should YOU do? Are you looking to host a business on nodejitsu? Don't. Nodejitsu is very immature as a company and its processes, unless you want to waste time and money. (Node.js in of itself is immature, compounding this is that nodejitsu is built entirely on node.js, do you really want to risk it?)Are you a hacker, dev, student, entrepreneurial? Skip nodejitsu unless you got the time and money to spend. Pick heroku or AWS free plan, or any of the other more forgiving and might I add reliable PaaS solutions.
I personally think the node.js community should seriously consider boycotting nodejitsu over this. It is clear nodejitsu is looking out for itself and not the majority of who we are, morphing into a B2B business. Why do you think so few node.js community leaders except those that work at or have a partnership at nodejitsu don't rave about nodejitsu's platform? My answer is because nodejitsu's business model is based on getting suckers to pay them, all they are doing now is clarifying they want rich suckers.
