Would love to see responses from the same users when the bizspark period is over. Seems like an idiotic choice to go vendor lock-in, small community, IMO sheltered mentality, high license fees (after bizspark), and difficult to automate operating systems. I suppose if you don't need a lot of machines it's not a problem yet, but seems like a lot of short sighted decisions.
I run S3stat and Twiddla on the .net stack and my BizSpark term has passed. It was in no way a big deal.
Yeah, servers cost money to provision. But then servers always cost money to provision regardless of your stack. Even with license fees, the MS stack wins for me because my entire server farm fits on three boxes instead of the twelve I'd need to get the same firepower on a typical rails stack. The extra few thousand in full price server licenses is just noise because really, we're talking about a business here, not a hobby.
The bottom line is that if your business is going to fail because of a single $5,000 invoice, it's debatable whether it was ever a business to start with. The whole reason we all build SaaS businesses in the first place is the 95%+ profit margins. Fretting about what happens within that 5% that makes up the expense column seems a bit silly.
Even without BizSpark, I bet I'll build the next product on the same stack. The math just plain works out.
