Having worked as a researcher, I can tell you it's the latter.
I have, and I’ll never go back to PowerPoint. Not coincidentally, my lab uses biorender all the time and it saves us an absurd amount of time. We often paste directly from biorender images into google slides. Yeah it’s pedestrian, but it works really, really well.
Ask the penny pinchers who look down their nose at this who funds them, how many R01s/R37s/equivalents they hold, etc. $400 for a decently run lab is jack shit. Unless you’re buying Rain-X by the gallon at Sam’s Club and silanizing your own float glass for gels, I suspect there are other expenditures that offer less marginal value. YMMV, but it probably won’t.
These guys are doing well because they solved a long standing problem that is worth a lot to a large group of people to make it go away. Every single signup I’ve seen went like this:
“How’d you put that together in 5 minutes?”
“We used biorender.”
“What’s biorender?”
“A web application that helps put biomedical illustrations together. If something is missing, you ask and they add it.”
(Couple days pass)
“Hey we just signed up for it too. Thanks!”
YMMV, again. But probably not.
It's bad enough that we have to deal with Elseveir - we really should not be encouraging stuff like this when it is not necessary as a general principle.
Nothing in this world lasts forever. I’m ok with that. Software undergoes bit rot, and services shut down. For us, the value is simply that we can communicate complicated experimental designs and results, clearly and effectively, without a lot of application training or other bullshit. That’s worth a LOT to my lab.
We release almost everything open source, and are militant open data proponents. We also like to remind people “if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces”. The value of this service isn’t in the pieces.
This is not to deny that they did a nice and important job with these icons. They did. But they're also part of an annoying trend of "take what should be desktop software, move it on-line, slap on some 'collaboration' feature, enjoy recurring pricing and taking users' data hostage".
I tend to whine a lot about SaaSS and user control, but even ignoring that, I wish we could remove the platform part from SaaS(S). There's no user benefit from each vendor doing their own half-assed reimplementation of a shared file system. There's only increased account management headache, and loss of data ownership.