At this point, it seems MDG is using the following model:
- Meteor framework is free
- Make money on Galaxy hosting
But what if they instead made money on meteor? Distributing it like a SaaS? So you would pay $9.99/month to use it… (not sure the logistics of how MDG would enforce/distribute this but anyway). Just like adobe illustrator, you can create as many things as you want with it (in this case, as many apps).
The upside for MDG is that they are not betting completely on Galaxy being able to stay in front of other hosting providers… this may be hard to do without purposely trying to lock other hosts out of the meteor market…and it’s possible the revenues could be greater with the SaaS model.
The upside for the community is MDG may be more aligned with their needs (as they are their core revenue stream… instead of a more indirect relationship where they (1) attract people to meteor community and then (2) make money selling them galaxy) and it may also give MDG the resources to manage more core packages, etc…
I know it’s absolutely crazy to sell a platform as a SaaS… frameworks are always open source…
But I see this as ALMOST like we (the meteor community paying $9.99/month) are essentially crowdfunding a massive development team that we can all share in the upside with.