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Should we release a free developer version of Ottemo, our ecommerce platform?

2 points by vastbinderj ↗ HN
We have spent 3 years building out our ecommerce platform and are successfully selling into the mid-market space where we charge enterprise prices.

We just finished a round of performance and scalability tests where we can support up to 500 concurrent shoppers on 2 T2.small instances and easily handle 100 concurrent shoppers on the free tier using a single T2.micro instance.

This has us thinking of trying to break into the SMB Market where Shopify and Big Commerce dominate. We know we cannot compete with their marketing budgets so we are contemplating releasing a free developer version limited to use of only SQLite for the database, (we support mongodb, mysql or postgresql in production) and pulling out some of our more enterprise-like integrations. Ottemo is built in golang for the API server and our current stores are built in AngularJS 1.x

We would provide binaries of our API server which will include SQLite and Open Source our demo store code to allow customization and creation of themes.

Will this dilute our value to our mid-market customers paying enterprise prices? Will this block potential investment from VCs if we expand down market into the SMB space with a free version?

5 comments

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canadaduane
As a developer, I'm always very wary of adopting any technology that would lock me in to a platform. This sounds like lock-in to me, since there is a binary involved, and limitations around size of data. I think your appeal needs to be on the business side where decision-makers are can see your freemium product as a short-term win, and maybe convert to paying customer if it works for them.
vastbinderj
Can you help me understand what you mean by vendor lock-in and how it is different from say, developing a plugin for Wordpress vs a plugin for Ghost? Aren't you still choosing a platform?

Or do you mean technology lock-in, because we built our API server in golang?

For the Store, we provide a reference implementation that is open source in AngularJS 1.x, but the store could be implemented in any JS framework. We have contemplated building a competing reference implementation in ReactJS, for example.

justinlardinois
I don't know much about your industry specifically, but I can say that developing software that integrates with third party services is a challenge when you don't have a test version of their architecture.
brudgers
My random advice from the internet:

1. Talk to your customers.

2. Iterate based on their feedback.

3. Don't intensionally make something kinda' suck.

Good luck.