Just to let you know that that last line hit me like a brick this AM when I read it. And I had a discussion with my wife about it as well.I guess the core is at what point does something that you like to do that is also helpful, (or can be justified as helpful) get in the way of business and the point of being in business. And at what point does it become a crutch to prevent action on something more important.(Say in the case of music mixing old songs instead of writing new songs).Really great point you raised will definitely cause me to think more about this.

Really much simpler. You just scoop up any files that are used by cups the printing utility under Mac OSX. If you don’t want to actually print (say you are remote) you simply create a fake printer and print to that instead. They you scoop up that file, analyze etc.

Hi. Thanks for responding.I am valuing the concurrent connection as the most valuable piece to what you are offering – though I’d see it as a value-add to the hosting. Your hosting would hopefully be as competitive as. I understand hosting prices might be hard to compete with when you’re a smaller size company at this point.I might not be the target market, mostly as the primary usage for me would be concurrent connections for chat/messaging.The animated gif example you give on your homepage of an updating stream on desktop and mobile, along with message notifications as an example: 10,000 active users who are interacting would be great, though unless the price comes down dramatically as scaling then it’s not feasible unless it’s a paid-for service.At your 10,000 connections price point of $1,499 – that’s 15 cents per month per user. For paid services, that can work fine – though any freemium model I don’t think would have a chance of scaling using your service.I do realize not all users will be active or using a connection 100% of the time but I imagine that’d be the goal for some businesses to have them using their service as much as possible.It would be interesting to see some data relating to how many concurrent connections there are to the number unique users services are supporting. Maybe it’s 100,000 and then cost is reduced to 1.5 cents per user per month? Etc.. It’s hard for me to visualize I guess. I wish I had a budget to start on the stage of where I could use Firebase as a quick way to launch and iterate – I do see the value there – and for scaling, though I’m a long-term / long-tail / holistic thinker and make my decisions based on what is able to be apparent.I wonder too how something like Firebase compares to Meteor, or React+Node, etc.. Are you primarily trying to target the developer for quickly launching new applications? I can imagine you’d preferably want to keep their app with you long-term though too. What happens when I scale to 100,000 or a million concurrent users or more? If that’s only a conversation that happens once that point is reached then I think my fear of uncertainty would prevent me from using Firebase for long. :)I might not be your target market.Thanks again for your reply.

I’m sure lots will pay (it’s a good service). I don’t know many devs that are ever *happy* to pay though (that’s the biz guys that are happy to pay for things) ;-)The free tier is a great idea/hook…it was just at the price point/level where I did have to seriously consider it (with much angst) before ultimately making my decision.The only other uphill battle that people will likely have with Firebase is really the privacy issue and how well they can guarantee that data access/analysis is restricted to only the account owner (they will likely do a better job of that because it will be *way* more important to their business than each of us on our own).

Hi Kevin. Thanks for raising this issue and I agree that its an important one. Firebase has a free tier so that side projects need not be expensive. If it turns into a real business I think developers will be happy to pay

Glad you liked it.Been blogging about marketing, the web, community and brands for almost 6 years now.It’s also what I do for a living as an advisor.

Great post, Thanks !

I wonder how many people read that and think “I can store data for 50 of my users at a time.”Are you suggesting providing the Firebase service but the developer using their own S3 account or alternative key – value backing store?I agree with Larry (LE) that more information targeted both to business and developers would make the offering more clear. Most of what I’ve heard about Firebase comes from stories and comments on HN.

Implemented as a printer driver? That’s a great idea, kind of an insurance policy for “I forgot my paper on the printer.” Something like Dropbox or Google Drive has the original file, but you have to worry about whether the computer your borrowing has the program and version you need to open it. With your virtual printer you can pull up a readable version in practically any browser with PDF.js and print an exact copy. You also have an extended print queue/history accessible anywhere.I assume your use case is around correspondence or legal documents? As a premium offering you could add OCR, financial software integration and simple analytics.

Thanks!