You’re very perceptive! That’s a great sledge (put down, for non-Aussies). I had the same fear. But thankfully our customers rescued me from that delusion! :)
I suggest you leverage the open source nature to gain publicity, and offer a hosted cloud version. Change the licensing to a clear cut apache license and remove all the current "strings attached" usage clauses and put any "enterprise" features in a specific folder to make it obvious. Companies are more willing to pay for a hosted service, especially if you can figure out compliance like HIPAA, SOC2 etc. Another value added service is a "managed hosting" offering, where you connect to their GCP/AWS/Azure account via OAuth and deploy the (managed) instances directly on their infrastructure, billed to their own cloud account.
What I normally try to do is ask any customer what their needs are and try to understand those, rather than just push my product on them. It may not be a fit.
But in general, if customers want to customize it (UI, extensions, streaming methods, add-ons), it's way easier to customize your deployment with BrowserBox Pro, than to get Cloudflare to customize your deployment of their browsers.
And if you purchase our licenses in bulk it works out cheaper than 7/user/month (we are from 3.33/user/month to 1.05/user/month at scale). Maybe Cloudflare also offers volume discounts, but I don't know.
Also, if a customer wants to build a customer-facing product around this virtualized browser technology, can they do that with Cloudflare? Can I, for instance, licenses the SKIA-drawing S2 tech from Cloudflare to use in BrowserBox Pro? Maybe, but I don't know.
BrowserBox Pro license covers all of this in one easy to purchase package.
That's a good point but typically larger customers already have infrastructure they can put this on, as it's fairly low overhead, works across OSes (with a bit of config in some cases), and doesn't require anything specialized. It can be added to their existing cloud or baremetal at minimum marginal cost.
Strictly speaking, even if you were to go with a public cloud provider, and set up new infra specifically for BrowserBox Pro, you can essentially get an infra cost/seat/month of < USD1 anyway--making it still cheaper than Cloudflare, at least at scale above 100 seats.
In your tutorial here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGUJCCPDWNE you're using linode 4gb ram 2cpu with dedicated CPU which costs $36/month. So how you can realistically get less than <$1 cost/seat/month?
I thought I was using a shared machine in that tutorial?
Anyway that was just picked without reason for a demo. Basically Linode and that price sheet are not the only options, and you can do things like collocating on time and machine. We do it. It's solid. We can't give away all our secrets here tho.
