This is the inherent issue with getting in bed with a partner, especially a monogamous partner, and the thing that’s kept me out of single-sourced cloud solutions in my past business ventures.
For me - I’m glad we dragged our feet a bit. Divorce is always painful, but at least we’re not fighting over the kids!
@zach : #1 and #4 are the same. #2 and #4 are the same. #3 and #4 are the same. “Cost of doing business” is part-and-parcel to your COGS. You build a model, you build your margins into your model, your net margin is what you’ve modeled after your cost of goods and your “cost of doing business”. It’s a rare model (and I’d love to find one!) that can absorb suddenly finding itself in the hundreds-of-percent increase in its cost of goods!
If your market will bear “Option 2” - great! Generally that’s the most attractive market for funding anyway, the market that has an ongoing recurring revenue stream. It has its own risks, and they’re real, but it’s there. That’s what makes the cell phone industry tick!
So given all of that, we can either reprice the product to absorb the hit, if your market will bear it (mine certainly wouldn’t), go to a pay-to-play if you market will bear it, or we absorb the upfront hit to knock it off and control the means of service (probably the most viable in my instance). The partner can probably still screw you in this case - I’d have to negotiate that out for sure.
Great. But this demonstrates why you absolutely CAN’T get in bed with someone providing these services and have a real business. You made these changes today, and we have a few thousand hours of engineering in place - it’s recoverable. You make your next set of changes in six months, and suddenly we’ve shipped thousands of units that have been bought-and-paid-for under an entirely different model and bang! We’re toast. Customer’s toast. Nothing but death-and-destruction as far as the eye can see.
We can’t trust a single-source third party with the under-pinnings of our business. If you HAVE to do it to bootstrap a project… just know the risks. Build for them. But the instant you can, second-source the service provider. I bet you don’t have a single piece of fiber from a single provider running into a single DC either. (ok - I know you don’t since it’s trivially obvious where it’s all hosted anyway…) Even single-sourcing to AWS is fraught with risk, but at least it’s manageable risk, as long as you control the under-pinnings.
Personally - I’m in a position where I need to think quickly and see if this is at all salvageable or bail before it’s too late.
I should probably be thanking you though! I went from “paranoid” to “visionary” in ten seconds flat! 