Hi,

I'm really not a fan of Python client side. Or RAD. Or closed source services.

And I'm hugely impressed by the potential of your product.

Good luck.

I never though I would say that one day. But don't listen to people asking you to open sourcing it now. You can always do it once you are profitable. But right now, you need money to get this going. And if your product does what you say it does, people will be happy to pay.

Although not to be locked up on the long run. You will need to address that one day. One day.

> I never though I would say that one day. But don't listen to people asking you to open sourcing it now

I want to second that, entirely.

I run a small software development company. I can understand your hesitation about not open sourcing the tool.

Don't do it until you are comfortable.

My only suggestion is if you are closing the product for any reason, then open source the core as much as possible.

Hi Meredydd,

I just had a video demo tutorial with your colleague @daviesian. He is such an intelligent and effective communicator. I learned a lot about your platform in a short 30-minute screen sharing.

In the crowded world of PaaS, human factors might have equal (if not more) importance than the technology magic. From my experience with Ian, I do see the bright future of your platform. You have a great team that people will trust.

Keep up the good work!

Wow this is pretty impressive! Python everywhere is a big advantage and the way the frontend, backend and database are integrated appears quite seamless.

My question is about scaling - what are some large apps on this platform and how big do you think these apps can get in terms of db size and qps?

Thanks!

Our infrastructure is all on AWS and designed to scale horizontally, so we're pretty confident we can handle whatever traffic you throw at your app. (Ask about our dedicated-resource hosting plans!)

As for examples, it's a bit Catch-22. Our smaller customers, you haven't heard of; and our largest ones, we can't talk about in public. And a lot of it is internal/intranet stuff anyway.

One customer has kindly allowed us to talk a bit about their app - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589020

Sorry for not digging in more and asking a lazy question but how do you do frontend with Python?

We use the Skulpt Python-to-Javascript compiler (I'm a maintainer): http://skulpt.org

You might be interested in my talk from PyCon US this summer, where I talked about the compiler, and how we turn blocking Python code into non-blocking Javascript code:

https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk

Real neat.

Awesome stuff. Are there any debugging capabilities? Being able to inspect variables and step through code is massively valuable, particularly for education, but also for devs.

Hey!

Being a penny pinching student, do you guys offer any discounts for students?

Yes, we do - depends on number of licences, country, and institution. Drop us a line at [email protected].

Do you have any plan to open source the platform?

Honestly, we would absolutely love to open-source it! The issue is that we're a bootstrapped start-up, and it's rather difficult to make open source pay the bills, even if it becomes huge (see, eg, Docker's troubles). By charging for the product, we can claim some of the value we create, and be sustainable so the platform stays around.

For a counter-example, see RedHat :) I can certainly understand your position, but it isn't impossible to make money from Open Source. One approach to get some funding might be a KickStarter or Patreon type offering. (Or a combination of both). You also have your hosting service. Just some ideas, there are lots of open source business models- good luck whatever you decide.

RedHat was bought and incorporated by a pre-existing business. It wasn't bootstrapped.

I'd also discourage a patreon- or kickstarter-style offering for a B2B product, because it signals very clearly that you're not playing with the big fish.

Not a bootstrapped business, you mean, like Docker (Explicitly used as an example, to which I was providing a counter-example)?

As for signaling, one would not have to use those providers if they felt it did not fit their brand, and could roll their own platform. But if signaling that you want to "play with the big fish" is what one wants, most companies hire sales team who go out and play golf with prospects. Having an open source product and using other forms of funding certainly does not preclude doing that. (Though being a small bootstrapped business might make it more difficult).

I can't see my company (a small business with a number of small apps, with engineering and marketing people who it'd be great if they could just use something like this to build some things themselves) ever using something like this that is both closed source and somewhat prone to lock in by the nature of how it works.

While charging for use might seem like a good business model, I think an awful lot of potential customers will just never use it because of it. You may be able to find a model where you charge for the front-end page designer or something, but open source everything needed to run the site so that being locked in to a product you have to pay for and can't modify is less of a concern.

Perhaps a clear migration path from Anvil-infused Python to vanilla Python / JavaScript would be a reasonable approach. If for one reason or another I have to move my apps elsewhere I'd would like an easy way to do so rather than being permanently locked into a specific vendor.

At my entreprise, they are paying per seat to use gnat compiler. Even if it is open source and free to use for non commercial use, you can sell it and expect that your potential clients will generally not cheat.

Are you worried about would-be customers self hosting? Because I doubt there’s that much overlap between would-be monthly customers and those who are eager to self host.

Or are you worried about clones?

Perhaps you could open source a lite version while keeping the premium version paid for?

This looks awesome! I am all for automating this stuff. Who do you see as your biggest customers?

This is a really hard question to answer. We've got everyone from scrappy one-person startups building products on Anvil, to larger startups pumping terrifying quantities of money through Anvil apps, to Seriously Large Companies We Can't Name building internal tools with our on-premises version.

Right now we're taking it all as it comes, but we never want to lose our focus on accessibility: It's way too hard to build web apps with today's traditional tools, and we want to make it easier for everyone.

Can you give examples of live sites running on Anvil?

I can't really talk about most of them, but I described one example down here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589020

Do you have a list of like full fledged apps that users/companies have made?