> Any business which intends to last longer than a hackathon would get a greater long-term advantage by developing such queries in-house.

That reminds me of this challenge Heroku is currently facing (http://go.theinformation.com/884b08):

> When an app hits a certain scale, the cost of Heroku can be many times that the cost of cutting out the middlemen and running on AWS directly.

> For that reason, Heroku finds it tough to attract big companies. They know they’re going to operate at a large scale, and they’re open to taking the trouble to cut out the middleman of a Heroku if the savings are great enough.

Isn't that why Heroku and other PAAS do custom pricing for their larger customers?

That's one possible solution, with a major challenge being that Amazon regularly cuts AWS prices (51 times as of January). Competing with Amazon is rarely a winning strategy, although Salesforce has similarly razor thin margins despite having been publicly traded for more than a decade.

I don't get it - are these just API wrappers with (more expensive) bitcoin pricing?

Correct. And it is tauted as a feature since you don't need "credit card, signup, or API key."

https://medium.com/@21/buy-50-apis-with-bitcoin-in-the-21-ma...

Right, but isn't it replacing that functionality with the additional need of an embedded bitcoin wallet?

The command line example in that article requires a $400 bitcoin device.

I think you missed the one-line terminal command that installs on any linux-based device. You can get the tools set up in just a few minutes, and for free, actually.

For now, they just launched.

Right now, developing your own paid rest service is a huge pain in the ass. You have to sign up to process credit card payments / paypal, manage sales and so on.

Because of that it's possible that many people don't consider building them (and some people do it for free, but it's another matter).

If there is a simple system to charge for such services, we might soon see a situation in which there are literally thousands of available services. And it's not a choice between using CC and using Bitcoin, but a choice between using the few services that handle CCs, or a plethora of services that use bitcoin.

I think the marketplace itself is the most interesting part. The sample APIs for sale are probably just examples they built to demonstrate usage.